THE PSYCHOLOGICAL IMPACTS OF COVID-19

Dr Tanveer Ahmed is a Sydney based psychiatrist and author. He works in private practice at the Hills Clinic, a public facility at Bankstown Community Health and visits jails for forensic assessments. He is the author of two books, The Exotic Rissole and Fragile Nation and has had various roles in the media, in both print and broadcast. On 29 April 2020, Tanveer Ahmed joined Dr Gigi Foster in a discussion of the economic and psychological effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. The discussion was filmed for Youtube broadcast and later also broadcast on Sky News Extra.

THE PSYCHOLOGICAL IMPACTS OF COVID-19

TANVEER AHMED

It’s a pleasure to speak to you today in unusual circumstances and I thank Gerard, Anne and everyone else involved at The Sydney Institute for keeping it humming along and attempting to make sure that intellectual life is not as disrupted as so many other features of our daily routines.

I’ve been asked to speak about the mental health effects to follow Gigi who gave a great analysis of some of the economic considerations. There will obviously be a bit of overlap. Gigi mentioned some of the health related matters and I’ll touch on that a bit more.

When we think of the mental health effects of the pandemic and its lingering consequences, we can break it down into a few broad-based themes. On the economic side, it is an unusual crisis in that it’s a crisis the government has effectively created. And we have never had a pandemic induced economic crisis, certainly not in anyone’s lifetime. The Spanish flu coincided very closely with World War 1.

In terms of the social and mental health effects, we can break this down to the immediate effects of lockdown and then the separate effects associated with what we might call say the twin crises, both health and economic. Mental health is in the background of both of those crises.

The mental health effects, are grounded in the social effects. To try and predict it we can certainly look at past crises and compare and think what might be different in the current setting.

To begin with, what we’re going through at the moment is better in Australia than in some other places.

But let’s look at the notion of lockdown and how we view that. Compare the plight of prisoners, for example, in isolation. Astronauts talk about going absolutely mad being in an enclosed space on their own for months on end. So, isolation is a real punishment and it’s quite anti-human in many respects.

Unlike parts of the Western world, we don’t have the same sort of spectre of death around the corner. If you’re in Italy, Spain, London, New York City, that is very much there. People are locked in while they hear the sounds of ambulances in the streets. Places where most people know someone who is connected to someone in intensive care or has died. That certainly has a way of focusing one’s attention in terms of the deeper sort of moral and philosophical issues which at a day-to-day level we may not necessarily encounter in Australia.

In terms of modern studies of the effects of lockdowns, the most obvious one was conducted in Canada during the SARS epidemic. For several months, they were able to monitor people in quarantine. After six to eight weeks they were able to see quite typical symptoms of what would be called diagnosed anxiety disorders and certainly depressed mood.

One thing they didn’t expect, there were even some features of symptoms associated with traumatic syndromes like nightmares or flashbacks of specific events. Thoughts associated with the illness or things people had seen or heard and were re-experiencing. This was not completely unexpected but it gives a sense of the intensity of the response that may occur in a similar sort of society. And we should make that comparison.

In reality, around the world we live one of the most prosperous, peaceful societies in human history. Our threshold for what might be considered traumatic is likely to be different and will, to some extent, inform some of the symptoms and psychological effects that people may experience.

To some extent, our experience is mitigated by technology. It’s only in the last 10-15 years you can be at home and on the internet; we can now work from home, zoom each other and so on. That is mitigating some of the negative effects. Even though we are headed, almost certainly, for an economic recession there is a parallel social recession. Yet, that social recession is being mitigated through technology.

It’s worth thinking of social distancing as a physical distancing with the social side varying according to the type of person and the efforts one makes. You’ll see a lot of articles in the pandemic that are slightly humorous or tongue-in-cheek but with some truth as well, comparing different personality types and how they might behave in lockdown. The introvert, one who may be slightly more socially avoided, is energised by solitude. That is a group, to some extent, quite enjoying the circumstances. The usual day-to-day hum of a of modern service economy favours the extrovert where meetings or open plan offices offer a performative aspect to social life and working life. That favours the extrovert. Our current circumstances dim that so there’s less pressure on those where that kind of behaviour doesn’t come naturally.

