Has COVID changed our lives for the better?

Those were the days. We had no idea what was coming. Since then, more than 10 million cases of COVID in this country, more than 14,000 dead. God knows how many of us suffer from what we call long COVID, nor how many suffer because COVID-19 does not usually disappear in the eight days it's meant to disappear in. Be honest. How long did you spend coughing after the eight days were up? When I occasionally cough now, I get PTSD; and I'm totally triggered by even the slightest tickle in my throat.

So are our lives a broken misery? Have all our sacrifices been for nothing? In any possible way, did the horrors of COVID change our lives for the better?

The short answer is yes. I'll tell you how but first let me acknowledge our terrible losses. So many of our elders died as COVID ravaged aged care. It also hit the poorest Australians, those with a disability. The economy shuddered, regrouped, transformed around the edges. Some businesses disappeared. Capitalists chucked tantrums about their losses all over the place, as recently as this week.

Take our friends at Charter Hall. According to the Australian Financial Review, Charter Hall is Australia's largest office landlord and its CEO David Harrison is desperately unhappy. Of course he is.

According to the Property Council of Australia, occupancy in early September reached 83 per cent in Adelaide, 78 per cent in Canberra and Perth [which experienced a slight drop] and 75 per cent in Brisbane, with Sydney peaks at 67 per cent and Melbourne at 51 per cent. Sounds like hard times for landlords, the most over-indulged bunch of capitalists in our economy (nah, probs miners but you get my point). Anyhow, Mr Charter Hall warned people who want to work from home they risk being replaced by robots. He said as unemployment started to rise again, companies would look to automation to save costs. He told the Australian Financial Review Property Summit, "if we keep having to deal with a lack of productivity and people saying 'I want to work from home', once unemployment rises, I think we will see jobs replaced by robots."

May I suggest that if Mr Harrison is worried about vacancy rates he stick to his organisation rent-seeking (OK, I know they invest, so not strictly rent-seeking but bear with me here). I have an excellent idea. All those empty offices could be repurposed for social housing. It mightn't make the same profit as office space but imagine the social benefit.

Those repping Charter Hall are not the only ones complaining about working from home. There are a bunch of folks from big business who say "culture can't be formed on the internet", including Darren Steinberg, CEO of one of Australia's biggest property developers, Dexus. (See a pattern emerging here?) It's the same reason. They want their bit of the country, the CBDs, to perk up. Thing is, plenty of places in the burbs have perked right up. Even the ATO is moving out of Civic, in the heart of Canberra, to the more 'burban Barton.

MORE JENNA PRICE:

For too many years, employers in this country have had too much power. And boy are they missing out on control. As employers struggle with worker shortages, they are learning exactly what it is employees want - and that's more autonomy. According to new British research across 27 countries and thousands of workers, one-quarter of employees who currently work from home part of the week say they would quit their job rather than return to the office full-time. The research from King's College London also found employees around the world see working from home for two to three days as being as valuable as earning five per cent more pay.

Barrenjoey Capital chief executive Jo Masters says the emergence of workplace flexibility has been the silver lining in the horror of the pandemic.

"Hybrid working was absolutely accelerated during the pandemic, particularly for female participation in the workforce.

"[It has] economic benefits and also societal benefits," she says.

Masters says productivity is stable and many workers have benefited from fewer commutes.

"The truth is, we don't know where a lot of these big fundamental shifts will land. We don't know what the new normal will be," she says.

But Masters says the other really big achievement of the pandemic has been getting employers to work alongside unions. She's right. We saw it first with JobKeeper and we saw it again at the jobs summit. These are major positives in a country which spent the last 10 years being told by its government that employers were great and glorious and workers and their unions should be grateful they got paid at all. Penalty rates? Don't be so ridiculous.

Any other positive legacies of the pandemic? I'm hoping we can internalise mask mandates on public transport, including on flights and in airports. Be our own personal health ministers and insist we wear masks. I note a pleasing continuation of handwashing at least in women's bathrooms. Turns out the gender gap is even apparent there. (Men, you are sooooo dirty.) And occasionally in queues, I can turn around and give someone a hard stare and they will back off, a few centimetres at least.

Is COVID really over? Short answer? Don't be ridiculous. We might get a break over summer from constant anxiety about what is yet to come. And some of its effects will last forever.