The Locked-up Country: Learning the Lessons from Australia’s COVID-19 Response

by Shahar Hameiri

Donald Horne famously called Australia ‘ the lucky country' . So how did we become the locked-up country and how might the future look different? Australia has changed enormously since Horne' s 1960s, but its response to the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrates the enduring truth of his thesis that our ‘ luck' was undeserved and wouldn' t last. By closing its borders and imposing a nationally coordinated lockdown, Australia unexpectedly eliminated COVID-19 in 2020, achieving one of the world' s lowest excess mortality rates. But as governments proceeded to bungle key planks of the pandemic response, by mid-2021, Australia was ‘ locked up' – closed off to the world and fragmented along state and territory borders, with its major cities enduring repeated and extended lockdowns. It soon became clear that Australia' s regulatory state had let us down. But these failures were not inevitable, and we can manage future crises more successfully. In The Locked-up Country, political experts Tom Chodor and Shahar Hameiri identify the source of Australia' s recent challenges and suggest a better way forward.

240 pages, Paperback

Published June 10, 2024

About the author

Shahar Hameiri is Professor of International Politics and Australian Research Council Future Fellow in the School of Political Science and International Studies, University of Queensland. He is co-author, most recently, of The Locked-Up Country: Learning the Lessons from Australia’s COVID-19 Response (UQP, 2023).

Reviews

[albie_of_nonfic · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent analysis of the failings of the pandemic response in Australia that deserves to be far more widely read.

This book thoroughly analyses not just the failings of state and federal governments in this pandemic, but also the systemic failings of the Australian system of 'governance', the so-called 'regulatory state' in which the government has outsourced most of its functions onto profit-making entities. The old cliche of 'steering, not rowing' is exposed as a fiction - governments apparently can no longer think, requiring consultants to provide the expertise lost when the public service was downgraded over the decades. Even then, the results produced by these consultants were abysmal, as was the Federal Government's execution of them.

This book also exposes a few flaws in the Australian political culture and the national psyche - the major parties' (and their adherents') dismissal of anyone opposed to lockdowns as paranoid extremist bogans, and the hysterical demands for 'covid zero' (from public and experts alike). The gross excesses against the public were at least partially self-inflicted.

The only irritants when reading this book were the lack of an index, and the desperate need for a glossary of acronyms.

[Norrie Sanders · Rating 4 out of 5]

Two academics assess Australia’s COVID response, concluding that border closures and lock downs were examples of governance failures. All sides of politics are criticised and simply blaming Prime Ministers and Premiers misses the point. They operate in a flawed system of policy and service delivery, over which they have relinquished control.

A thought-provoking book that will help any reader to understand the successes and failures of the COVID years and the dramatic changes needed to improve our responses to all types of disasters.

See the full review at: https://www.queenslandreviewerscollec...