The Victorian government’s handling of Covid-19 will be remembered as a rolling series of blunders rivalling that of any government in the post-war period. A fourth lockdown, based on flawed advice, will have catastrophic economic and social costs that are impossible to fully calculate. It will be seen as a lesson in how not to respond to a pandemic.
Brett Sutton, Victoria’s chief health officer, said the virus was “an absolute beast”, compared it to measles and said it was spreading “in settings and circumstances we’ve never seen before”. There was no evidence for this. It was widely criticised, including by Melbourne University epidemiologist James McCaw, a member of the Australian Health Protection Principal Committee, which advises the national cabinet.
Covid response commander Jeroen Weimar claimed “fleeting contact” with people “brushing past each other” likely transmitted the virus, justifying the lockdown, but these were later reclassified as false positives. Acting Premier James Merlino said if the government did not “get ahead” of the virus it would “explode” and become “uncontrollable”. This talk was unfounded and unduly alarmist.
It is often said that advice costs nothing unless you act on it. The problem for the Victorian government is that it has acted on advice not backed by epidemiological evidence. A limited lockdown for a short period of time or confined to a specific area, as adopted in other states, is viewed as an anathema in Victoria.
UNSW epidemiologist Mary-Louise McLaws claimed that Melbourne was different to Sydney, which helped explain the virus spread. But Liz Allen, a demographer from ANU, showed that NSW and Victoria are not all that different. “In fact,” she said, “the data point(s) to NSW being at greater ‘risk’.”
It should not have come as a surprise that when the lockdown was announced, thousands of Victorians fled the state. The highways were clogged and airline tickets were snapped up within hours. Some might have been fearful, given what the government said. But many more would have seen it as evidence of another failure to contain the virus and not wanting to be homebound.
Is it any wonder the infection and death tolls in Victoria are far greater than any other state? Each lockdown has been implemented in response to systemic failures in containing the spread of infections and demonstrable proof that its system of testing and contact tracing will not be enough to suppress it.
While Victoria boasts that it has a world-class testing and tracing regime, it has only just introduced a uniform QR code system and made check-in mandatory. NSW rolled out QR codes last year. Victoria’s contract tracing system was found by a parliamentary inquiry to have been so defective last year that it cost lives. Other failures in hotel quarantine underscore the bureaucratic dysfunction in Victoria.
This latest Covid outbreak is relatively “small”, as Department of Health secretary Brendan Murphy said, yet the response has been heavy-handed. A 14-day lockdown, with no idea when it will lift, would not have been implemented in NSW or probably any other state. The Victorian government is being run by the bureaucracy even though it has been shown to be the worst in Australia.
The economic cost of the lockdown in Victoria has been estimated by industry groups to be around $2bn each week. This means kids not being educated, jobs lost and businesses ruined. The social and health impact of lockdowns gets little attention. It leads to higher rates of domestic violence, depression, and increased drug and alcohol use.
The Victorian government has conveniently blamed the South Australian and federal governments, and Scott Morrison personally, for the latest outbreak and subsequent lockdown. This has found a receptive audience on social media where the ludicrous hashtags #MorrisonLockdown and #IStandWithDan are routinely trending. But the lockdown is entirely Victoria’s fault.
There are nevertheless significant failures by the Morrison government on the vaccine rollout, aged care and quarantine. It, too, has suffered from poor advice and has been slow to address problems and take remedial action. The government, especially Health Minister Greg Hunt, is reluctant to admit mistakes.
The vaccine program has been bungled from the start. Australia has one of the lowest rates of vaccination in the world. Supply was not secured. Timelines have been missed. The government’s messaging has been mixed and the advertising campaign has not been as effective in addressing vaccine hesitancy as it should be.
The failures in aged care are monumental. The government did not know how many facilities had been vaccinated. It could not say how many aged-care workers there were or how many had been vaccinated. It has failed to address problems identified months ago. Richard Colbeck, the minister responsible, should have been sacked long ago.
The federal government has also been slow to act on purpose-built quarantine facilities. While hotel quarantine has largely been a success, and there is no guarantee the virus would not escape from a remote facility, the government should have funded new facilities in each of the mainland states. Hotels are not a permanent quarantine solution.
Governments have a responsibility to make decisions in the state or national interest, carefully weighing up advice and considering the costs and benefits of taking different courses of action. Prime ministers, premiers and ministers abrogate this responsibility when they outsource decision-making to so-called experts who repeatedly make errors of judgment.
While Australia has largely been a Covid success story, with relatively low infections and deaths, we are fumbling the next phase of managing new virus outbreaks without wrecking our economy and inflicting a greater social and health toll. The partisan bickering is not helpful. There is, after all, plenty of blame to go around.
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