A coalition of the forgetful

The political class has remained silent on almost every substantial public policy question arising from 36 months of hell. By Nick Cater.

If anything is worthy of a royal commission or three, it is the half-a-trillion-dollar fiscal adventure prompted by the threat of a pandemic. On the eve of the 2019 election, Treasury predicted net debt would peak at $374bn that year before gently receding. This year, Treasury’s pre-election update forecast net debt would be more than double that by 2026 at $864bn or 33 per cent of gross domestic product.

Eye-watering national debt is just the start of it. The spending was largely dictated by the radical public health decisions of state governments for which Canberra picked up the cheque. Indefinite periods of emergency rule, suspension of parliaments, arbitrary business closures, banning of free movement, citizens indefinitely exiled, medical intrusion, paramilitary policing and numerous other gross state incursions into our lives should be exposed to scrutiny. Let’s give those in charge the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps every arm of government from the Department of Health to Victoria Police managed everything perfectly every minute of every day. Or perhaps we have just experienced the greatest public policy fiasco of our lifetimes.

Wherever we land on the scale between administrative perfection and a total debacle, a healthy liberal democracy would be hungry to learn lessons. Yet curiosity appears to be one of Covid-19’s chief casualties. The agitators on Twitter and the commentariat that amplifies their grievances are silent on almost every substantial public policy question arising from 36 months of hell. The political class has been struck by a collective amnesia as blue, red, green and teal unite in a coalition of the forgetful, determined to leave every stone unturned and every line of inquiry untapped.

Last week, Health Minister Mark Butler ordered a snap inquiry into vaccine procurement arrangements. It might be more useful to examine the usefulness of the vaccines themselves since they have failed to stop transmission, whatever else they might do.

This time last year the nation was being told to get vaccinated, not just to protect ourselves but those around us. The ABC’s guru on everything, Norman Swan, went to air in early September with the news that the vaccine offered 35-50 per cent protection against infection. There was “clear evidence” vaccinated people “are much less likely to be infected”, said Swan in response to a question from a listener named Sarah. “If you’re much less likely to be infected, you’re less likely to pass it on to other people … by adding vaccine to lockdown, then you are protecting children because fewer children will be being infected. Hopefully, Sarah, I’ve convinced you.”

Over the next few months, all but a handful of refuseniks rolled up their sleeves. By the start of the year almost 95 per cent of Australians over 16 had received at least one dose and 91 per cent had had two. More than 10 per cent had been public-spirited enough to go back for a third. Had Swan been right, that should have been the start of the end of the pandemic. Sadly not. At the time of his broadcast, fewer than 70,000 Australians had tested positive to Covid-19. More than 8 million have tested positive since. In early May, Australia overtook Sweden for the number of infections per million people. Today we are on a par with Ireland and Italy, having overtaken Spain and the US.

Our peculiar good fortune, together with New Zealand, was to keep Covid-19 at bay during earlier, more virulent outbreaks. With hindsight, it was the closure of international borders, more than the vaccines, that kept our death toll per million at below half the world average. Yet the Omicron variant notwithstanding, are we not entitled to ask for more evidence of the degree of protection these imperfect vaccines are delivering? Are we not entitled to ask for more transparency about the severity of vaccine injuries?

These questions are openly and vigorously discussed in professional medical forums as doctors and public health experts who still believe in the benefit of free inquiry edge us a little closer to the truth. Yet in the broader civic arena they remain taboo, their airing considered to be against the broader public interest.

So let us park them for now and consider the costs and benefits of lockdowns and border closures. This week a year ago, NSW was entering 107 days of enforced confinement. It was nothing, of course, compared with the police-state crackdown in Victoria, the capital of which briefly held the world record as the world’s most locked-down city. Authoritarianism reared its head in every state and territory in the country to some degree. To this day, there is scant evidence any of this cruelty worked.

It is difficult to imagine a single politician or prominent public servant who would be likely to emerge unscathed from a royal commission. Most would be able to justify decisions taken in the fog of a pandemic out of an abundance of caution. A few would be exposed as the power-hungry, arrogant or blundering fools that they were.

Yet the responsibility for managing Covid-19 spreads far and wide, so wide that no Australian government, or indeed any opposition, is agitating for an inquiry any wider than the narrow review Butler has ordered. Neither the political class nor the mainstream media has the appetite for a debate that might prove they were not quite as smart as they thought they were or the things about which they scared us witless for two years may have been, shall we say, a little over-egged.

Above all, they fear exposing their own impotence, just like the Russian doctors rattling away in French, German and Latin parodied by Leo Tolstoy in War and Peace, unwilling to accept that the cure for a novel disease, hitherto unknown to medicine, might be beyond them.

“An idea as simple as this could never have occurred to the doctors,” writes Tolstoy, “just as a wizard could never accept the idea that magic was beyond them.”