‘Fractured’ pandemic response failed the most vulnerable, independent report finds

An independent review of Australia’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic has found ill-conceived policies, politically driven health orders and excessive use of lockdowns failed to protect the old, disregarded the young and abandoned some of the nation’s most disadvantaged communities.

The review, led by former top public servant Peter Shergold, urges federal and state governments to learn from mistakes and overhaul planning, to broaden the advice provided to national cabinet and restore trust in how decisions are made.

Peter Shergold says governments need to learn from the mistakes of this pandemic.Credit: Flavio Brancaleone

The final report of the Shergold panel, which was funded by three private philanthropic trusts and is entitled Fault Lines, identifies four substantive failings in Australia’s response to the COVID crisis: inequitable government support measures that exacerbated existing social disadvantages; the unjustified closure of schools; inadequate protection of aged care residents; and the overuse of “brutal” lockdowns and border closures.

It backs the federal government’s move to establish an Australian Centre for Disease Control and recommends a series of further reforms across the public sector and within national cabinet to improve transparency in pandemic decision-making and encourage greater collaboration between governments, business, unions and community organisations.

“Frontline workers, women, children, aged care residents, people with disabilities, ethnic communities, international students, expatriates overseas and those already experiencing relative socioeconomic disadvantage bore the brunt of the pandemic,” the review found. “Left unchecked, the recovery threatens to be just as unequal.

“We need to ensure that supports are properly targeted to those in greatest need. We owe it to the thousands of Australians who continue to lose their lives that we learn from the pandemic and identify how government responses can be improved in the future.”

Empty Melbourne streets under lockdown and curfew in October 2021.Credit: Eddie Jim

The panel’s work was commissioned by three philanthropic trusts – the John and Myriam Wylie Foundation, the Paul Ramsay Foundation and Andrew Forrest’s Minderoo Foundation – and received no public funding. It was conducted over six months and involved more than 350 confidential submissions and consultations with health experts, public servants, economists and business and community groups.

The panel was made up of Shergold, who is chancellor of Western Sydney University and was head of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet during the Howard government, company director and former chancellor of the University of Wollongong Jillian Broadbent, University of Queensland chancellor and former diplomat and foreign affairs adviser Peter Varghese, and Isobel Marshall, the 2021 young Australian of the year.

Shergold told The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald a strength of the review was the absence of political constraints associated with any government-commissioned inquiry. The report, published on Thursday, has been presented to federal and state public service chiefs.

“If we do not make a conscious effort to look back and assess what we got right, what we changed and what we got wrong, we will end up making similar mistakes in the future,” Shergold said.

The report credits federal and state governments for getting many of the “big calls right”, particularly early in the pandemic, but notes much of Australia’s success reflected starting advantages in being able to close international borders and rely on a strong economy and public trust in the pandemic response.

As the pandemic developed, this trust was eroded by political divisions in national cabinet over issues such as school closures, inconsistent application of rules in different jurisdictions, the absence of an independent, national authority on communicable disease, and the use of non-disclosure agreements to conceal epidemiological modelling and other evidence relied on by governments.

This lack of transparency helped “mask political calculations” in government decisions and made it easier for political leaders to selectively follow advice.

Opaque decision-making “saw a plethora of external health experts become media celebrities” and fill the information void.

“Australians hoped that a national cabinet would bring a national approach,” the report found.

“Unfortunately, that was not to be. Indeed, political opportunism – and an absence of transparency and inclusion – fractured the policy response, resulting in unnecessary hardship and consequences for vulnerable people living with disadvantage.”

The report lists a series of “consequential” wrong decisions including:

• Excluding casual workers and temporary migrants from JobKeeper and failing to include a clawback mechanism to retrieve payments to from highly profitable companies;
• Blanket closure of school classes without giving due consideration to the long-term impacts on education, social development, mental and physical health, and the economy;
• Reluctance by state health authorities to admit to hospital aged care residents who tested positive for COVID;
• An inadequate response to the “triple jeopardy” faced by people living with a disability, who were at greater risk of getting seriously ill from the virus, and who also lost access to routine healthcare, medications and therapeutic services and contact with support workers, families and friends.

The use of protracted lockdowns, particularly in Melbourne and western Sydney, was the most contentious public health measure employed in the fight against COVID-19.

The report’s authors describe lockdowns as a blunt instrument whose reach was excessive and implementation harsh.

The review finds lockdowns were a sensible measure to prepare Australia’s hospital system at the start of the pandemic but were subsequently “driven by policy failures” and became the dominant public health response.

“Many lockdowns were avoidable,” the report found. “Some were the result of failures in our quarantine systems, our contact tracing systems, a sluggish vaccine rollout and shortcomings in our communication with key parts of our community.

“Some decisions were politically motivated. Some responded to public fear whipped up by the media. Lockdowns, especially when targeted at a particular location, brought a deep sense of inequity among those who were most restricted. Lockdowns, overall, created a universal feeling that the pandemic was being policed rather than managed.”

The report attributes Melbourne and Sydney’s long winter lockdowns of 2021 to a federal government vaccination program “afflicted by bad luck, bad communication and bad decisions”.

It warns the cost of primary healthcare and preventive treatments deferred during lockdowns are yet to be realised.

“It is now obvious that we overestimated mortality and underestimated the collateral damage of the actions taken to stop the spread of COVID-19,” it concluded.

The report also criticises “draconian” travel restrictions and interstate border closures.

“As with lockdowns, border closures – particularly between states and territories – should be used sparingly and only in extreme situations. They should be applied with greater empathy and flexibility.”

The report cites a series of damning, socioeconomic inequities in Australia’s pandemic death toll, including a rate of death for people born overseas 2½ times higher than for people born here, and a threefold risk of death from COVID for people in the bottom socioeconomic quintile compared with those in the top quintile.

It notes that three out of every four COVID deaths in 2020 were recorded in aged care.

Reforms proposed by the review panel are intended to expand the range of advice presented to governments in future pandemics, so the imperative to control the spread of a contagion is balanced against the broader social, economic and health considerations for already disadvantaged communities.

Federal Health Minister Mark Butler has pledged to work with state and territory governments to establish a Centre for Disease Control.

Other report recommendations include the establishment of a panel of experts and community representatives to provide additional advice to national cabinet on pandemic decisions, and for all government modelling and scientific evidence to be publicly released.

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