Significant shortcomings in the COVID-19 Response Inquiry, published by the Australian Government in October, are outlined below by a senior health policy expert, Professor Stephen Duckett AM.
“The absence of any political analysis of the management of the pandemic weakens the relevance of its conclusions and means that its recommendations do not fully address the underlying problems,” he writes.
Stephen Duckett writes:
The national report on Australia’s COVID response is long, at 877 pages (depending upon the format), with 4,647 footnotes. But long is not synonymous with comprehensive, and there are significant gaps in the report’s analysis and conclusions.
Some of these problems are not of the panel’s making, I suspect, but others, related both to methodology and findings, are.
There appears to be an over-reliance on people’s perception now of what they thought then, without looking at what people actually said back then. The report conveys the impression that trust was an issue in 2021 and beyond. Yet opinion polls at that time showed that the public was generally satisfied with governments’ handling of the pandemic.
However, satisfaction with the Commonwealth Government’s handling declined in mid-2021, associated with its vaccine rollout failures in the first part of that year. This nuanced public perception is glossed over in favour of a simple narrative of declining trust in government.
The report panel was established as a Commonwealth inquiry, not a joint state and Commonwealth one despite the significance of state roles in managing the first years of the pandemic. In the report there are many references to ‘government’, and almost all of these refer to the Commonwealth government alone, as if state governments were irrelevant.
But the main problem seems to stem from the panel following their mothers’ advice – if you can’t say anything nice about someone, don’t say anything at all. This niceness leads to the panel’s saying nothing about the politics of the pandemic, and this led to misdiagnosing the causal problems.
Although there is nothing wrong with the conclusions and recommendations of the report per se, they are incomplete and do not address the critical problems of the management of the first couple of years of the pandemic.
The recommendations of the report quite appropriately emphasise transparency and consistency of messaging and propose a bureaucratic solution – the establishment of an Australian Centre for Disease Control – an initiative that virtually no one opposes.
Silences
The big gap in the report is it ignores what was in plain sight during those difficult first years.
There is no real discussion in the report about the fact that the Commonwealth and state governments were often at loggerheads, pursuing completely different policies about pandemic management, especially in the second year. Commonwealth ministers were regularly in the media attacking and trying to undermine state government policies.
Although transparency – a key theme in the report – might help, there were very different ideological positions at play here, with the Commonwealth emphasising the importance of opening up quickly, regardless of the impact on infection spread, and doing everything it could to undermine state public health protections.
In the post-vaccine Omicron era, the virus was regularly dismissed as mild, ignoring the consequences of long COVID, which were by then well known.
In addition to the government brouhaha, we had the Murdoch media running interference, peddling misinformation and again undermining the decisions of state governments, especially the Victorian Government.
Technocratic solutions, such as more transparency, may help here, but in the face of these vicious campaigns – both by the media and the Commonwealth Government – it is unlikely that more transparency would win the day in terms of enhancing consistency of messaging and building community trust.
I’m not sure what recommendations I might have made if I were a member of the panel about how to address the spread of misinformation and the war between the Commonwealth and state governments.
Perhaps if there were an independent chair of the so-called National Cabinet, and more transparency about its decisions and their evidence base, then this might have ensured better consistency of messaging.
But the plan to open up provides the counter example: the plan was very clear but nevertheless it was undermined and misrepresented within minutes of its being released by the very people who had proposed it, namely the Commonwealth Government.
The absence of any political analysis of the management of the pandemic weakens the relevance of its conclusions and means that its recommendations do not fully address the underlying problems.
So, the challenge for those of us interested in public health and public policy is to hope that the bureaucratic solutions that have been proposed may help to constrain the idiocies that we saw in the first years of the pandemic.
We can only hope that an Australian Centre for Disease Control, producing agreed, independent, evidence-based information, may help to constrain the antics of the deniers, so that in the next pandemic, governments might work together for the common good and the legacy media will find it harder to produce misinformation of the kind that it created and peddled in 2020 and 2021.
• Stephen Duckett AM is Honorary Enterprise Professor, School of Population and Global Health, Department of General Practice and Primary Care, and Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic & Social Research, at The University of Melbourne.
Previous articles at Croakey
Pandemic planning and responses must address equity concerns: national inquiry, by Melissa Sweet and Alison Barrett
COVID inquiry produces a long to-do list for Centre for Disease Control, by Melissa Sweet and Alison Barrett
As national COVID inquiry wraps up, experts call for action on Centre for Disease Control, and air quality in schools, by Geoff Hanmer
Commentary on gaps in the inquiry was also included in this column, ICYMI: Medicare Champions, COVID gaps, First Nations health – and events not to miss
See Croakey’s archive of articles on COVID
