Covid report points finger at state lockdown failings

Lockdown premiers Dan Andrews, Annastacia Palaszczuk and Mark McGowan.

The lasting legacy of Australia’s Covid pandemic response has been an erosion of public trust in politicians and our institutions.

Premiers, drunk on power with politics their focus, undermined what had been a well-managed initial response that put Australia ahead of the global curve.

Mistakes certainly were made but it was the rush to vaccine mandates, prolonged lockdowns and lack of transparency on why these measures were considered necessary that have left the deepest scars.

Those scars remain and include an enduring mental-health crisis affecting many young people who were denied by government impost the freedoms and experience of youth.

The Covid inquiry was not perfect but its report has done a good job in not avoiding the gross failings that resulted primarily from state leaders who could not maintain the discipline of the initial pandemic response.

When the inquiry was announced we were critical that the actions of state governments had been specifically excluded from the terms of reference. We said this meant that lockdowns and other measures that had the biggest impact on people’s lives would not be properly assessed. And that the appointment of hand-picked experts, at least one of whom made no secret of their political views and support for tough lockdowns during the pandemic, “left the whole process open to accusations of apprehended bias from the start”.

Thankfully, the inquiry report gets to the core of what went wrong. It says 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.

Decisions included closing the international border, agreeing on a national lockdown and moving to support jobs through a nationwide wage subsidy scheme. Prime minister Scott Morrison quickly identified key weaknesses, including the operation of federal-state relationships through the Council of Australian Governments.

The failures came as some state leaders were unable to move from a precautionary principle approach to less restrictive settings as a vaccine was made available and the virus was better understood.

The inquiry report says that once more was understood about the virus threat and our healthcare system’s resilience had increased, the pandemic response should have shifted from a reliance on the “better safe than sorry” precautionary principle, where fast actions not necessarily informed by evidence were required, to a risk-based approach grounded in evidence. National cabinet’s structure also meant that broader health and non-health impacts were not consistently given the appropriate level of consideration.

In the end, the dirty politics was not in the report itself but in the timing of its release that coincided with Anthony Albanese being under maximum pressure over his personal dealings with former Qantas chief executive Alan Joyce to get free upgrades on flights when he was transport minister.

Jim Chalmers also took the opportunistic route, cherrypicking lines from the report to blame the former federal government for his current inflation problems. The federal Treasurer said Australia was “paying the price still in the budget and in terms of inflation for some of the mistakes that were made then”. Dr Chalmers’ criticisms are overblown on several fronts.

Australia’s economic response was not out of step with other nations. The Covid inquiry report says while Australia recorded its first recession in almost 30 years, with GDP falling 6.9 per cent between the December quarter 2019 and the June quarter 2020, it was able to largely mitigate severe economic impacts.

“That said, there were a number of ways in which the individual design of supports during this initial period could have been improved to ensure value for money for taxpayers and to support the economic recovery,” the inquiry report says. “With the benefit of hindsight, there was excessive fiscal and monetary policy stimulus provided throughout 2021 and 2022, especially in the construction sector. Combined with supply-side disruptions, this contributed to inflationary pressures coming out of the pandemic.”

The inquiry found Australian policymakers were not alone in misjudging the nature and strength of inflationary pressures coming out of the pandemic that have led to declines in real incomes across much of the developed world.

The report says the policy focus on getting unemployment down as far as possible also came with real benefits for households, businesses and government finances. “However, a stronger focus on supply side rather than demand side policies in plans for the economic recovery would have mitigated some of the inflationary pressures,” it says.

This was been seized on by Dr Chalmers. But Labor’s economic critique is out of step because in opposition the ALP had argued for Covid spending measures to be continued beyond the time that the Morrison government brought them to an end. The report says “the panel notes that the modification of the JobKeeper payment was an exemplar of the use of evidence and evaluation”.

Poor decisions taken during the pandemic have left an economic legacy. But they are not the one highlighted by Dr Chalmers and are largely the result of Labor premiers. The use of mandates has weakened trust in vaccines more generally and led to a fall in critical routine vaccination uptake among children, and a rise in vaccine-preventable illnesses such as measles and whooping cough.

There are still large backlogs in elective surgery due to its suspension during the pandemic. The health system, while protected from being overwhelmed during the pandemic, has been left with system-wide issues that are having an ongoing impact on Australians in need of healthcare. Children faced lower health risks from Covid-19, but broader impacts on the social and emotional development of children are ongoing. These include impacts on mental health, school attendance and academic outcomes for some groups of children.

Many of the criticisms levelled at premiers for their heavy-handed approach to Covid lockdowns have been proved correct.

In his critique of the report on Tuesday, Dr Chalmers took the wrong message. He cannot use the Covid excuse to avoid the budget management and spending restraint necessary today to overcome the inflation challenge and repair the damage done by the overly political decisions of primarily Labor premiers.