Go too late and the ruinous impact will be even more ruinous.
But we are starting to get our heads around the consequences of what we are going through and just how the new world order will be quite different to BC, which now means Before Covid. PC will have a new connotation.
The obvious casualties are the tourism and airline industries that are already in serious trouble. The good folk living in the Queenstown basin have long been complaining about the crowding, the stretching of resources and the lack of accommodation, all problems that evaporated overnight.
Now restaurants, hotels, shops, buses, adventure attractions and all the thousands of other businesses that depended on tourists have no income.
Air New Zealand saw its business, within a few short weeks, plummet from $6 billion to less than $500 million. The expected massive job cuts have already begun.
I have a young nephew who wanted to be a pilot since he was 15. He did his training, flew little mail planes around in dangerous weather and worked his way up the ladder over the years to finally get his captain’s wings a few months ago. Now he is doing voluntary work delivering prescriptions to the elderly.
Billions have flown every year because it was relatively cheap while so many were flying. Now it’s going to be very expensive.
And when you get to your overseas destination you will be shut in a hotel room watching Netflix for two weeks and when you get back home it will be another two weeks holed up in a hotel.
Not much of a holiday or a business trip. I’ll stay here thanks.
And of course, there’s the flow-on affecting travel agents, engineers, caterers, cleaners, airport staff and all the other dependent industries.
The mainstream media were already in trouble given the big offshore social media companies have been stealing their content then their advertisers and not even contributing tax.
With the sudden plunge in remaining advertising we see how fragile their businesses are. A functioning, robust democracy requires a decent media so this is a problem.
I was wondering how the carbon market might be affected. One might expect it to be collapsing given big emitters like airlines are literally falling out of the sky.
I see the carbon price has gone only from $29 to $25 but this is a government-fixed price and emitters pay in retrospect so are covering last year’s emissions.
Our total emissions will certainly be heading towards some of the set targets and no one will be in the position to pay more tax so this must have some impact on the future pricing and thus on farmland being converted into trees surely?
With dairy payouts forecast to be much lower and forestry conversion less of a player, one might expect land values to suffer. Oh yeah, and our equity.
The great news is that as food producers we are in the box seat.
Criticism of our sector and activities is already muted and activists will have less of a following as folk focus on more pressing issues such as their daily survival. The Greens might even struggle to return to Parliament whenever we have an election.
But the drought’s lasting effects mean we won’t be able to greatly capitalise on the benefits of food production next season.
Finally, a couple of correspondents raised interesting matters from last week’s column.
Kevin, my new best friend, pointed out smallpox is not the only virus to ever be eradicated. Cattle plague or Rinderpest, which used to kill almost all cattle that caught it, was finally extinguished in the 1990s after a 50-year vaccination programme by vets, of which he was one.
John is reading a book on the amazing navigational skills of the Polynesians and the chapter explaining why this intellectual property of navigational lore suddenly disappeared says it coincided with the arrival of Europeans and the resulting virus epidemics wiped out 60% of Maori and up to 95% of Polynesian cultures, putting this plague and even bubonic plague into context.
