AMA joins human rights commissioner, legal and health experts in criticising narrow terms of reference announced by federal Labor
It’s stupid, we need the full review Federal and States to be able to do better next time. It all needs to be there warts and all.
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.
most value in this if it’s above politics I guess that’s probably to much to hope for
Way too much to hope for and it would get especially ugly if a labor federal government investigation highlighted issues in liberal run states.
From the Human Rights Commission: https://humanrights.gov.au/about/news/media-releases/human-rights-commissioner-critical-covid-inquiry-scope
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The scope and powers of the inquiry have already sparked a war of words with the Coalition, with shadow health minister, Anne Ruston, labelling it a “cop-out” and the opposition leader, Peter Dutton, accusing Labor of running a “protection racket” for state premiers.
The prime minister rejected the criticism as “absurd” but deflected questions about whether the inquiry would have the power to compel premiers to appear, telling reporters that seeking “conflict” is “completely contrary” to its aims.
“So much of the healthcare delivery and pandemic response was done by the states and territories … [that] a wide-ranging system-wide inquiry would make more sense,” he told Guardian Australia.
The infectious diseases physician Prof Peter Collignon agreed it was “problematic if [the inquiry] can’t look at what states did in Australia”, particularly because of the difficulty making international comparisons.
Prof Nancy Baxter, a clinical epidemiologist and the head of the University of Melbourne school of population and global health, said she understood the government did not “want this to be bigger than Ben Hur but we are likely to miss important learnings”.
“If the purpose of the commonwealth inquiry is to identify lessons learned to improve Australia’s preparedness for future pandemics, then excluding unilateral state actions is a major oversight to say the least,” Willox said.“While this inquiry is at one level very welcome, it falls short of the root and branch review that is required to ensure that governments work cohesively and respond holistically during the next inevitable pandemic.”
The original article contains 829 words, the summary contains 249 words. Saved 70%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!