To be frank, I’ve seen that in some of my patients. I’ve had more than a handful of patients that I may have expected to become worse during such a time. These are patients with serious anxiety disorders. Most have either improved or remained stable. Many of you will be familiar with Jon Ronson. I saw him speak about this on the BBC where he talked about having an anxiety disorder. He knew many others like him. Many spoke of not feeling any worse and often they felt better.

One of the reasons for this is because the current threat is a shared threat. A great deal of mental health problems, especially in Western society, are about suffering alone. Almost an outcrop of excessive individualism if you like. So now, where people who have pre-existing mental disorders, while you might expect them to get worse, they’re not necessarily.

They have a sense of genuine threat and they always felt the world was especially threatening and now it’s confirmed. A lot of people that were previously sane are feeling equally threatened. But they’re feeling it’s a shared context so many of them are not necessarily getting worse in the way you might think.

That’s one aspect of being in lockdown.

The very nature of working from home obviously creates a whole set of new circumstances. It collapses the boundary that we placed between a productive sphere and the domestic sphere. It has various impacts on gender. In fact, I heard an economist talk about this pandemic as possibly the first crisis where the government is actually treating the economic unit of the home as a dual income. In previous crises, policy would have been set with the idea of a male breadwinner.

That is a sign that this crisis will be handled slightly differently, particularly in that social component. Lockdown has its own potential consequences. They will be relatively limited in Australia. We haven’t had the intensity of lockdown or the length of lockdown that others have and already it looks like some of it will be loosened quite soon.

While I spoke about some people with severe anxiety disorders possibly not worsening, other groups, like grandparents, that we’ve essentially isolated for their health, for many of them it can be especially lonely. And not having that touch. Touch is really critical. Missing that for an extended period has a whole range of negative psychological impacts.

Now on the economic side there are effects on mental health. And we need to look at past crises. There was a very notable study on this in the British Journal of Psychiatry in 2014. It looked very specifically at the global financial crisis in 2007 and looked at it over several years and in a whole range of countries. It’s very instructive. Again, it was another crisis where Australia got off pretty lightly.

First, male suicide tends to go up significantly, by 3 to 4 times. Female suicide is usually fairly steady. It doesn’t necessarily change dramatically. Now I guess one of the main theories is that the male breadwinner role is diminished. The more traditional male role of the breadwinner, the protector, the provider, is diminished and that takes an especially hefty toll on many men and for them suicide rates seem to increase significantly. And that’s actually mirrored in other eras like the Great Depression where there was a similar trend. So that’s an interesting aspect of gender.

On the other hand, female domestic roles become more important, more heightened. In some ways, it almost gives a stronger sense of purpose to many of the women while it is the opposite for some men, at least historically. And not only that. Many of the caring jobs go to women – the Great Depression actually saw one of the biggest shifts of women into working roles. Female employment went up 24 per cent in the early 1930s during the Great Depression. That is a good example of how gender roles can differ significantly.

Yet, a lot of women would say that at the same time women are often take on the bulk of the caring roles. This is true with our current homeschooling, or looking after the elderly, if not seeing them physically often organising the various things grandparents or parents need. So there is a definite extra load that may fall upon women. At the same time, I would argue this may be the first crisis where men will take certainly not the bigger portion, but they will take arguably the biggest component of that, at least historically. In a place like Australia, more men than in the past will have to take on stay-at-home roles or teaching roles or second income type roles.

One of the things I’m interested in is a shift from blue collar to what is sometimes called pink collar, the caring industry, be it disability, carers, nurses etc. And my hope is, and under the guise that many crises or epidemics often speed up historical trends, be it the rush to digital and a host of other trends. I’m hoping it will shift that trend. The shift of men from blue collar to pink collar jobs. Aided by policy to some extent.

One other social impact we might hope for is that half a century of expressive individualism, or a focus on individual autonomy, will be diluted by the morality of public health. It’s a very different type of morality. Suddenly we are hearing a lot more about mutual obligation when you look at some of the ways people are behaving. That may also be a social trend which I hope to some extent will be overall beneficial.

It’s worth thinking of different countries with regard to suicide. Greece did especially poorly between 2007 and 2009. Other countries like Sweden, Austria and Iceland did reasonably well. One of the theories with the latter countries is the benefits of their health and social safety nets. There was a lot of austerity imposed on Greece such as cut backs to health budgets. HIV, for example, increased significantly partly because there were lots of cutbacks on needle exchange programs.

