Peta Credlin: Bring on a Royal Commission into COVID in 2021

Australians deserve to feel proud as this year draws to a close, but we still need answers into how states dealt with the pandemic.

So how different was your Christmas? Was it blighted by the absence of family kept away by state border closures; were you locked up on Sydney’s northern beaches; or was it a joyful reunion of loved ones kept apart for much of the year by the house arrest and ring of steel around Melbourne?  

Being Australians, I’m sure you found much to celebrate, or I hope you did because whatever our particular circumstances might be from time to time, we’re all blessed to live in the best country there is.

But still, truth be told, it’s been a bummer of a year.

We should be grateful for avoiding the COVID deaths of the United States and Britain, and much of the political argy bargy over how much damage should be done to livelihoods in order to save lives. Partly this was luck. We’re a big island a long way from everywhere else.

We could and did close our borders relatively early and kept them fairly effectively shut, except in Victoria, where epic ineptitude produced 90 per cent of our deaths.

And because the states are in charge of public health while the Commonwealth is in charge of the economy; in effect, Canberra picked up the tab for the states to run what turned into an elimination strategy.

And unlike other countries, we could do that, more or less, at the cost of shut-tight international borders and a stop-start local economy until an effective vaccine finally rolls out.

As Australians, we deserve to feel a measure of quiet pride as this year of years draws to a close; but not self-congratulation because 2020 will still leave deep scars.

NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian was a standout during 2020 compared to some of her state counterparts, Peta Credlin writes. Picture: NCA NewsWire/Jenny Evans

There’s the debt, obviously, racing to over a trillion dollars that our grandchildren will be paying off; and the deficits that are likely to endure for decades because the habit of public spending is hard to break.

There are the tens of thousands of small businesses closed-and-opened-and-closed-again whose owners are likely to give up in frustration and despair, with their staff destined for unemployment.

There’s the bump in mental illness and suicides, and the additional cardiac and cancer deaths from treatment delayed or avoided, less obvious than coronavirus deaths, but the unavoidable price of prioritising a new disease ahead of all the old ones.
And then there are the psychic costs to a society that once prided itself on self-reliance but has become accustomed to hang on Premiers’ every word, almost religiously to follow the instructions of chief health officers, and to be almost pathetically grateful for being “allowed” 20 rather than 10 people in our own homes.

As liberty eroded, to say it hasn’t been a great year for freedom and for self-respect would be an understatement.

There’s no doubt that Gladys Berejiklian has been the best of the premiers and that NSW has been the best of the states at coping with this virus and getting the balance right between saving lives and saving livelihoods.

Berejiklian and her health team learned the lessons of the Ruby Princess debacle. Efficient testing and tracing systems were put in place. New outbreaks were leapt on fast. That meant that the disease could be managed without lengthy, draconian, citywide lockdowns.

Compare this with Dan Andrews and Victoria. Hotel quarantine was managed by dodgy private security guards instead of the police and military; and, when the virus inevitably escaped, test results took up to 10 days to come back, people understandably gave up on self- isolation, and antiquated tracing systems couldn’t cope.

Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews still needs to answer some big questions, Peta Credlin says. Picture: Darrian Traynor/Getty

Hence the need for a temporary health dictatorship unprecedented in our history, with people confined to their homes for 23 hours a day for four months.

Still, as Andrews’ tame inquiry found, no one was to blame, no one individual had actually made the deadly decision that led to 900 families missing a loved one this Christmas, and while the whole exercise was a monumental failure of governance and an abomination under the Westminster system of responsible government, there should be no consequences for anyone at all because that was “beyond the remit” of this inquiry.  

You can be confident that the former Labor staffer now policing industrial manslaughter will likewise manage to look away from this monumental scandal.

Then there were the other Premiers, most notably Queensland’s Annastacia Palaszczuk and Western Australia’s Mark McGowan who kept their borders closed long after there was the slightest health justification, exploiting the pandemic to pose as saviours of their states, while leaving NSW to handle most of their own citizens returning home from overseas.

It was utterly transparent political posturing but it’s already won an incompetent, spendthrift Queensland government a new four-year term and will almost certainly do the same in the west.

From the outset, Scott Morrison was canny enough to realise that other than paying the bill for this pandemic, the decisions were all — constitutionally — going to be made by the Premiers, so by establishing his so-called national cabinet he made sure he wasn’t sidelined.

But as we saw with borders, schools and so much more, other than provide PR value, despite this national cabinet, the Premiers did whatever they pleased, and too often the PM has looked more like the Premiers’ equal than their leader.

News Corp Australia columnist Peta Credlin. Picture: John Feder

This time last year, we were being ravaged by bushfires which killed around 30 people, decimated regional communities and shaved a small percentage off GDP.

If there had to be a Commonwealth royal commission into these figures, logic surely demands that there be a Commonwealth royal commission into this pandemic which has directly killed around thousand people, cut 7 per cent off GDP in just one quarter, and cost over $300 billion in additional federal spending.

Because bushfires are routine in Australia, inquiries into them always have the same outcomes: what’s needed is better co-operation between agencies, better use of technology and more hazard reduction burns.

Pandemics aren’t unique — the Asian flu pandemic of the 1950s and the Hong Kong Flu pandemic of the 1960s were about as destructive as this one — but they’re rarer than bushfires and have certainly, at least this time, generated an unprecedented policy response.

Was it an over-reaction, could policy have been better targeted, and how is normality best restored? These are important questions that should be pondered while the memories are fresh and well before the next pandemic hits.

Without a royal commission, that has all the necessary powers to call the right witnesses and ask all the right questions, we will never know what went wrong in Victoria’s quarantine system: and that matters because as a senior Labor figure said to me a few months back: “If we get away with this, it will set a new low in government that we will never be able to come back from.”

In the end, for all the rhetoric, it’s the numbers that tell the reality of this dreadful year; for every one million residents, Victoria suffered 130 COVID deaths while the rest of the country combined, suffered less than five deaths per million.

Bring on 2021, and a Royal Commission.

* Watch Peta Credlin on Sky News, weeknights at 6pm