Anthony Albanese has failed to bash Scott Morrison and shield premiers with this Covid-19 report

Anthony Albanese and NSW Premier Chris Minns at NSW TAFE's Hunter campus on Tuesday. Picture: X

The authors of Anthony Albanese’s Covid-19 inquiry have exposed the craven attempt to clip their wings before they even started.

Not only was the protection racket for the premiers transparent, it failed.

Of the key criticisms contained in the 860-page report handed down on Tuesday, the most striking were the consequences of the arbitrary state and territory lockdowns, school closures and vaccine mandates.

It’s little surprise the Prime Minister didn’t turn up for its release. This wasn’t the narrative the government would have been hoping for.

The report was notable for its praise of Scott Morrison, describing his leadership at the national level as “courageous”.

In the initial stages of the pandemic at least, the report provided a strong validation for the Morrison government’s response.

Unsurprisingly, there were failings. Every Australian who lived through the deprivation of liberties, still lives with the consequences.

But one of the most fundamental issues the report raises has been the erosion of trust.

A failure to transition to evidence-based approaches, and an absence of justification, means the community is unlikely to accept the same impositions again.

Among the issues most critical to this trust crisis were the vaccine mandates, school closures and unexplained and often unjustifiable border closures and lockdowns.

This was almost universally a problem created by state and territory governments. Vaccine mandates, which have since fallen off a cliff, were imposed at a federal level only for healthcare workers and the aged-care sector. It was the states and territories that mandated them for everyone else.

Morrison was opposed to school closures. The states did that themselves. And as for the border closures and lockdowns, again, the states were the authorities on that.

The report suggested that the national cabinet approach worked well until it didn’t, despite findings that the nation was ill prepared for a pandemic in the first place.

The problem was Morrison’s inability to prevent the premiers going rogue.

“Different approaches being taken across the states and territories also led to distrust,” the report said.

“Initially, national cabinet was united in its approach, but this unity waned over the course of the pandemic and at times there were contradictory explanations of decisions by leaders, further fuelling confusion and mistrust.

There was praise in the Covid report for former prime minister Scott Morrison’s actions during the pandemic. Picture: Getty Images

“While different approaches across states and territories could be appropriate where local conditions or different population risk profiles demanded them, some differences were not easily explained, and no rationale was provided.

“This included the operation of state border closures that states enacted unilaterally and that lacked consistency and compassion in implementation.”

There was enough praise for Morrison to have made it difficult for Albanese to continue the prosecution at a leadership level.

“The inquiry considers that the decisive and difficult decisions taken by the Prime Minister and other Australian Government ministers at the outset of the pandemic demonstrated courageous leadership and actions consistent with the precautionary principle,” it said.

“The rapid response leaders implemented protected Australian lives in the first wave and set us on a path that reduced the overall negative impacts of the pandemic.”

But there was the expected dose of criticism as well. Mistakes were made.

There were mixed messages in the assessment of the economic response.

In their post report press conference – absent of Albanese – Health Minister Mark Butler and Jim Chalmers struck sharply different tones, to the point of becoming almost comedic.

Butler acknowledged the work of the Morrison government while trying his best to focus on the findings’ deficiencies of the national health response.

Chalmers on the other hand went straight for the jugular, using selected elements in it to aggressively attack the Coalition for spending too much money and creating the post-pandemic problem he is now being blamed for mismanaging.

“The response during the alert phase of the pandemic was excellent,” the report said.

“The executive and bureaucracy showed strong economic leadership through the period to quickly respond to the challenges being faced.

“Even though there was great uncertainty, the government delivered an unprecedented amount of economic support very rapidly and in proportion to the size of the downturn.

“The response had a strong focus on minimising harm by minimising financial stress, poverty and labour force ‘scarring’.”

On the other hand. it found the government had funnelled too much stimulus into the construction sector and that the fiscal measures, recommended by Treasury and the central bank at the time, were ultimately inflationary.

It noted that the delay in the vaccine rollout also cost the economy $31bn.

It conceded Australia wasn’t alone in being trapped in the post-pandemic price-and-supply crisis.

Chalmers ignores the subtext to this, which is the failure of Treasury – the same Treasury now advising him – to foresee the inflationary impacts and the absolute failure of the RBA to move sooner to rate rises.

There was also another blunt missive – which applies to both the Coalition and Labor – that throwing money into the economy after the pandemic, knowing all this, simply added fuel to the fire.

“Australian policymakers were not alone in misjudging the nature and strength of inflationary pressures coming out of the pandemic, which have led to declines in real incomes across much of the developed world,” it said.

“Following a decade of low inflation, and based on prior pandemic experiences, inflation was not viewed as a credible risk by policymakers.”

Overall, the report validated the Morrison government’s response, noting that the country was woefully unprepared to begin with.

The most sobering summary, however, was in a reminder of the inevitable: this will happen again.