Countries may suffer similar economic circumstances but the health and social responses they undertake can mitigate the potential mental health effects. The US, in some ways, sits in between. In the US, 2009 was the one year in the last half century where suicide numbers were greater than car accidents. And binge drinking also increased significantly. More recently, we’ve had things like the depths of despair associated with oxycodone and some of the opiate addictions.

A big part of mental health in the last 20 years is the disability sector where you had a huge increase in mental health as a component of disability. This is a generational trend from bad backs, which is really where the notion of the disability pension came from, to troubled minds. In the years between 2001 and 2014 there was a 50 per cent increase in those receiving the pension for psychiatric reasons. The growth has stalled a little since 2012 because eligibility requirements were tightened by the Gillard government.

Now we have an underclass of the long-term unemployed and those on the disability pension that are becoming more entrenched. The coarsening of what you might call welfare dependence is closely linked with mental health conditions and substance abuse. I want to put a proposition that another reason is a stigmatisation of jobs in the bottom end of the labour market. That’s something I’ve seen in my work.

I remember a speech by Indian prime minister Narendra Modi when he came to Australia. He said one of the great things about the Western world is that the ordinary worker, the cleaner, the driver is given an equal dignity as compared to the caste system in India or other parts of the world. That is the case to an extent. But it has diminished in recent decades. In my work with many people there is almost a fine line between those who might look for menial work and those who see there is a greater dignity in being on the disability pension. That end of the labour market has been populated by many temporary migrants and a host of other groups that we’ve imported.

With the pandemic, there’s been an improvement in the notion of dignity around essential work or what might previously have been called ordinary work. My hope, with no evidence at all, is that this may improve the idea of the dignity of ordinary work and that might have an impact on that section of the labour market, the long term unemployed, New Start, disability as a kind of interaction with mental health conditions. My hope is that it may improve some of the numbers in the longer term.

ECONOMIC AND PSYCHOLOGICAL IMPACTS OF THE PANDEMIC – DISCUSSION – GIGI FOSTER, TANVEER AHMED & GERARD HENDERSON

Gerard Henderson: Thanks Gigi and Tanveer for a great presentation.

I thought I’d start first on the topic that Gigi raised about the disadvantaged and then go briefly to the topic that you raised about dignity. It seems to me that if you look at particularly ABC programs where people go on air with commentators [not you Gigi on Q&A the other day], but people who say we’re all working at home without realising that most people are not working from home. They may be at home; they may be at home minding children. But people who are doing cleaning, driving buses, building buildings, constructing roads they’re not at home. And many of those who are at home don’t have computers. And many people who have computers don’t have as many computers as they have children. So, it seems to me that, necessary though the social distancing provisions are, they do seem to hit very heavily at those who are not in professional employment.

Gigi Foster: I completely agree. And the point about children is particularly important. The fact that we’ve closed schools or strongly encouraged children to be learning online

means that not only do the children in the more disadvantaged areas go into an environment which is arguably less supportive of their learning than at school but they are also underfoot and need to be cared for by members of our labour force who, otherwise, would be more productive. I would definitely say that’s a regressive and, you know, a highly damaging impact of the school closures. If we were going to take one step towards opening up the economy, the first one we should take is to put kids back in school.

Gerard Henderson: Tanveer?

Tanveer Ahmed: You often hear it said, we’re all in it together and the virus doesn’t discriminate. But I do think there are class and socio-economic dimensions to the virus. It is not necessarily something we’ve seen specifically but it’s just straight out in deaths. One thing I didn’t talk about is that men are three times more likely to die of coronavirus. We think that’s linked to immune systems. If you look at a place like New York, the biggest impact was in Elmhurst Hospital in Queens which had the highest number of deaths. People coming in were often the essential workers. They were the ones driving the taxis, they were the ones on the tube, the subway, they were the ones still out in the world interacting with people and far more likely to be exposed to the virus. So, from the point of view of death from the virus, I think there is a class dimension. What Gigi has said is absolutely true and this is something I’m saying regularly. It is parents coming with children on the autistic spectrum  who are trying to teach them from home. There is certainly a middle class component, people who don’t necessarily see the disparities if they are in an office job and so on. They think everybody’s got great internet and can do a job from home. That is just not the case and I think that’s flowing through this debate about the school closures.

Gerard Henderson: Now you didn’t mention this in your talk but your practice is in Western Sydney.

