Daniel Andrews’ lockdowns and other curbs on basic freedoms during the pandemic were unjustified, inconsistently enforced in a racially discriminatory way, harmed kids and women disproportionately, and in some cases resulted in outcomes the reverse of those intended.
That’s the conclusion not of Victorian Labor’s political opponents, nor right-wing extremists and cookers, but of the Albanese government’s expert review of the pandemic, conducted by veteran health bureaucrat Robyn Kruk, epidemiologist Catherine Bennet and health economist Angela Jackson — an independent and unimpeachably qualified team.
The 900-page report makes for ugly reading for the former NSW and Victorian governments and lockdown advocates, and especially the Andrews government, which the evidence shows exercised extreme powers without justification or consistency.
On lockdowns, for example, the review concludes:
We heard that lockdowns have lost credibility with the Australian public. This is particularly the case in Victoria. The city of Melbourne was kept in lockdown for 112 days in the second wave in 2020. The final 30 days of that lockdown had either single-digit case numbers or zero cases reported, and most were contacts of known cases in quarantine … For more than half of the latter part of that wave, most cases were directly linked to aged care facility outbreaks. The rest of the population were kept in lockdown to reduce the risk of outbreaks spreading back into the community via workers or their household contacts.
And:
Use of statewide lockdowns where there had been no recent cases outside a capital city, rather than localised lockdowns, contributed to the loss of credibility. Advice to the chief medical officer from the National COVID-19 Health and Research Advisory Committee on 30 July 2021 synthesised the benefits of localised short-term lockdowns to manage COVID-19 outbreaks. South Australia successfully used a short, sharp lockdown to contain transmission after a person crossed into the state who was unknowingly infectious with the Delta variant, preventing a large outbreak (which was contained within a few chains of transmission, compared with New South Wales and Victoria, which never succeeded in getting back to zero cases).
Moreover, the enforcement of lockdowns, including Andrews’ notorious hard lockdown of housing towers in Melbourne, was wildly racially discriminatory, with an analysis of COVID-19 fines issued in Victoria in 2020 determining that “African and Middle Eastern people were four times more likely to receive fines, and local government areas with higher proportions of non-English speaking backgrounds had higher levels of fines”.
Not all states followed Andrews’ lead in hardline enforcement. “Others chose a more health-driven, educational approach. For example, we heard that the Australian Capital Territory chose to balance the risk of spreading COVID-19 with the protection of human rights and displayed better engagement overall. Evidence suggests that relying on an enforcement approach does not necessarily provide the intended outcome and can have negative impacts.”
Victorian police, while ferociously enforcing restrictions on civil liberties, also used information from government contact-tracing apps for other investigations, further eroding public trust. And not merely were the Andrews’ government’s lockdowns unjustified, but they also inflicted significant damage on Victorians. “Safer Care Victoria found that, between September 2020 and January 2022, five Victorian children aged 0 to 4 died from complications associated with malnutrition and neglect. This was a concerning increase from the two neglect-associated deaths recorded between 2000 and 2019.”
And women bore the brunt of them. “Caring responsibilities increased for both women and men during the pandemic, but women spent more hours providing care for children or other family members, even in dual-income households. One study found that in 2020, women spent approximately five hours more per week on unpaid care work compared to men. This gap grew to nine hours per week when observing couples with dependent children. The same study found the gender gap in unpaid care work widened as a result of the Melbourne lockdown”.
The panel also criticises quarantine for returning travellers, which Andrews spectacularly botched in a series of disastrous decisions for which he was never held accountable: “The assumption that Australians returning from home [sic] would not adequately quarantine, without good evidence to support this, meant that quarantine for all international arrivals was based on the premise that citizens could not be trusted … if home quarantine compliance was adequate for managing local outbreaks throughout the pandemic — and random checking by police did indicate that most were compliant in the second wave in Victoria — then hotel quarantine could have been freed up for symptomatic returnees or other arrivals who had no home to go to or who had vulnerable people at home they did not want to expose to risk of infection”.
And Andrews’ absurd mask mandate for kids actually led to more infections: “Victorian data showed that children aged eight to 11, who were required to wear masks under state orders, had higher infection rates than those aged five to seven, who were not required to wear masks and had previously had the same infection rates. The older children wearing masks also had higher recent vaccination uptake, so would be expected to have had lower infection rates than the younger cohort during this term.”
The evidence assembled by the expert panel is damning: the lockdowns weren’t justified, they harmed Victorians, and — contra Andrews’ reputation for leading a progressive government — were enforced by a power-gorged Victorian police force disproportionately against people of non-English-speaking backgrounds.
“Dictator Dan” might have seemed extremist rhetoric at the time, but it was a lot closer to the truth than his feral supporters will ever admit.
Was the Victorian government’s response to COVID-19 appropriate? Let us know your thoughts 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.
