The "lockdown liar"

is going to find life very difficult from now on. 

For those of you who don't know...we went into a stringent lock down because someone lied to the officials doing the contact tracing. The Chief Medical Officer and those from whom she takes advice decided that this was the safest course of action for the entire community. 

I have no argument with that at all. If the information they were acting on was correct it would have been the only responsible thing to do. 

But any lock down, any restriction on what we consider to be normal activities, has consequences. Those consequences have to be weighed against the safety of everyone. It's a difficult and delicate balancing act and I am glad I am not the CMO or the Premier or the officer in charge of the police force. 

They are being criticised for doing the right thing. They would have been criticised either way. It was a no-win situation for them. They erred on the side of caution - the only sensible thing to do when lives are at risk. 

Blame has to be placed elsewhere - with people who were careless, people who are working a second job without informing the tax man, with families who thought it was fine to get together even though one of them was working in a very high risk situation.

The lock down has now been slightly eased but the financial consequences for some has been catastrophic. People have lost pay because someone lied. Worse, there are businesses which might not survive. 

I know of one business which won't survive. They got through the worst of the situation earlier in the year. They did it without getting any government hand outs. The family worked excessively long hours alone. Now they can't cope. A government hand out is not going to help. They need hands on help. 

Yes, food is involved. They have crops that need picking. It is work nobody is ever really willing to do and now there are limits on travel, on living and working together.  The family has a reputation as a good employer but that hasn't saved them now. 

And this sort of thing is going on all over the country, indeed the world. Farmers haven't even sown some crops. They couldn't do that because of the pandemic. If they did then caring for them, harvesting them and getting them to their markets has been another series of problems which has been too much for so many of them.

We are in fact at risk of a different sort of problem which is just as big and is so far unrecognised.  People are going to be hungry. There could be a widespread famine. That could be as dangerous as the Covid19 virus itself. 

So when one person lies and shuts down an entire state others need to be aware of the wider consequences. We need to help our neighbours and friends.

And the person who lied needs to face the consequences of his actions.