Tanveer Ahmed: I work primarily in Blacktown in my private practice. I have a public component in Bankstown in Southwest Sydney. And then I also work in the CBD which is more legal, insurance, and such matters.

Gerard Henderson: So you’ve got a pretty good grasp of differing levels of economic achievement which you’re dealing with. Well let’s now go to the issue of dignity. Both of you mentioned the Spanish flu of 1918 and mainly 1919 in Australia. The estimated deaths were 15,000, 12,000 as the official figure but some weren’t accounted for. So, let’s

say 15,000 in Australia. If Australia had the current population then that it has now that would be about 75,000 deaths. But it was a different society as well if you look at dignity. It seems to me now that, to some extent, you’ve got a division between those who have

permanent employment or very secure employment who have one view on social distancing and those who have insecure employment or casual employment who have another view on it. And it’s notable that whilst the public sector was pretty small around 1919 it did run across various professions. You had professional people in the public sector. You had a lot of workers in the public sector as well. But as the public sector got privatised over a century later essentially now the public sector group is a professional group. And those who are in lower level employment, by and large, are not in the public sector. So how do you see that kind of clash between those in secure employment, those in unsecured employment? Do you notice anything different in your practice with that kind of group or you don’t?

Tanveer Ahmed: It is still early days but I guess what you’re alluding to is one of the big fault lines of modern politics the divide between the “anywheres” the “everywher”, and that sort of “somewheres”. You have a growing professional class or knowledge worker who’s increasingly distant from the aspirations and experiences of, say, our suburban worker often working in the private sector or casualised employment, shift work. The most obvious thing is the latter group has much greater economic insecurity. And there’s a much bigger desperation for them to go out to work when their work has probably an element of greater risk because they’re dealing with the riff raff if you like. They’re dealing with the public and they have less control over who comes face to face with them or stands close to them. In terms of the trade-offs in the economic debate over the easing of restrictions, that group is affected the hardest. For the professional group, many of them will be working from home where their biggest whinge might be a slow internet connection when trying to do teleconferences on their computer. There are frustrations in working from home. I don’t doubt it for a second. But the same level of potential desperation and potential lack of funds, of work and a much greater desperation about the future is not as apparent in the professional classes.

Gigi Foster: I totally agree. I would just add that there is an age dimension to this as well because it is more likely that a casual worker will be younger, and also since younger people have a lower risk of death from COVID19 they are looking at different odds. When they think about going back to work their risk is much less at 20 than at 60. And the 20-year-old is more likely to have a casual position or be precariously attached to the labour force. This also begs the question of the longer-run impacts on that generation and on Australia’s industrial mix going forward. Where are those workers going to be soaked up from?

We’ve got almost a million people who have been applying for unemployment benefits. and we’re not going to bounce right back from this. Those links that have been severed between employers and employees and between supply chain members all across Australia, overseas and whatever, those are going to take a long time to rebuild. It takes a long time to re-find partners to trade with, to produce with.

This could be an opportunity for Australia to decide what it wants to be in five years, where it wants to be industrially and to figure out how to soak those workers up. And one option is what Tanveer spoke about, of trying to get some of those semi-skilled or unskilled workers who have been thrown out of a casual position, a more labouring type position perhaps, to have them transition into some of the occupations we know that we need. And we’re going to need more workers in aged care support, nursing, teaching, the caring occupations, the “pink collar” work force.

Gerard Henderson: If we go to the figures you gave at the commencement of your talk, about the drop in gross domestic product in China, Australia, , the United States and elsewhere, you’re implying that this unemployment, particularly for younger people and older people, is going to take a long time to go down.

Gigi Foster: Absolutely.

Gerard Henderson: And it looks even grimmer perhaps than the latter years of the 1930s.

Gigi Foster: One of the things that saved us from the more extended depression at that time was of course the Second World War. Let’s hope that we don’t have such a life raft this time around. But one of the lessons we might draw from that period is in fact the kinds of fiscal stimulus directions that the American government pursued at the time. The New Deal policies which soaked up a lot of labour. That was the whole point of a lot of those programs that produced infrastructure like the Hoover Dam. Some of it’s never been replaced. The Australian government could potentially, instead of just handing out money to people in a temporary way until September when supposedly the payments stop and people are going to be that much more insecure financially and otherwise, could embark on a more proactive strategy to grow certain sectors of the economy through hiring those kinds of workers to produce infrastructure that will be with us for a long time.

