Mark Kenny | Anthony Albanese's COVID inquiry avoids key areas where lesson will could be learned

State governments which enacted the most severe and contested pandemic restrictions - stay-at-home orders, business closures and mask mandates - breathed a sigh of relief yesterday as the Albanese government's promise of a "royal commission or some form of inquiry" emerged mainly as the latter, "some form of inquiry".

That "form", ironically, exhibits the jurisdictional borders and political hypersensitivities which dictated Australia's patchy state-by-state approach through the darkest months and years of the COVID-19 crisis.

Anthony Albanese says a full-throated royal commission was unsuited because they tend to be led by senior judges who understand the law but lack the public administration, economic management and epidemiology expertise that the chosen panel will bring to bear.

READ MORE:

Beyond doubling as a neat summation of the Morrison government's instincts in 2020, which demonstrably lacked imagination (ie it had to be brow-beaten in income subsidies and increased dole payments) the Prime Minister's rationale is pretty thin.

Judges understand the law it is true, but primarily, they understand evidence, how it is gathered and how it is weighed. There is no reason why the panel members named could not have undertaken their inquiry as a royal commission nor for that matter why they could not have acted as senior assistants to a retired judge in that capacity. The exhaustive robodebt royal commission for instance, was about laws but it was also about policy, people, power and politics.

Assessing the varying COVID-19 state responses without examining the advice open to their governments when suspending freedoms, and without assessing the wisdom of those decisions in their public health/public administration dimensions, will inevitably leave central aspects unstudied, unexamined.

Equally inevitably, it will lead to reduced public confidence in the whole COVID-19 review exercise.

"If we don't learn the lessons of what happened during the course of COVID, good and bad, by every level of government, how do we expect to go into the next pandemic understanding what had happened in the previous one?" Peter Dutton said.

The outbreak of COVID-19 in early 2020 upended so much of normal life and saw momentous decisions made on the fly - many based on fragmentary information. Fear was rational given the carnage in northern Italy, Britain, the US and elsewhere. With the luxury of hindsight, it is possible - even likely - that many measures will appear as overreactions, or as simply wrongheaded. That's an understandable concern for states.

But protecting decision-makers pales into insignificance against the need to learn as many details as possible about what happened, when and why.

Our journalists work hard to provide local, up-to-date news to the community. This is how you can continue to access our trusted content: