Opinion | Australia’s Covid-19 lesson: time to relearn how to govern

Successive economic and governance reforms have drastically weakened the Australian state’s capacity to directly address serious problems, even in an emergency

Reading Time:3 minutes

Surfers walk past a billboard urging people to stay at home, in Sydney on December 19, 2020. Photo: EPA-EFE

Published: 9:15am, 7 May 2021Updated: 11:36am, 7 May 2021

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.