Gerard Henderson: But there are no easy solutions there either, as you know, because in the United States in 1938 you had a second depression which in Britain and Australia we didn’t have. We had a gradual recovery, in the United States there was a recovery and then a second depression in 1938, then the war commenced for the US around the end of 1941. If you’re putting people into government jobs they have to be paid for by the government, don’t they?

Gigi Foster: It’s not ideal but it’s a way to at least try to use the opportunity that we have now. As you said this is going to be a long recovery. The government has to do something or else we shall have a lot of suffering in this country and I am a supporter of the Job Keeper program. I am a supporter of the idea that one should engage in Keynesian stimulus when there’s a recession.

Tanveer Ahmed: Do you mean like a New Deal or something equivalent?

Gigi Foster: Something like this, right. And you’d have to think about where we want to take the economy. There are a lot of options on the table and it’s a once-in-a-lifetime, once-in-a-generation chance to take some serious action by the government that will help spur the economy in a direction that the private sector will then hopefully come in and be able to compete in towards comparative advantage in Australia, towards the areas where we should be producing more. I don’t know whether it’s going to happen but I’d love to see some discussions about that.

Gerard Henderson: Earlier in your talk you spoke about people with anxiety were handling this better than might be expected because they were sharing the anxiety with people who haven’t previously had any anxiety. But the impact of long-term unemployment on the kind of people you see day to day, both whether it occurs in the CBD or the suburbs where you work a fair bit of your time, that would be pretty grim wouldn’t it?

Tanveer Ahmed: One aspect of Western, particularly Western, mental health was partly a luxury good. This was where we had a lot of people kind of going, “Oh what’s the point of my life? How do I be totally fulfilled in all my aspects of life?” The pandemic is clarifying purpose and people are going back to essentials, the Maslow hierarchy of needs. We see that in the corporate sector too. Suddenly the banks aren’t worrying about whether they support gay marriage or not. Or the millennials are not worried about whether their job reflects their values adequately. They just they need a job. And the bank needs to function like a bank. So, some of this is clarifying purpose.

There’s no question you’ll get different kind of layers, even in mental health. But you’ll get much more practical components to mental health. For people without jobs, the economy needs to supply the jobs. If someone’s you know depressed because they don’t have a job, there’s a very good reason. There’s no number of tablets to fix that problem.

We can help people adjust to it and solve problems but in the longer term anyone unemployed who would traditionally have a job in a well-functioning economy, will be twice the risk of suicide. That’s very significant. In modern Western societies there has been a component of the unemployed that exists on that long-term unemployed welfare dependence. There’s been a component of that and part of that is possibly a luxury good too. Poorer countries most certainly do not have that luxury. But in terms of the effect of unemployment, the loss of purpose, all these dreams collapsing, there’s no question that will have a short-term mental impact which, ideally, can be mitigated. That was one of the key points I wanted to raise. You can have several countries with similar economic impacts but the difference between them lies in their health and social safety nets and what government policy can actually mitigate significantly in terms of the social or mental health impacts.

Gerard Henderson: So you’re suggesting that pronoun awareness is on the decline?

Tanveer Ahmed: Well elective surgeries are back, almost.

Gerard Henderson: Coming out in the economy, you’re talking about big government initiatives which the private sector may latch on to. But that’s going to be hugely costly.

Gigi Foster: Oh yeah.

Gerard Henderson: So how does the borrowed money ever get paid back or doesn’t it matter?

Gigi Foster: It depends on whether you’re in the more classical monetary theory camp or the modern monetary theory camp. But one thing that those two camps agree about very much is that the amount of money circulating in the economy needs to be calibrated to the amount of economic activity happening in the economy. At the end of the day, the goal of the policies we’ve set now has got to be to get the private sector back on its feet because the private sector is the generator of so many jobs and so much progress in society.

Now the private sector indirectly supports government spending, as I spoke about in my talk, and it’s that government spending that creates the kind of social support network that enables us to have long and happy lives while Australia has luxury problems like whether or not somebody wants to be a he or a she or a whatever else. We generally consider ourselves lucky in Australia. And it’s this partnership between the private sector and the public sector which is a feature of a successful, thriving society.

