Scott Morrison is right: Any COVID inquiry that doesn’t look at state issues is meaningless

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has announced a year-long inquiry into our response to the COVID-19 pandemic, although it won’t be a royal commission. It will call on state premiers to give evidence about “how they worked together”, but will not have the scope to investigate any of the major decisions they took individually.

This, apparently, is a “deep” inquiry, per Health Minister Mark Butler. Former prime minister Scott Morrison told The Australian Financial Review he would cooperate only if the inquiry looked at state and federal leaders.

“Any serious retrospective inquiry that seeks to go back over this ground would be obsolete if it did not require equal attention and involvement of all state and territory governments who shared in Australia’s response to this one-in-a-100-year event,” he said.

It’s rare you compose a straight, declarative sentence that you’re fairly sure has never been published in the history of your publication, but here goes: Scott Morrison is absolutely right.

Those surreal early years of the COVID-19 pandemic are not so distant that we have forgotten the unprecedented heights of power and prominence to which it hoisted state premiers. They made hugely consequential individual decisions regarding the management of the pandemic. This happens to be particularly true in states held by Labor.

The current model would have us believe the following is worth no further scrutiny.

Victoria

Failures in the management of Victoria’s hotel quarantine program led to 99% of the infections in the state’s devastating second wave in early 2020, according to the Coate report. There were 18,000 infections and 768 deaths, many of them of a nature — alone, separated from loved ones — that is impossible to truly contemplate.

The Coate report found no adequate accountability in this process. No-one, to pick one example, from Premier Daniel Andrews down, could recall deciding to spend millions on the private security that led to so many avoidable infections.

Additionally, the scope of the inquiry will mean there is no further scrutiny of the decision-making that led to the sudden mid-year lockdown of public housing towers in Flemington and North Melbourne, when busloads of police showed up to surround the homes of largely migrant and working-class people.

The Victorian ombudsman found this was “not based on direct health advice and violated Victorian human rights laws”, and in May this year, the Victorian government settled a class action from those affected.

Nor will the inquiry look at the raiding of a pregnant Ballarat woman’s home and her handcuffing over a Facebook post.

Between March 2020 and October 2021, Melbourne spent a total of 262 days in lockdown, across six stints.

Queensland

“I do not want under-40s to get AstraZeneca,” Queensland’s then-chief health officer Jeannette Young told a press conference in June 2021. “I don’t want an 18-year-old in Queensland dying from a clotting illness.”

A slickly produced video clipping up Young’s statements was posted on Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk’s Facebook and Instagram accounts, complete with subtitles in case you were scrolling past on mute.

“Even the UK government won’t allow their under-40s to get the AstraZeneca vaccine. This is not the time to risk the safety of our young Australians,” the video was captioned.

Anti-vaxxers, in a move you could see coming from space, jumped on the news.

Under Palaszczuk’s oversight, Queensland consistently had the highest vaccine hesitancy in the country. This was not helped by her own delay in accepting a shot of AstraZeneca. The messaging from Young remained the same in August, even while children under 10 were being taken to hospital with infections.

It might be worthwhile interrogating whether there was any political calculus involved in Palaszczuk’s decision to highlight these comments, damaging as they were to then-prime minister Scott Morrison’s attempts to get his sputtering vaccine rollout back on track, and whether there was any assessment made of the risks in encouraging vaccine hesitancy.

Further, no-one has ever taken responsibility for health officials incorrectly blaming a young man for spreading COVID in March 2021.

The rest

It is not merely partisan. Any serious accounting of how COVID was managed and what can be learnt for future pandemics needs to look at, for example, how New South Wales went from a “gold standard” to being seemingly unprepared for a savage outbreak of the Delta variant in the space of one month in mid-2021.

On account of what looks like a concerted effort to protect Labor premiers from any more embarrassing revelations, while grubbily inflicting more pain on Scott Morrison — now a backbencher, most likely soon to be gone from Parliament altogether, and not exactly short of political pain and embarrassment in the last year — we are denied that.

What have we missed? Let us know any other major state decision that a meaningful inquiry should look into by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.