Pandemic overreach finally exposed as a national scandal

Those who were complicit are trying to brush off the findings as the wisdom of hindsight. They must not be allowed to get away with it.

The policies of Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews and Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk were harmful.

For those of us who have railed against pandemic overreach for more than two and a half years – struggling to comprehend the paranoia of politicians, bureaucrats and media, in defiance of the facts – there has been some solace this week. Australia’s great Covid-19 shame has been confirmed by a reputable study.

We have seen police drones spy on backyards, pregnant women arrested in their homes for dissent, Australians barred from returning to their own country, and families and loved ones barred from funerals, weddings and medical help across state borders. We all had our bizarre or traumatic experiences (I was reduced to smuggling a child illegally across a state border) but those of us who retain our sanity are convinced it must never happen again.

Our damaging, cruel and costly pandemic response has been exposed in the first major independent review of the nation’s Covid-19 performance. Those who were complicit in this public policy scandal are trying to brush off the findings as the wisdom of hindsight.

This is disingenuous. They must not be allowed to get away with it because most of the relevant information was available early in the pandemic and experts and commentators were calling out the missteps in real time since early in 2020.

Complicit in this pandemic overreach were both major parties, state and federal levels of ­bureaucracy, medical authorities, unions (especially representing doctors, nurses and teachers), and most of the media. The same people who encouraged and inflicted draconian and unnecessary measures likely will conspire to avoid proper assessments and ­accountability.

To be fair, they will be supported by a huge swathe of the population who either still believe the spin they were fed or are too embarrassed to admit they were caught up in the madness of the crowd. For most of the pandemic, to criticise the government responses was to invite abuse as a “granny killer”.

We need a national royal commission, in conjunction with the states, to ensure the overreach cannot happen again.

Examining the medical advice behind the political decisions will be illuminating. Do not forget that emergency restrictions were still in place nationally until early this month, vaccine mandates remain in place in the most ridiculous instances (such as for emergency service volunteers in the current Victorian floods), state governments retain unfettered powers, and new Covid-19 strains could trigger a relapse from our paranoid premiers anytime. We need to expose the most egregious excesses, examine the medical advice, develop uniform state laws, and arrange a national strategy with greater transparency before we either plunge back into this pandemic or confront a new one.

The Fault Lines report was funded by charitable foundations and conducted by former Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet secretary Peter Shergold; former Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade secretary Peter Varghese; banker, corporate director and former university chancellor Gillian Broadbent; and entrepreneur, medical student and Young Australian of the Year Isobel Marshall. It was thorough, independent, and, if anything, genteel in its analysis.

Yet it made direct findings as obvious and damning as this: “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.” Unsurprisingly, the report found this undermined public trust and confidence.

“The imposition of lockdowns regularly showed overreach, and their implementation lacked consistency, compassion and clarity,” it found. The report also confirmed that “lockdown overreach” was “as much a response to political perceptions of community anxiety as to expert advice”.

Let that sink in. Some people were locked down because politicians thought other people wanted it.

Security guards a closed Bondi Beach Public School a student tested positive in August 2021. Picture: NCA Newswire /Gaye Gerard

The four key findings are; that economic support should have been fairer; lockdowns and border closures were overdone; schools should not have been closed; and the elderly should have been better protected. The review did not delve into questions we might raise now about vaccine mandates and misinformation.

In many respects this review merely scratches the surface, and underlines why a royal commission is required. But it does vindicate the minority of politicians, medical experts and commentators who dared advocate for a different approach from early on.

The false dichotomy between lockdown and “let it rip” is exposed by the data. The performance of Sweden is relevant because it is so often proposed as the polar opposite to our approach – yet it has a significantly lower infection rate so far.

Still, Sweden has a fatality rate that is about three times higher than ours but only about half the rate of many European nations and much lower than Britain and US. Given the northern hemisphere weathered two Covid-19 winters without vaccines, compared to our one, this comparison is instructive; it suggests that a lighter touch would not have increased infections here and might not have increased fatalities over the medium term.

The costs of the Swedish approach were much lower, economically and socially. They never shut their primary schools, and despite this, infections in children “remained low” while few teachers became seriously ill (less than 0.02 per cent) and Swedish children were spared learning losses and mental health issues.

There was no excuse for the closure of Australian schools because medical evidence and expert advice was firmly lined up against it even in the early stages of the pandemic. On television, and in these pages, as early as March 2020, I was quoting expert medical advice to warn against school closures.

A childrens’ playground at Albert Park, roped off as part of Covid restrictions in Melbourne Picture: NCA NewsWire / David Geraghty

“The strident calls have continued for weeks; shut everything down, shut down society, shut down schools, shut down businesses and shut down the economy,” I wrote in these pages. “We have had continued high-level medical advice that schools should be a safe option; a place to keep kids organised and focused, coached on hygiene demands, away from vulnerable people and continuing with their education.”

A few other commentators did the same, but most media was frothing at the mouth and schools were closed at various times in the eastern states.

On my Sky News television program, infectious diseases expert Professor Peter Collignon was a regular, pragmatic voice. In April 2020, he said: “And another serious thing we’ve got to look at is schools, I mean the reality is that children really seem to get this less frequently, this is different to flu where you would close schools, but they get it less frequently and they also have less complications, not that they can’t, but schools are really fundamental, are we going to close them for six months? What we need to do is protect the people at schools who are at risk, which is anybody over the age of 70, I think should not go, and anybody over the age of 50 with heart problems etc shouldn’t be there and could be on office duties or working remotely.”

Yet now we have premiers feigning disinterest in the Fault Lines report, politicians invoking the hindsight excuse and Daniel Andrews using long-suffering Victorians as a human shield. “You do what’s right,” said Andrews, “you follow advice and you do the very best you can and that’s what everyone involved did, including millions of Victorians who went and got vaccinated, stayed at home, went to extraordinary lengths to keep themselves and others safe.”

But their kids never should have been kept from school. That must be on Andrews, and some kids might never recover.

Police at the Queen Victoria Market on September 13, 2020 in Melbourne.

On Thursday when the Fault Lines report was released, I interviewed former deputy national chief medical officer Nick Coatsworth, who was inside the government tent in the first half of 2020. “We should think of it now as a mainstream and consensus view that school closures were wrong,” he said. When I interjected that this must have been known even back in the first six months of the pandemic, he responded; “Yes we did, we knew all that, that was the evidence, and yet contrary policy was implemented, I think it was based on fear, I don’t think it was based on the evidence.”

This should be a national scandal. Our political leaders knew there was no reason to close schools, yet they did. The then PM Scott Morrison was urging them not to, but regardless, state governments denied children access to education and socialisation.

The most privileged coped well, with online learning at home. The most disadvantaged kids felt the brunt.

The Fault Lines report spells out the political imperatives at play. “Politics weakened the national cabinet’s effectiveness over time,” it said. “State leaders insisted on going their own way … Tough action on Covid-19, including the decision to close schools, was judged politically popular by many state leaders.”

This is damning stuff, it vindicates many critics but exposes deep flaws in our political system and our society. Politicians judged their nanny state interventions as being popular because they were – our claims to being a resilient and self-reliant mob were trashed.

The report says we need more transparency and “checks and balances” in pandemic responses to prevent ministers and chief health officers imposing draconian restrictions without reference to cabinets or parliaments. “We cannot face the next pandemic with the same unfettered powers.”

The most bracing aspect of this pandemic review is not that it has revealed all our flaws via the rear-view mirror.

What is truly frightening is that all this was so obvious, even articulated by some, early in the pandemic. But our political, bureaucratic and media class careered on with a hysterical, illiberal, harmful and unnecessary response all the same.