What we want in the future is not a lot more public sector nor really a lot less presence of the public sector. We want that combination of public and private activity which supports Australia’s prospering in the future. Of course, that does mean right now we’ll have to have a lot of public expenditure because the private sector is looking at bankruptcies, the destruction of links, all these things that have happened. There is a role right now for a larger amount of government activity which hopefully, within five to ten years, will have been sucked out by the private sector.

Gerard Henderson: But in the meantime, if there’s no work around, employers can’t keep workers on even if they’re getting government subsidies because there’s nothing for them to do except stand in the corner.

Gigi Foster: Paint rocks.

Gerard Henderson: A lot of the businesses who closed down will have a great struggle reopening. Let’s say there’s a government funded zoo. If they have to lay off some staff they can always bring them back on. But with a private zoo, if you lay off staff the chance of getting them back is very grim.

Gigi Foster: Absolutely. This is the destruction of links problem. Once that company goes under, all the links it had to the workers are destroyed. Then those workers are floating out in space, they’re idle capacity. The owner of the business is idle capacity. His capital is idle capacity and it has to be re-absorbed somehow. The government can help that process along by financing, underwriting, subsidising some kinds of activities in the short run. That’s part of what Keynesian stimulus does.

Gerard Henderson: I might just conclude – flashing back a century, I’m not an expert on the Spanish Flu. But I’ve read a bit about it. It looks as though the newspapers at the time kept going. In Australia, Australian Rules Football kept going for a whole season. Rugby League kept going for a whole season. Some of the cinemas closed. But it seems that people accepted what was happening much more than their governments are prepared to accept on their behalf today. So, Tanveer, does that tell you anything about the change in society or is it that we just know more about medicine? Because, if you look back to the literature of the time coming out at the end of the First World War, there were people put in isolation if they came to Australia and all that, but the economy seemed to go on. It seems to me that far less was closed down than we’re talking about a hundred years later.

Tanveer Ahmed: That is just a marker of how prosperous we are, how entitled we are and our expectations. And that overlaps with Gigi’s debate about life years. The modern Western economy, particularly in a place like Australia, has little tolerance for that. It’s partly why governments have, you know arguably, in some areas possibly overreacted. I think we just live in a very different time of extreme prosperity and also we have very little contact with death. Death is probably a lot more frightening than it was a century ago and it was a lot less visible than it was a century ago. That is another factor here in terms of the types of responses we’re seeing.

In poorer parts of the world you’re not seeing quite the restrictions. Take Bangladesh, which is my birthplace, where the number of deaths is possibly thirty times higher, it’s something that just happens in the background and the government cannot afford to shut the economy down too much. So, they take the hit of so many deaths. I don’t think a society like Australia could tolerate that.

Gerard Henderson: In conclusion, and we can finish on your own comment on this, what Tanveer is saying is that the more prosperous the economy the more you’ve got to close it down.

Tanveer Ahmed: We can actually afford to do this.

Gigi Foster: Death is a reality. And implicitly we do make these decisions all the time, every day in our departments of health, at the federal level and the state level. These decisions happen. The fact that the Australian constituent wants to put his head in the sand and say no, no there is no trade-off in the world between lives, that is a problem that hampers our ability to have these discussions openly. It holds back our political debate.

I believe we should be pushing for those discussions, as morally wrenching as it may be, and point to other countries, developing countries, where they have to have such discussions. They recognise how important the economy is and they have to make some hard choices. One of the reasons that politicians have moved in the direction they have, a big reason, is not that they initially were the ones leading the charge towards lockdowns but because the public was so scared, particularly in developed countries, so scared by reports on the media, by images of body bags in the streets of Italy and this notion of ICUs overrunning and nurses falling over. It’s very scary. We didn’t have that kind of media back in 1918-1919 and we didn’t have the luxury of stopping economies. It’s been this fear reaction that the politicians have been forced to recognise in their moves toward lockdown. There was an extremist area here which has cost us lives.

Tanveer Ahmed: Just a final practical point. The most prosperous countries also have the most aged populations. That is a practical consideration here. They were also the most vulnerable.

Gerard Henderson: Well many thanks to both of you, in particular for not using the word “conversations” and talking about “discussions”.

Tanveer Ahmed: Or “unprecedented”. Nobody’s said that today which is great.

Gerard Henderson: And we’ll love to have you back when we’re out of virtual reality and back at The Sydney Institute. But for tonight thanks a lot. Well done.