Our leaders are not ready for the next pandemic

The end of this month marks four years since the World Health Organisation declared China’s COVID-19 outbreak a public health emergency of international concern, heralding the start of a traumatic period many of us would prefer to forget.

The anniversary is also a reminder that Australia is now four years closer to the next pandemic. But we are not prepared for that inevitable event because our political leaders have not adequately studied the lessons – good and bad – of our most recent experience.

A federal inquiry is being held into responses to the COVID-19 pandemic.Credit: Getty Images

The Herald has previously argued that the Albanese government’s decision to hold a limited inquiry into the impacts of COVID-19, instead of a more effective royal commission, is short-sighted and undermines Australia’s ability to fully learn from the pandemic years.

Sadly, that debate has been lost and the federal government’s limited inquiry, led by public sector expert Robyn Kruk, epidemiologist Catherine Bennett and health economist and former Labor staffer Angela Jackson, is now under way.

Interviews with key players such as former premiers and prime ministers have been held over recent weeks, however the full and frank verdicts of those key players will never be made public in their entirety as transcripts will not be issued.

Premiers and former federal politicians have the option of lodging a written submission, as do health experts and other figures involved in the response, but have the ability to ask for their written views to be published anonymously, or not at all.

Some submissions have been made public, but only via their authors.

One contribution from the former deputy chief federal medical officer, Nick Coatsworth, makes for compelling reading. Coatsworth warned that discordance between state and federal governments had disadvantaged the response by confusing the Australian public “at a time when clarity was essential”, and diminished the rights conferred by Australian citizenship, “including the ability for a jurisdictional government to discriminate based on place of residence”. Using a ventilator-sharing policy that he helped formulate in early 2020 as a hypothetical, Coatsworth told the inquiry it was “almost impossible to conceive that such a strategy could have been effectively implemented in the political climate” had mass sharing across the nation been needed.

He also described Australia’s research output during the pandemic as being inferior to some other nations, said state governments must never again be permitted to deny access to communicable diseases healthcare to any Australian citizen based on which side of the border they live (hello, Annastacia Palaszczuk), and blasted vaccine mandates as often counter-productive.

“The political discussion around mandates falsely conflated Australians who were ‘anti-mandate’ with ‘anti-vaccination’,” Coatsworth wrote. He said the mandate decisions were “one of the clearest examples of a failure to use the principles of verifiability, responsiveness and proportionality in assessment of pandemic policy” and should only be used in the future as a last-resort policy.

The Herald has also recently reported submissions to the inquiry from the Burnet Institute and Grattan Institute. Not everyone will agree with their views, but the Herald congratulates Coatsworth, the Burnet Institute and Grattan Institute for having the guts to share their experience and reflections, and do so on the public record.

The Herald welcomes contributions from all sides and perspectives of this debate. The unknown is whether this weak inquiry really has the capacity, or interest, to truly interrogate this extraordinary period and face up to some hard truths about what went right and what went horribly wrong.

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