"Annus horribilis": it's the phrase that's sends us all scrambling for our dictionaries (or search engine) but one popularised by royals, church leaders and politicians alike.
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Latin for "horrible year", it is certainly an accurate description of the year 2020.
Always a "glass half-full" sort of guy, I like to look for the positive things that might flow from the worse period of my lifetime.
I believe most people would say that COVID-19 has caused them to re-think their priorities and the way they do things, including their work practices.
Family was always the number one priority for most, but health threats and forced separation have given even greater weight to humankind's most basic instinct.
Prior to the current recession, Australians had benefited from 29 years of unbroken economic growth.
Not everyone was doing well, but most were benefiting from an export boom which made room for higher levels of economic aspiration. Undoubtedly, there were many things we came to take for granted.
The global pandemic and its economic calamity have solidified family and financial security as the key issues for most Australians.
Of course, the other things that impact on us daily remain important but more than ever before. Health, safety and economic security are top-of-the-pops, rightly and understandably so.
How much governments learn from the pandemic remains to be seen. For me, one of the most obvious is our growing reliance on others. More particularly, how vulnerable that dependence leaves us. As a nation, we are too reliant on others for our fuel, inputs to our food production, labour and national defence.
We are around 90 per cent oil import-dependent. Our fuel-refining capacity is disappearing.
The only company capable of producing the main active ingredient in the herbicides and pesticides our farmers so rely on is about to exit the Australian market, because it can't compete with Chinese imports. When Nufarm Australia goes, almost all of our farm chemicals will come from China.
Our farmers also need labour. Yet each year they rely on around 50,000 backpackers to produce their product. We now know what it's like when the borders close. This is a serious vulnerability.
Successfully addressing these issues will require more than a bit of public policy tinkering. We need structural reform and a fundamental re-think. Take fuel security. While it is true our old refineries can't compete with the big, new refineries of South East Asia, it's in Australia's interest for governments to find ways of retaining or replacing them. There will be a cost, but what is the cost of not acting?
We also need to get more crude oil out of the ground. Our key oil provinces are depleting, and no new fields are coming online. You can't refine fuel without oil.
This is an area where the false battle between energy and the natural environment is threatening our economic security. We have the technical expertise to extract our natural resources without doing harm to the environment and we have world's best environmental approvals processes. We need to have more faith in them. COVID-19 tells us that.
Let's hope we learn from our annus horribilis.