Command and control

Power hungry governments that sidestep parliamentary process are more prone to failure. By Nick Cater.

It is almost 20 months since Daniel Andrews declared a state of emergency by invoking hitherto untouched powers in the Public Health and Wellbeing Act, a piece of sloppy legislation passed by the Victorian parliament in 2008.

The Premier’s Department press release on March 16, 2020 declared a state of emergency would be in place for four weeks “to assist with measures designed to ‘flatten the curve’ of Covid-19 and give our health system the best chance of managing the virus”. Twenty-four weeks later, Andrews persuaded parliament to allow him to extend the state of emergency for another 15 months. Victorians hoping to be granted their democratic rights in time for Christmas will be disappointed to learn that Andrews, through his Public Health and Wellbeing (Pandemic Management) Bill, is now about to be granted the right to declare a pandemic at any time without a single case of a specific disease in the state.

The headline above The Age’s cheerful editorial 10 days ago celebrating the end of what it bravely claimed to be the sixth and final lockdown declared: “Enjoy your new freedoms, Melbourne. You’ve earned them.”

The Victorian government’s command-and-control approach to the pandemic follows a familiar pattern of policy failure identified by economist Thomas Sowell. A crisis is declared over some harm that the government claims it can eliminate. Critics of the solution are dismissed as absurd, simplistic or downright dishonest.

When the solution fails to fix the problem, critics are accused of ignoring the complexities and told there are many factors at play. Bad as things might be, it is asserted they would be worse were it not for the prudent programs that mitigated the inevitable damage. The extent to which coercive stay-at-home orders have worked is a matter for conjecture. The results of Victoria’s 20-month live human experiment strongly suggest they haven’t, but the experts would no doubt condemn such a conclusion as simplistic.

They would point to factors other than government ineptitude to explain why more than half of Covid-19 infections and two-thirds of fatalities occurred in Victoria, the state that locked down hardest and longest. Yet the correlation between centralised, coercive government and incompetence is too close to ignore.

Historical examples of tyrannical incompetence are not hard to spot from the disaster at Chernobyl to the Trabant. In her book, What Really Happened in Wuhan, Sharri Markson makes a convincing case that but for the secrecy and hierarchical command of the Chinese communist government, Covid-19 might have been contained two years ago.

The Andrews government serves as a living example of why governments that rule by fiat are more prone to failure than those forced to run the gauntlet of parliament. Decision-making is restricted to a handful of individuals who lack perfect knowledge and are vulnerable to groupthink. Contrary facts, discordant data and alternative strategies are suppressed. Since all power emanates from the emperor, no one in his inner circle is game to tell him he has no clothes. Increased power leads to an excess of hubris. Any reserves of humility the leader might have had are depleted as the god complex begins to set in.

From the start of the outbreak, there were many who tried to argue for a different strategy, one a lot less like that employed in China and more in keeping with the principles of individual liberty and personal responsibility that have served us well. The alternative approach advocated focusing protection on the elderly and vulnerable instead of pretending the risks were equally shared. There was strong evidence in March 2020 that the World Health Organisation’s estimate of a 3 per cent fatality rate was wildly overstated. It was also known the risk of death for the elderly was substantial, but the risk for the young was statistically insignificant.

Yet instead of putting all available resources into protecting the few, most governments were fixated with the false indicator of the incidence of Covid-19 in the general population. Kids with almost no risk of becoming seriously ill were kept home from school and barred from playgrounds to stop infection spreading to the elderly.

The strategy failed. The notorious hotel quarantine bungle that led to Melbourne’s outbreak in the winter of 2020 was a minor hiccup compared with what happened afterwards in Victorian nursing homes. The government followed flawed advice that Covid-positive residents should be treated in their nursing homes, supposedly to prevent hospitals being overwhelmed.

By early July, it was apparent that scores of residents were dying in nursing homes who might have survived if they had been treated in hospital. Since nursing homes lacked the experience and equipment to abide by the highest protocols of quarantine, the virus rapidly spread to other residents.

Nursing homes were screaming for ambulances, but Andrews’ bureaucracy was slow to react. In mid-July, chief health officer Brett Sutton said the official strategy was to keep the virus out of aged-care homes by screening healthcare workers who entered, rather than removing sick residents: “I don’t think moving residents out who are infected is always the control measure that is required.”

Belatedly, the policy was changed, but by then the coronavirus wave was passing and the damage was done. In 2020, 678 nursing home residents died, all but 19 in Victoria. In 2020, three out of four Covid deaths were nursing home residents. So far this year, with the new policy in place, the figure is one in 50.

The strategy of protecting the vulnerable by attempting to control the general incidence in the community is a disastrous public policy failure. Non-pharmaceutical measures have not contained the spread and the available vaccines are far from perfect.

The case for focused protection, unlike the case for emergency lockdowns, is supported by hard evidence. There have been six times as many infected people in the community this year than last but, mercifully, only 31 care home residents have died.

With the fitful opening of the economy and removal of some shackles from our lives, we cannot rely on the partial protection of vaccines alone to keep the elderly safe. We need to rely on a strategy of focused protection and community co-operation that was last year derided as dangerous and foolhardy by the public health establishment. Andrews’ emergency powers are impossible to justify on health grounds, which is probably why he hasn’t even tried.