Covid report shines light on government overreach

Peter Shergold and his team have done the nation a great service in forensically assessing the efficacy and necessity of Australia’s Covid-19 pandemic response. The conclusions from their investigation, which was funded by private charitable foundations, confirm many of the views expressed by this newspaper in response to extended lockdowns by trigger-happy state governments and the closure of schools that hurt families and the education prospects, mental health and social wellbeing of a generation of children. While some may argue the review had the great benefit of hindsight, this does not detract from the need to properly assess the performance of government in times of crisis and how things can be done better in future.

The report, Fault Lines: An Independent Review into Australia’s Response to Covid-19, acknowledges the “fog of war” where decisions have to be made in the unknown. It says government responses to any crisis will never be perfect and Australian governments got many of the big calls right. But we also got some consequential calls wrong.

The Shergold report is the first independent review of Australia’s handling of the Covid-19 pandemic. It found that key groups were excluded from financial support, sometimes putting them in danger. Lockdowns and border closures were avoidable and schools should have remained open. The report sounds a warning to governments against the perils of overreach when dealing with future health crises, and it is critical across the board. It says economic support was inequitable. Failing to include a clawback mechanism for businesses supported by JobKeeper was a design fault. It was fiscally irresponsible and unfair when other groups in society were excluded from economic supports. Too many of Australia’s lockdowns and border closures were the result of policy failures in quarantine, contact tracing, testing, disease surveillance and communicating effectively the need for preventive measures such as mask wearing and social distancing.

Professor Shergold found the balance between the costs and benefits of lockdowns swung towards costs long before governments were willing to lift them. The report says it was wrong to close entire school systems, particularly once new information indicated that schools were not high-transmission environments. Stopping aged-care residents from going to hospital when they contracted Covid-19 was a mistake that cost lives. Restrictions on visits to aged-care homes long past the end of the outbreak caused unnecessary pain and distress, as did locking residents out of their home states by arbitrary and inflexible border closures.

Most damning is the finding that there were too many instances in which government regulations and their enforcement went beyond what was required to control the spread of the virus, even when based on the information available at the time. “Such overreach undermined public trust and confidence in the institutions that are vital to effective crisis response,” the report says. “Many Australians came to feel that they were being protected by being policed.”

Rather than apportion blame to individuals, the review panel said its task was to “take a step back to provide an assessment of the bigger picture”. The review had a clear objective: to learn the lessons from the Covid-19 pandemic to be better prepared for future health crises. Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews, who presided over the world’s longest lockdown in Melbourne of 262 days, was honest enough to say in response to the report “there are many things we wish we didn’t do – many decisions we wish we didn’t make”. In contrast, Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk said: “I stand by all the decisions that were made. We made the decisions in the best interest of Queenslanders and it kept Queenslanders safe.” But, as the Shergold report makes clear, these were not always good decisions.

Above all, the report highlights how the pandemic revealed the true power of state governments, and the susceptibility of our federation to disagreement and division. As a former secretary of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet during John Howard’s tenure as prime minister, this would be of little surprise to Professor Shergold. But herein lies the real challenge: to clearly define national cabinet roles and responsibilities in a crisis, to be open and transparent about the modelling and data used in government decision-making, and being able and prepared to share information between jurisdictions. These are lessons that apply to good government and building a better nation well beyond the pandemic.