Comment: As coronavirus continues to plague our health and our economy, the debate about balancing them should not be reduced to a choice between old and young, writes GregBaum
. In the story, senior writer John Kehoe says: “It is legitimate to ask if policymakers should prioritise people of all ages equally.”The context is the excruciating trade-off our governments are now trying to negotiate between the health emergency and the economic emergency. Both are grave.
“Many seniors like him would not put their own life above the livelihoods of their children and grandchildren, if the economic and social costs are too great.You might accept that a life equates to a livelihood. I don’t. You might accept that lives can be weighed against each other. I don’t. They can be weighed for relative worth, but not to pronounce life-and-death judgment on one or the other.
There are about four million Australians aged 68 or older. Even with dying with dignity enshrined in Victorian law now, it is difficult to imagine a voluntary cull of the uselessly old being fully subscribed any time soon. It rules out Elton John and Barbra Streisand and the US president, and his challenger, and his challenger’s wife, and George Pell and some of your parents and quite a few of your grandparents and at the very end of the chopping block, Rupert Murdoch.
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