Coronavirus: We’ve made mistakes, but it might have been worse

State governments defying foolhardy demands by the commonwealth have spared a much bigger disaster.

Illustration: Tom Jellett

Naturally the thoughts of all Australians go out to our fellow countrymen and women enduring stage-four lockdown in Victoria. The spread of the virus there is alarming. The toll of the lockdown on people’s mental health must be significant. The economic impact is disastrous.

While many who are simply trying to cope with the situation are supportive of the efforts of the state government, others are highly critical of Premier Daniel Andrews. Failures of hotel quarantine seemingly caused this second wave, and structural problems in Victorian health have meant that the contact tracing system has been second rate. At first glance these are state government let-downs. But the situation isn’t that simple.

I have written before about the culpability of the commonwealth in these failures, even if the state government has mismanaged its affairs. Quarantining is explicitly defined as a commonwealth power according to section 51 (ix) of the Constitution. The fact it has become a shared responsibility between tiers of government doesn’t change that.

The bottom line is the commonwealth has the power to run quarantining but allowed states to do it in the name of pragmatism. Attempts to thereafter lambaste Victoria for using security guards ignores three things: the commonwealth had the power to insist on a different approach and didn’t; the notice period the Victorian government was given to facilitate large-scale hotel quarantining was minimal; and security guards did the same work in Western Australia, where no such failures eventuated. So yes, the Victorian government wears the blame for the hotel quarantine mistakes, but context matters.

And while Victoria’s health structures have contributed to inadequate contact tracing, so have the deficiencies with the COVIDSafe app. That was a commonwealth initiative, one we initially were told was “vital” to containing any potential second wave.

Yet long before hotel quarantine failures pushed Melbourne to the brink, the COVIDSafe app was revealed to be an underwhelming tool — and an expensive one at that, riddled with glitches that still haven’t been fixed.

So it is clear that both the Victorian and commonwealth governments have let their citizens down when it comes to containing this pandemic. Blaming one and not the other is selective. We can conclude that at the same time as recognising that things could be much worse, and the credit for the situation not being worse must go to our politicians.

For example, we could have failed to contain the first wave of the virus, like most European nations, putting pressure on our health system before it was adequately ready to respond. The time Australia bought for itself, courtesy of bettering most of the rest of the world in responding to the first wave, saved lives — there is no doubt about that.

Or we could be in the situation the US is in, never having seriously embraced the need to lock down the country to suppress or eliminate the virus. Under President Donald Trump too many Americans have died from COVID-19 and many more inevitably will. Equally, the impact of the way the health side of the crisis has been mismanaged over there has decimated the US economy. A more than 30 per cent collapse in gross domestic product is truly staggering.

But Australians also need to accept that our leaders haven’t managed the crisis as well as, for example, somewhere like New Zealand has. Jacinda Ardern’s approach aimed for elimination, and it worked. Scott Morrison’s suppression strategy had a different goal. Claims the NZ economy was dealt an unnecessary body blow to achieve such a feat now seem silly. Trying to repair an economy constantly gyrating between lockdowns and lifting restrictions is proving even more damaging.

Of course the risk is always there for NZ that the virus returns, and our Kiwi neighbours didn’t face the same degree of difficulty that we did: theirs is a smaller, more isolated population, with fewer international arrivals.

Also NZ’s unitary political system empowered Ardern in a way Morrison can only dream. Our Prime Minister may have a penchant for cancelling parliament in favour of executive government, but he can’t get around the states’ service delivery powers.

Yet Australia’s federation may have saved parts of the country from enduring what Victorians are now going through, because of state governments defying what in hindsight were foolhardy demands by the commonwealth they lift border restrictions.

If Australia’s political system matched New Zealand’s unitary structure, the federal government could have done what it liked on this score. Where would we be then? Most likely the second wave currently contained to Victoria would be a national disaster, with the assistance other states are providing Victoria drying up as each jurisdiction looked after itself. This would have stretched resources in a way that would have increased death rates and reduced the capacity of contact tracing, just for starters. Then we have to consider how much worse the economic fallout would be. Sliding doors.

Western Australia and Tasmania maintained hard border closures when the federal government demanded they open up. WA Premier Mark McGowan was prepared to stare down a High Court challenge supported by the commonwealth. Morrison has since backflipped and withdrawn his government’s support for Clive Palmer’s challenge.

Queensland delayed opening its borders (which now are closed again) despite pressure from Morrison and his ministers. After eventually giving in to the political pressure and opening up, Queensland has been rewarded with a renewed risk of community transmissions precisely because of the brief period of free movement the feds insisted on. South Australia is in a similar boat.

NSW never closed its borders the way other states did, because Premier Gladys Berejiklian is close to Morrison and preferred not to defy him.

The reward for people living in NSW? Australia’s largest state is now the one most at risk from the outbreak in Victoria. Forced to consider lockdowns and endure other states shutting themselves off from NSW because it was too slow to act.

Peter van Onselen is the political editor at the Ten Network and a professor of politics and public policy at the University of Western Australia and Griffith University.