Australia’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic is envied globally. Heralded as a model for other liberal democracies, Australia’s excess mortality since the start of the pandemic is the world’s lowest. They say it is hard to argue with success, but that is exactly what I will be doing. Behind the headline figures, policy failures are becoming hard to ignore. Thousands of Australians remain stranded overseas, with the government now threatening those attempting to return from India with imprisonment. The botched vaccination campaign could leave borders closed for years. And state governments frequently lock down capital cities and close state borders to manage small outbreaks. With few exceptions, when Australian governments attempted sophisticated policy responses, they fumbled. Border closures and lockdowns – crude and socially harmful interventions, meant as stopgap emergency measures – remain Australia’s primary pandemic response tools, 14 months on. In covering these problems, the media has focused on the Morrison government’s (in)actions, and on the blame game between state and federal governments. Leaders’ decisions clearly matter, but Australia’s problems run deeper. Policy impotence is the result of a decades-long shift from top-down “government” to diffuse and fragmented “governance”. Successive economic and governance reforms have drastically weakened the Australian state’s capacity to directly address serious problems, even in an emergency. Australia came out of World War II with a powerful command-and-control state, used to manage the national economy and deliver an increasing range of social services. As Australia’s post-war boom ended in the 1970s, political elites from both major parties and senior bureaucrats concurred that Australia’s uncompetitive economy was caused by an “overloaded state”, too responsive to popular demands, especially from workers. The obvious remedy was to reduce expectations of the state, including by limiting the public’s capacity to influence policy. Reform began in 1983, proceeding over the following decades under both Labor and coalition governments. The goals of monetary policy shifted from promoting full employment to inflation-targeting, enabled by central bank independence. Many public functions were outsourced. Consultants acquired a central policymaking role. State-owned companies were privatised, while the delivery of social services, like health and education, was marketised. Using its overwhelming fiscal dominance, the federal government forced similar transformations on states. From 2011, as the commonwealth sought to “repair” its budget deficit, it shifted adjustment costs to the states. Stranded Indian-Australians feel ‘betrayed, abandoned’ by travel ban The post-war command-and-control state was gone, along with the capacity it afforded for direct and purpose-driven action. In its place stood a fragmented array of quasi-independent agencies, loosely coordinated by the government. Gone too were clear lines of responsibility and accountability. The state was made less popularly responsive, but at a steep cost, as the pandemic showed. Australia had ostensibly been preparing for a pandemic for years, but impressive-looking plans hid the absence of actual capacity. States were given no dedicated funding to support implementation. Choking under austerity, most states progressively eroded their public-health and rapid-response capabilities in the 2010s. No national pandemic “war game” took place after 2008. The National Medical Stockpile, meant to maintain essential supplies for emergencies, stocked only A$10.76 million (US$8.3 million) of personal protective equipment. By contrast, over A$3.23 billion (US$2.5 billion) was spent in two months from March 2020. Consequently, Australia faced serious shortages for weeks after the pandemic struck. Amid China warnings, Australia to spend US$581 million on military Despite these weaknesses, Australia managed to eliminate community transmission of the coronavirus in the pandemic’s early months by severely restricting international arrivals , locking out thousands of Australians abroad, and implementing a national lockdown. Neither policy was part of Australia’s pandemic plan. Subsequent efforts to advance beyond border closures and lockdowns have failed due to weak state capacity. The hotel quarantine system, Australia’s first line of defence, is an example. In Victoria, an emaciated bureaucracy hired consultants to coordinate the Covid-19 response. The lines of control over Victoria’s hotel quarantine system were so blurred that even the premier and health minister could not say who approved hiring private security for hotels. The system’s failure caused Australia’s worst outbreak, locking down Melbourne for 112 days. But Australia’s hotel quarantine system remains fragmented and faulty. There are no national standards and states have to fend for themselves. Although international arrivals are kept low, there have been 16 leaks in Covid-19 cases from hotel quarantine since November. State governments’ lack of confidence in their own contact-tracing capacities has meant they frequently impose citywide lockdowns to manage these leaks. Despite these lockdowns’ social and economic cost, the federal government has failed to develop, let alone implement, a national quarantine plan. Likewise, Australia’s vaccination programme, the key to borders opening up, has been undermined by opaque and lucrative contracts with private logistics companies. These contractors failed to deliver promised vaccines to doctors, causing confusion and delays. By the end of March, Australia had managed only 600,000 of the promised 4 million jabs. Targets have since been scrapped completely. To address weak state capacity, governments have repeatedly used the military and police forces to carry out civilian duties, like contact-tracing. A naval officer was put in charge of Australia’s revamped vaccination campaign. As command-and-control organisations, they are more amenable to top-down direction, but this is clearly no panacea. Australia’s hubris is undeserved, as policy and governance failures abound. The pandemic’s lessons are clear: we must relearn to govern. A real crisis shows that well-resourced public agencies, responsive to governments with democratic mandates are indispensable. Shahar Hameiri is associate professor of international politics, University of Queensland. He is working with Dr Tom Chodor on a project investigating Australia’s response to Covid-19