Ah, memories. I’d forgotten how disastrous the federal government’s response was to the COVID pandemic. But watching this week’s Four Corner’s “Profiting from the pandemic” brought it all back. Along with the nagging question that’s never been satisfactorily answered: how could the Morrison government — or any government — make the same mistakes over and over again?
A litany of catastrophic errors
Remember early on when we didn’t have enough personal protective equipment for health and aged care workers — forget about citizens — because the federal government had failed to ensure the national medical stockpile was resourced to handle the global pandemic?
This was followed by outbreaks in aged care that — despite those in living facilities overseas — seemed to have caught the government off guard. Not just initially when the first outbreaks appeared in residential care homes in NSW, but months later when, after an initial round of COVID-zero backslapping, more than a dozen Victorian facilities were struck as part of Victoria’s second wave.
Then there was the multimillion-dollar COVIDSafe app that never worked as promised and was abandoned after failing to trace and track the Christmas 2020 outbreaks.
How about the government’s decision to haggle over price rather than order enough MRNA vaccines to cover the population if the cheaper vaccines they were counting on failed to materialise or proved riskier and less effective than hoped?
What about the crashing website and phone lines at GPs’ offices when, still low on supply and unable to confirm orders, the government announced old and vulnerable Australians could book in for their shots? And the repeat of the same logistical problems months later when after the right vaccines finally arrived the government still couldn’t manage to distribute them until — in the face of public outrage — the military was given the job.
Oh, and let’s not forget the refusal to invest in proper quarantine facilities, ensuring that COVID continued to escape hotel quarantine into communities that — thanks to this and the delay of safe and effective quarantine — perpetuated the lockdown of huge numbers of Australians with all the attendant economic, marital, mental health and educational costs.
And then, at the end of two of the most terrible years most of us have ever endured, the pièce de résistance. The Morrison government’s failure to listen to multiple warnings from the Australian Medical Association, aged care providers, truck drivers and the Productivity Commission that we needed to ensure we had an adequate supply of rapid antigen tests before opening up.
Beggaring belief
While this startling array of deadly and damaging bungles and missteps has been noticed and criticised by academic and media commentators, and the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety, it has never been satisfactorily explained.
How could a government that had been in power for seven years have been so unprepared for a public health emergency that it had known was a possibility for years, and so flat-footed and incompetent at managing it once it had arrived? In particular, why did it seem so unable to learn from its own mistakes, even as the same ones kept accumulating and members of the pro-Coalition cheer squad at the Murdoch press, including Janet Albrechtsen and Miranda Divine, began raising concerns?
Here’s a theory. Maybe it’s the Coalition’s style of governance that’s at fault. A style that has led to a hollowing out of the public service that, even had it wanted to fix things (and we have no evidence it did), was impossible to remedy overnight. A style of governing that continues to this day and relies entirely for its planning and ideas and implementation on consultancy and business mates knocking on the doors of key ministers to alert them to a (real or imagined) problem and simultaneously provide the solution, which can of course be purchased from them in exchange for a generous dollop of taxpayer dollars.
Indeed, the one limited success of which the government can boast is that when this system did work, when Aspen Medical, an Australian company with broad and deep connections to the Liberal Party, was able to provide masks and walked through the door to offer its services, it obtained the work without tender and averted the worst of the crisis that struck health workforces overseas.
But in all other instances this consultant-led approach to governing was a disaster for managing the crisis. Why? Because it’s self-serving and entirely reactive. And while it might be feasible in a business-as-usual environment to passively wait for a Coalition-friendly rent-seeker to walk through a minister’s door and explain what’s coming and how the consultant can help, in crises that are unprecedented it will never work.
This is because rent-seeking business mates won’t know what the future holds, and won’t have built or even pivoted their current business to profit from it — which means all the door-knocking falls silent.
This is where the public service should step in to provide analysis and solutions geared towards public, instead of private, interests. But during COVID, this never appeared to happen. Perhaps because of the Coalition’s refusal to stop governing in the quid pro quo fashion that required every policy to benefit itself or its mates politically or financially. Or because the public service, having been demoted to implementation coordinators and deskilled so profoundly it sometimes can’t even manage that, was no longer fit for this purpose. Or both.
If this business mates-led theory of governance is correct — and I’d welcome input and examples and counterexamples to supplement my thinking — the implication for the election is clear.
We live in unstable and uncertain times. In the coming years, the crises we can’t anticipate may outnumber the significant ones we know are coming — and as COVID showed, the importance of government when the world turns upside down cannot be understated.
We need one that is committed to governing with integrity, and has a philosophy and workforce and systems in place to ensure the interests of the public are top of mind.
