Path of Rebuilding

On Sunday, Premier Daniel Andrews announced that Melbourne would ease its restriction from 22 October. People can leave their homes without any reason to wherever to metropolitan Melbourne. Every household can have 10 visitors every day and 15 people can gather outside. Pubs, clubs and entertainment venues together with hairdressers and beauty salons can open with a restricted number of patrons. Weddings, funerals and religious gatherings will open with limited attendance. However, retail businesses and gyms will still have to wait and people are still required to work at home. In short, Melburnians are given some freedom but still need to wait for probably another 10 or more days to become normal or “Covid normal”.

This follows from the reopening of Sydney last week. Up to this moment, there is not a great surge in new cases in NSW. The federal and state governments now emphasize “living with the virus” which means Covid-19 will no longer be seen as a problem if the number of patients hospitalized is kept manageable. The message from the government is: Covid-19 is unavoidable but people will be saved from serious illness or death through full vaccination. And NSW and Victoria are both on the track to have a high vaccination rate.

Now we see the light near the end of this Covid-19 journey. However, great damages to society and everybody have been done. Small businesses are hit drastically. They were not supported well and it is not clear how many can survive to the end of this journey. Society is no longer the same and businesses are worried that how many of their customers will remain after reopening. Those businesses which have closed or workers who have lost their jobs in the past two years will face the challenge of how to rebuild.

New migrants who have few connections and many deprived of information will need special help from the governments to rebuild. The governments can build up better networks to help the society to rebuild after the Covid-19 pandemic. The need of the CALD communities cannot be neglected or forgotten.