AMA joins human rights commissioner, legal and health experts in criticising narrow terms of reference announced by federal Labor
AMA joins human rights commissioner, legal and health experts in criticising narrow terms of reference announced by federal Labor
States should do their own review.
The reality is the state governments are responsible for the vast majority of our covid response and the federal government has no business telling them what they should have done differently. Each state took a very different approach and that’s fine, because each state is different. Even within states it varied significantly - QLD effectively had three policies - metropolitan south east corner, regional towns/small cities, and outback QLD where going to the nearest hospital usually involves flying to it.
Where the federal government could have done better was mostly indirect issues, such as making stopping vast quantities of medical supplies from being exported. And the impact closing borders had on farms.
That’s kind of the point though we need a comprehensive review so we can all do better next time including doing an analysis of the states responses.
Australia did pretty well on the whole, mistakes were made but this shouldn’t be a blame seeking exercise this was all pretty much fly by the seat of your pants stuff at the time. The most value in this if it’s above politics I guess that’s probably to much to hope for but there is a lot to be learned.
What worked the best, where can we improve?
Where are the weak points in national and interstate logistics?
Even just detailing exactly what each state did provides value when trying to form a response plan for next time in a national context.
What sovereign medical capacity do we need to retain when state and international borders close?
We can get a very good national plan out of this if it’s run properly with good guidelines on what to do next time.
There will be a next time and no doubt the individual disease vector will have its own challenges but at least we have the opportunity now to really pick our collective response apart so we can have a robust informed response next time. It needs to be holistic to provide the most value so that includes the states.
Way too much to hope for and it would get especially ugly if a labor federal government investigation highlighted issues in liberal run states.