Rules, so many new rules. They govern our behaviour through every waking moment. Washing our hands: there is a right and a wrong way. Then there is touching – not our faces, preferably not cash, nothing outside the home, really. Keep away from each other. The rules are tightening on where we can go, what we do, who we should do it with, whether we can work or not and, if we can, where we can do that work.

Police started shutting St Kilda beach down from 6pm on Friday. Credit:Justin McManus

None of us has ever before had to observe such a panoply of community-wide directives about our individual behaviour. And the stakes could not be higher. The ultimate price of non-observance, we’re told, is that we could kill ourselves or others, or both.

And yet, outside our immediate personal environment, rules that governed our lives, shaped our society and our economy, and determined our prosperity are being smashed. Simply in order to help as many Australians as possible to survive the COVID-19 pandemic, governments have been forced to obliterate the economic and fiscal orthodoxy that’s been painstakingly established since the early 1980s recession.

Decades of economic transformation have been wiped out in less than a month. The Prime Minister and the national cabinet offer the notion that for, say, the next six months businesses will go into hibernation and re-emerge when the worst is over. It’s an appealing idea, suggesting that things will almost be back to normal soon enough. It gives the sense that our federal and state leaders are imposing order on chaos.