Book Review: The Locked-Up Country

The subtitle of Chodor and Hameiri’s book is “Learning the Lessons from Australia’s COVID-19 Response.” There is one lesson in particular that the authors foreground – which, in fact, is the singular and repeated refrain of the book: that we re-learn how to govern.

As the book recounts in detail, there are very specific ways in which the inability to govern stymied Australia’s response to COVID-19, leading to the nation’s titular fate. It is also a problem common to many of our international peers, and arguably is at the core of the recently extended round of international negotiations being conducted by the World Health Organisation on the text of the international Pandemic Treaty.

Ostensibly about the COVID-19 pandemic, the book offers a broader argument about the nature of contemporary states like Australia, and their (in)capacity to govern generally; the pandemic proves to be the perfect case study for a more fundamental and systemic issue. The opening chapter is a brief primer on how Australia shifted from the boom-time command and control economy of the period after World War II, to the present system, one which allows the political office holders of the day to deflect responsibility for addressing or resolving problems. This is captured in the chapter’s title, “I don’t hold a syringe, mate,” the words of an internet meme which built on Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s response earlier in his tenure to an interview question about why in 2019 he thought it OK to be on holidays in Hawaii while Australia suffered through extreme and horrific bushfires: “I don’t hold a hose, mate, and I don’t sit in the control room.”

Who, then, does sit in the control room? It turns out to be a moot point. Australia – responding to the various economic and political crises of the second half of the twentieth century, sketched in brief here, has shifted “from top-down government to fragmented and diffuse governance.” It has become a “regulatory state.” Neoliberalism became the name of the game – properly understood, Chodor and Hameiri argue, not as “more market less state,” but as a reconfigured state, one where “in place of command-and-control structures stood a fragmented array of quasi-independent agencies, loosely coordinated by the government.” Just exactly how loose that coordination was became rapidly apparent as the pandemic took hold. The confusing and chaotic array of governmental responses – lockdowns with different and conflicting rules and regulations, border and travel management confusion, poor access to tests and PPE, changing rules around work, schools, hospitals, and financial support and so on – are all clear evidence of this.

Our authors structure their analysis of these symptoms with a focus on five specific elements within the regulatory state’s governance matrix: regulatory federalism, unelected policymakers, outsourced public functions, privatisation, and the marketisation of social functions. These intertwined to create pathologies in policy making and implementation processes, which then had catastrophic effect when the state was put under pressure to act effectively, at speed, and with purpose and conviction. In the event, it was not able to manage any of these benchmarks, a story documented in the subsequent chapters of the book.

The underlying theme of the book is that this failure can only be addressed with a recalibration of the relationship between the state and the needs and desires of its citizen – an enormous challenge, given the nature of the prevailing political economy and the power of its vested interests. While the book makes a compelling case for a shift in the nature of the state to give it the capacity to act, to be authoritative in responding to crises – as well as to undertake the ordinary functions of routine government – little is said here about how we might move from the prevailing regime to a new one. Indeed, the discussion of actual change in the book – the change from the Morrison-led Coalition Government to the Albanese-led Labor government, does not fill one with optimism. Quite the reverse. As the authors comment, actual and proposed changes under the new government all lack ambition, serving to merely adjust the regulatory state, addressing issues of efficiency or effectiveness.

There is not room here to fully explore the rich and detailed accounts which Chodor and Hameiri give of the key areas in which the regulatory state failed people living in Australia in the early years of the still ongoing pandemic. But, in catchily titled chapters, they take us through the failures of pandemic planning, the failures of the Zero COVID policy, the failures of border closures and hotel quarantine, the failures of lockdown, and the failures of the vaccination “stroll-out.” These compellingly told accounts are all the more powerful because of an underlying normative concern with the differential impact of these policies. They analyse the tensions that exist between clearly popular policies – for example some of the lockdown responses – and the ways in which that popularity masks the impact on already vulnerable and disadvantaged populations. A clear example is the work from home policy. In its various forms, this was relatively easily accommodated by those with economic and social means, but had significantly harmful consequences for those with few resources, already marginalised and disenfranchised. Such consequences ranged across the social and material, but also undermined the very health objectives they were ostensibly designed to address, with infection and disease becoming inescapable for those who did not have the luxury of the work from home option.

And this brings me to a curious tension which runs through the whole of the book: its engagement with the seriousness of COVID-19 itself. The overwhelming focus of the book is the harm caused by the failures of the regulatory state in the context of the pandemic, and more particularly the kinds of harms brought about by the conflicting and contradictory policy regimes which did emerge as a consequence of the state’s weak coordinating capacity. There is much to agree with here. But, surprisingly, this critique at times gives rise to a sense that the harms and consequences of the disease itself might be discounted in the analysis. The repeated accounts of flailing policy measures poorly enacted to (finally!) “do something,” along with the details of the often-adverse consequences of this “something,” have the effect of discounting both the positive impact it could have had if done properly, and also the importance of doing it at all in order to protect people from COVID. Examples that struck me here were apparently dismissive passing references to key measures for preventing infection in the first place: masking, and the introduction of proper in-building ventilation (for example in schools and public buildings). Both of these continue to be critical measures to protect us from COVID-19; both continue to be ignored by the population in general and policy makers in particular.

Now that the lock-downs have passed, there is a general sense that the pandemic is over – government leaders among others often refer to the pandemic in the past tense. In fact, its presence in the population continues, along with the harms that it continues to do – even as the virus steadily mutates and evolves. From this point of view, the apotheosis of Australia’s COVID-19 response appears to have been its flailing and crisis-driven need to “do something,” as documented in this book. Now, in the current phase of the pandemic, in which there is no apparent threat of hospitals being overwhelmed or of cities being locked down, we are back to business as usual: no one is holding the hose and the control room is empty. There is little to no public debate about either the ongoing and high rates of infection, the existence and consequences of long-COVID, or the need to have in place actionable plans for the next pandemic. This outcome is not so surprising, given the diagnosis provided by Chodor and Hameiri. But it does make one wonder what it will take to engender a serious, efficacious, response to the problem, if a global pandemic is not an adequate trigger. Perhaps a climate emergency?

This is a review of Tom Chodor and Shahar Hameiri’s The Locked-Up Country: Learning the Lessons of Australia’s Covid-19 Response. (University of Queensland Press, 2023). ISBN: 9780702266379

Professor Anthony J. Langlois is the Stan Perron Dean of Applied Ethics in the Faculty of Business & Law at Curtin University.

This review is published under a Creative Commons License and may be republished with attribution.