Half-baked Covid-19 inquiry will only deliver half-baked answers

Anti-lockdown protesters at Melbourne's Queen Victoria Market in 2020. Picture: AFP

How do you learn the lessons of Australia’s response to the coronavirus pandemic without examining its most glaring mistakes?

That is exactly what the government is trying to do in announcing a national inquiry into the government’s response to the pandemic while excluding the decisions by the states including lockdowns and border closures.

So for example, there will be no questions asked about the pros and cons of why Victorian Premier Dan Andrews locked Melbourne down for 262 days, a record which made headlines around the world?

There will be no questions about whether any lessons can be learned from harsh policies like closing children’s playgrounds or imposing street curfews or sudden and inflexible border closures?

The exclusion of states in the inquiry seems to be an attempt to ensure Anthony Albanese’s aim of making the inquiry a “positive” experience so “the process of learning from the pandemic is constructive, rather than destructive”.

“We need to make sure that this is forward focused and [we] consider all of the Commonwealth responses to the pandemic.”

While a bitter witch hunt about the worst excesses of the pandemic are in no-one’s interest, at the same time the pandemics and the associated lockdowns were a brutal experience for many imposing tolls on jobs, mental health and children’s education. These are not issues that should be swept under the carpet in this review.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, makes an announcement at the Royal Exhibition Building, with Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Nicki Connolly

Even Victoria’s former chief health officer professor Brett Sutton, who was the architect of Victoria’s record lockdowns, says it would be “totally appropriate” for the inquiry to prove if lockdowns were worthwhile

“I would be disappointed if we didn’t go to those really important issues … there shouldn’t be shyness about asking the tough questions for those things that were most disruptive,” Sutton says.

In the case of Victoria, it certainly seems that federal Labor has handed Labor premier Dan Andrews a get-out-of-jail free card for excluding the states from scrutiny.

The Victorian Labor leader has, by some distance, the worst record of any state premier in handling Covid. Under his watch Victoria had not only the longest lockdowns but also the harshest. Andrews also presided over the 2020 hotel quarantine bungle that killed 768 mostly elderly people with no clear resolution as to who was responsible. Yet all of this pain delivered no advantage. More people died from Covid in Victoria than anywhere else in the country, including its larger neighbour NSW.

Francis Park in the Blacktown City Council, in Sydney's west, has closed playgrounds and exercise equipment in parks on the recommendation of the NSW Police. Picture: NCA NewsWire/Jeremy Piper

The extent of the pandemic overreach in Victoria is still seen in distressing statistics about the lockdowns on children’s education and mental health and on small businesses.

An independent review of Australia’s response to the pandemic led by top public servant Peter Shergold criticised the overuse of “brutal” lockdowns, the unjustified closure of schools

and inadequate protection of aged care residents.

That isn’t to say there wasn’t a place for lockdowns, particularly early in the pandemic. But their ongoing use in 2021, raises serious questions of state government overreach. How can we learn these lessons from these issues if we don’t look.

By excluding the states, the government has given us a half-baked inquiry which can only give half-baked answers.