Covid inquiry pure Seinfeld

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has called an inquiry that can provide no answer at all. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Peter Stoop

On one of his occasional but always welcome visits Down Under, peripatetic Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has taken the tried and true advice – that you should only call an inquiry when you already know its answer – one inspired stage further.

He’s called a Covid inquiry that can provide no answer at all. Neither a “known known”, far less a “known unknown”.

That’s to say, no meaningful answer – other than, perhaps, that, well of course, his predecessor got it all and completely wrong.

Talk about chutzpah; it’s a pure Seinfeldian rip-off. Not so much an inquiry about nothing, but a 100 per cent nothing-burger.

The central question of any inquiry into what “we” did – and yes, as everyone except seemingly our presumably permanently jet-lagged PM knows, it was “we” plural – is both very simple and quite complex. Did Sweden “do it right” or did (almost) everyone else? On the one hand, the lockdowns, the social distancing, the school closures, the masks, the effectively compulsory vaccines – along with all the massive government spending and zero interest rates? Policies that continued to be – brutally – applied, all the way to the end of 2021 in Victoria? Or on the other, Sweden’s light touch: in a phrase, almost none of the above? This rather basic, straightforward, question has to be posed, though, examined, and conclusions drawn, with appropriate recommendations for the future, in a series of stages through the “Covid years” and indeed beyond, including right now.

First, what was done, by the national – Scott Morrison-led federal – government, right at the start. This was three broad things: closing the international border, the national lockdown, and the huge support program around JobKeeper.

In February-March 2020, we – as in, everybody – simply did not know what we were dealing with. Not only in “Covid terms”, but in economic and financial as well.

But by the “second stage” – the second half of 2020 and into 2021, before the vaccines arrived – we did know or should have known. That’s both, broadly, about Covid, but even more clearly about the economic costs and benefits.

That’s when the Sweden counter case became so sharp.

It’s also, of course, when the management of both Covid and the national economy, moved out of the hands of the federal government into that of individual state governments and their health regimes. Yet, this is precisely and specifically excluded from the purview of Albanese’s sham Seinfeldian inquiry.

An inquiry, seemingly peopled, I might add, by characters from a Seinfeld episode. Then followed the third stage, and again it was all about what state governments were doing – lockdowns, and border closures, and the rest.

That’s through 2021, when we finally had the vaccines and they were being rolled out.

Though it was largely what states were doing, it was mixed in with federal government actions – both Covid-related and economic. Again, also are the questions about the Reserve Bank and interest rates. I would TWO further stages. What we did or did not do in 2022, when Covid “was over”, and what we are doing or should be doing right now. But who wants real answers?