No, Minister: Covid inquiry is base politics at its worst

Anthony Albanese’s Covid inquiry could be an episode from Yes Minister. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Brenton Edwards

Anthony Albanese must be a fan of the British satirical series Yes Minister, because his public inquiry into Covid is torn from the series script.

In one episode Sir Humphrey told the minister: “A basic rule of government is never look into anything you don’t have to, and never set up an inquiry unless you know in advance what its findings will be.”

The PM has waited till nearly half way into his first term before bothering to even announce the inquiry, and that’s before you consider how limited its terms of reference are and how powerless it is. By not setting up a royal commission, as promised, Labor isn’t taking the investigation into the pandemic seriously.

The federal government has limited the terms of its Covid inquiry to explicitly rule out investigating any decisions state governments took during the pandemic. We all lived through the pandemic, watching first-hand how powerful and important the states were as pandemic decisions were made.

The terms of reference in Albo’s limp inquiry spell out that “actions taken unilaterally by state and territory governments” won’t be looked into and won’t be evaluated. To so explicitly ensure a cover up of state actions and responsibilities is appalling.

As former Deputy Chief Medical Officer Nick Coatsworth said yesterday: “That’s pretty much everything they did”.

The pandemic hit home the constitutional reality that states within our federation have enormous powers. They for the most part acted unilaterally and ignored the Commonwealth government when doing so. Those decisions taken should be investigated. To exclude their independent policy making decisions is nothing short of farcical.

There are only two options explaining why the Labor government set the inquiry up in this manner. It deliberately wants to hide from view any analysis of state decisions taken, or it is so incompetent that it didn’t understand the ramifications of limiting the inquiry terms of reference. In other words that are either sneaky or stupid, not a great choice. There is no third option.

As an insurance policy to ensure the Yes Minister script is followed to the letter, one of the three panellists doing the inquiry is a former senior Labor staffer for one of Albo’s left wing factional mates he shared the cabinet table with when Labor was last in office. At the very least that is a perception problem.

The stitch up mirroring British satire would be funny if it wasn’t such a serious abrogation of responsibility. The cost and impact of the pandemic was unprecedented. To hold royal commissions into all manner of other topics, allowing broad terms of reference to facilitate open inquiry, but not when it comes to the pandemic is one of the worst lapses of Judgement I’ve seen. It is also a concerning eye opener into this government’s desire to control and limit what the public gets access to.

The consequences of limiting the inquiry will result in a less than fulsome investigation into what went right and what when wrong during the pandemic, meaning the lessons we learn will also be limited, stifling our ability to do better next time. All because this government wants to control the narrative and limit potentially damaging findings for state Labor mates.

It is base politics at its worst.

Peter van Onselen is a professor of politics and public policy at The University of Western Australia and Griffith University