To the Panel,
First of all, I welcome the fact that an independent inquiry
has been established to review the period of the pandemic, and I assume, the
conduct of all governments state and federal during this time.
As a resident of Melbourne which bore the brunt of the
longest lockdown in the world, I’m aware that our experience was very different
to the rest of the country. Nonetheless, given the extreme restrictions that
were imposed by governments during the pandemic in what was supposed to be solely
for the purpose of protecting the health system, the actions of all require proper
scrutiny from a truly independent body, not some hastily convened
Kangaroo-court with a limited frame of reference like the Victorian Coate
inquiry.
I’ll address some specific matters later in this submission,
but as a general observation, if you take the view that the object of the
pandemic response was to prevent people in Australia from contracting COVID-19
until such time as vaccines could be developed and administered, and that was
pretty much the only thing that mattered in Australian society, then on the metric
of hospitalisations and deaths, you would say Australia handled things fairly
well.
However, to suggest governments should take this approach to
running things is complete nonsense. Even in times of crisis, there are so many
other things that governments need to take account of like children’s
schooling, people’s ability to earn a living, our relations with other
countries, mental health, families who live interstate from each other and not
least, public finances, so that they have the capacity to deliver services to
their constituents in the future.
Therefore, the different premiers standing up day after day
and saying their actions were just determined by the medical advice was an
abnegation of the role they were elected to do. Yes, by all means they should
take account of the medical advice, but their job as elected officials is not
to simply do what a public health officer tells them but to weigh up what they
say as well as all the other things they ought to be considering.
Too often the obsession with eradicating COVID at all costs
(which itself was a ridiculous aim as COVID-averse places like WA, New Zealand and
China are now finding out) led to the sledgehammer approach of repeated
lockdowns, the repercussions of which will be felt for years. Of course, this
is a very polarising issue and there will be many people who agree with the COVID-zero
approach taken. However, that certainly wasn’t the approach taken by most other
developed countries, and after having both (a) observed the effect 291 days of
lockdown had on Melbourne; and (b) recently travelled to the UK and Ireland and
seen how they are managing COVID, I’m certainly not convinced.
Leaving aside however the relative merits of the Australian
approach, I have 3 specific areas of complaint that I would like to highlight
to the panel.
The first concerns the closing of the international border
to outbound travellers. If the whole point of closing the border is to try and
prevent COVID-19 from entering the country, I fail to understand how
someone leaving the country represents a health risk to Australians.
Also, if a citizen has things to attend to overseas and a foreign country is
happy to let them go there, then what business is it of the Australian
government to try and stop them?
The second concerns the lack of a consistent national
approach to the handling of the pandemic and the hi-jacking of the response by
the states, some of which had premiers who cynically exploited the situation
for electoral gain. Of course, the Federal government has a lot of culpability
here. I think it was Winston Churchill who said, “never waste a good crisis”
but this is precisely what they did. When confronted with a virus that isn’t
constrained by either state or international borders, and knowing that federal
money would be needed in order for the states to stay economically afloat, the
federal government missed a golden opportunity to take charge and transfer
power away from what in the modern world is an entirely regressive and more or
less obsolete level of government. By not insisting on a nationally
co-ordinated response in exchange for pandemic relief, the state governments
were free to run amok, gleefully fanning jingoistic state rivalries and
imposing a bunch of entry rules that often were inconsistent and more often,
simply cruel to families separated by arbitrary state borders.
Aside from being unable to visit my elderly mother for the
best part of 2 years, in mid-2021 I experienced first hand the sort of idiocy
that happens when each state makes its own rules. On a rare occasion where
Victoria had shut to parts of Queensland as opposed to the other way around, I
was able to go the Gold Coast for business, but if I set foot in Brisbane, I
would have to quarantine for 2 weeks on my return. However, at the same time,
anyone who lived in Brisbane was able to travel freely to the Gold Coast while
I was there and presumably, infect me with COVID-19. This sort of thing is exactly
why a national approach is needed to pandemics. It would also stop the 2 levels
of government trying to blame each other for things like nursing home deaths,
quarantine facilities and vaccine rollouts because the buck would stop with one
level of government.
The third and final objection relates to the deliberate
actions and stuff ups by state and federal governments during the period of the
pandemic which needlessly prolonged both the pandemic and lockdowns. As you
would be aware, the conditions of lockdown imposed by state governments were
incredibly severe. You could only leave your house for four reasons, and even
then for 2 hours a day (in the case of Victoria you couldn’t even do that after
9pm), and when you did leave you were forbidden from going more than 5 km from home
let alone interstate or overseas.
You couldn’t visit friends or relatives, all the shops and
restaurants were shut, you had to home-school your children, you had to wear a
mask every time you did leave your house, and if you so much as sneezed the
government required you to go queue in a line, sometimes for hours, in order to
get tested.
Therefore, given the extreme measures the government were requiring its citizens to take, surely in return those same citizens were entitled to expect that governments would leave no stone unturned to manage the pandemic properly so that the prison-like restrictions could be removed as soon as possible. But no, instead here are just a few examples of them not doing this:
- In WA, the government allowed weddings to be held in quarantine hotels
- In NSW, after vaccines were available, the government let unvaccinated drivers ferry quarantine travellers to their accommodation, one of whom started a cluster than shut down NSW and Victoria for 4 months last year
- The federal government failed to diversify its vaccine supply, so when the Chief Medical Officer in Queensland went on the television and deliberately destroyed public confidence in the Astra-Zeneca vaccine, the rollout was delayed until such time as further Pfizer vaccines could be sourced – and therefore prolonged the 2021 lockdowns in our 2 biggest states
- In Victoria, the government refused help from the military to run hotel quarantine, and instead engaged a private contracting firm, whose staff both fornicated with quarantine guests and allowed them to leave their rooms at will. When questioned about this at the Coate enquiry, the Chief Medical Officer said he didn’t think it was important that he read the email about who to engage on quarantine, and the premier claimed not to remember who made the decision.
It's simply not good enough, and if God forbid this happens
again, a few things need to change.
We need a thorough review of lockdown measures, and whether
there is a better way to contain the next pandemic which doesn’t involve a
complete shutdown of society.
We need a national approach, as the one adopted last time
led to vastly unfair and inconsistent outcomes depending on where you happen to
live, and viruses don’t tend to pay heed to arbitrary lines on a map.
We need to be better prepared with proper quarantine
facilities, and not use hotels which proved time and again they weren’t fit for
purpose.
And most of all, we need people in charge who know what they
are doing and can manage things properly, not a bunch of provincial politicians
who keep messing things up and seem more interested going on TV for 120 days in
a row to lecture everyone instead of fixing the problem.
I wish you well with the conduct of your inquiry.
