States did not always manage their responsibilities well either. To date, the Australian Government’s response has been characterised by poor preparation, a refusal to take responsibility and provide national leadership-including in areas of clear Commonwealth constitutional responsibility-a failure to learn lessons as the pandemic progressed, and significant failures of implementation with, at times, catastrophic consequences The Senate Select Committee on COVID-19, where the Government was in a minority, concluded: Widely publicised delays in the rollout produced Australia’s 2021 word of the year: ‘strollout’. The ‘incompetent management of the federal government’s responsibilities during the pandemic’ was identified by Labor’s National Secretary as the second of eight reasons why the Coalition lost the 2022 election. It was described as a ‘phenomenal failure in public administration’ and ‘the worst national public policy failure in modern Australian history’. The vaccine rollout was an area of clear Commonwealth Government responsibility. Infections in the 2020 waves in Victoria were substantially higher in more disadvantaged postcodes. On an age-standardised basis there was 2.6 times the number of deaths in poorer areas compared to wealthier ones. There were over 140 deaths per 100,000 population in the poorest socio-economic quintile compared to about 40 in the wealthiest quintile. Importantly, the impact of the pandemic was experienced unevenly, both economically and in terms of health effects, with poorer people-particularly women-faring worse. About 18,000 deaths were averted by the actions of state and federal governments, supported by the Australian public, which endured lockdowns and border controls. The comparatively low number of deaths is a result of public health measures-especially ‘lockdowns’ and movement restrictions implemented differentially across the country -which suppressed infection rates in the first two years of the pandemic when the COVID-19 strains were more virulent. Most deaths occurred in 2022 following the progressive lifting of restrictions after the release of the National Plan. However, multifactor standardisation reveals Australia’s overall comparative performance against international peers was not so strong. Overall, the outcomes of COVID-19 in Australia have been good, with just over 5 million cases and about 8000 deaths at the time of writing (June 2022), with deaths in the low range internationally (see Table 1). It focuses on the public health response: the Morrison government’s economic response to the pandemic, including its JobKeeper program designed to protect incomes and mitigate the pandemic’s impact on some industries, is discussed elsewhere. It identifies the manifold shortcomings and suggests directions for addressing those weaknesses. This paper presents the first comprehensive review of the management of the pandemic at the national level in Australia. It uses documentary analysis to identify key decisions of policy makers and contemporary accounts of policy processes to assess the effectiveness of the management of the first two and a half years of the pandemic. This paper discusses how the Morrison government managed its health sector-related COVID-19 responsibilities. For most of its term Australian politics was dominated by the response to the SARS-CoV-2 virus which causes COVID-19. The re-election of the Liberal-National Coalition government, led by Scott Morrison, was a surprise outcome of Australia’s election. Australia is a federation and so all governments had a role in fighting the pandemic. Australia’s management of the COVID-19 pandemic has attracted praise, but external observers often erroneously attribute this to the actions of the Commonwealth (national) government alone.
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