Thousands of Australian citizens remain stranded abroad, unable to return due to strict caps on spots in hotel quarantine, which are set by state governments. Frequent domestic border closures — also decided by state governments — have effectively fragmented Australia into eight separate countries. Last month, Australians were treated to the surreal spectacle of the Australian Defence Force patrolling the border between Queensland and New South Wales.

Across the country, citizens have discovered that reserve powers are largely the prerogative of state governments, and are being exercised in ways that routinely exclude other states’ residents, as if they were foreign nationals. For example, Western Australia now requires that people living in New South Wales have at least one shot of the Covid vaccine to enter the state. In one of the most callous examples of exclusionary state politics in practice, last year the Queensland government denied a 14-year-old double-lung transplant patient from NSW access to his specialist doctor, declaring that Queensland hospitals were for Queenslanders.

More from this author

The cruelty of Australia's endless lockdown

By Shahar Hameiri

Indeed, throughout the pandemic, it seems that states’ rights have trumped citizens’ rights — while at the same time reducing federal government to a feckless bystander.

How quickly things change. Few would have predicted that the Australian federation would suffer from such deep fragmentation before the pandemic. After all, the trend for decades had gone in exactly the opposite direction, towards greater centralisation of power at the federal level. Australia’s federalism was long viewed by political scientists as one of the world’s most “vertically imbalanced”; the Commonwealth has controlled around 80% of tax revenue since World War II, making Australia’s states reliant on federal transfers for half their budgets.

Federal governments used this leverage to introduce greater controls over how the states spend their money, by introducing a host of national schemes that promised funding to the states which agreed to undertake reforms. In some cases, such as in the National Disability Insurance Scheme initiated in 2013, states were relieved of their responsibility for disability care altogether, in favour of private and non-profit service-providers.

But when the pandemic struck in March 2020, state governments moved swiftly into the driver’s seat. Harnessing emergency powers few realised they possessed, they imposed society-wide lockdowns and closed internal borders. Although the constitution accords responsibility over quarantine and international borders to the federal government, lack of federal preparedness saw state governments assume full control over the hotel quarantine system, which was hastily established over one weekend. Since hotel quarantine capacity determines the number of weekly international arrivals into Australia, the states in effect have de facto control over international borders.

Initially, many were thrilled to see state governments taking strong action, especially as Prime Minister Scott Morrison was slow to act in the face of the pandemic. And premiers have been rewarded for this by remarkable levels of popular support, especially when they succeeded in keeping Covid out of their states. The Queensland Premier, Annastacia Palaszczuk, and Western Australian Premier, Mark McGowan, were both easily returned to government in their respective state elections. In McGowan’s case, re-election was secured by a margin rarely observed in free and fair democratic polls.

More from this author

New Zealand's Zero Covid delusion

By Tom Chodor

Morrison, meanwhile, despite initially enjoying high levels of public approval, has seen his popularity plunge to negative territory, as lockdowns and border closures sparked by the Delta variant have again handed the initiative to the states. Aware of the potential for incoherence and discord within the federation, he established a National Cabinet in March last year as a platform for federal and state leaders to coordinate policy directly. The National Cabinet was initially heralded a success, with the nationally coordinated lockdown of March-May 2020 eliminating community transmission in Australia. However, beneath the veneer of cooperation, there was squabbling and petty tribalism.

There were, for example, no national standards developed, so each state designed its own hotel quarantine system differently. When these systems failed, rather than learn from each other’s mistakes, states preferred to take pot shots at each other about whose Covid response was best.

The repercussions of this petulance soon became clear. In Melbourne, the capital of Victoria, poorly trained and precariously employed security guards caught Covid from returned travellers and then spread it in the community, sparking the state’s second wave last winter, resulting in more than 19,000 cases and 800 deaths, as well as a 112-day lockdown.

Victoria tried to redress these problems by establishing a centralised agency for managing hotel quarantine, but in June a leak from NSW sparked another wave of infections, which spread to other states and even New Zealand, resulting in more lockdowns. The outbreak was caused by an unvaccinated driver without the correct PPE transporting airline crew from the airport to the quarantine hotel. While NSW requires all drivers to be vaccinated and wear a mask, compliance and enforcement was left to the private transport companies. Once again, the failure to learn from best practice in other parts of the country had disastrous consequences.

As the pandemic has worn on, these skirmishes have erupted into open warfare, exacerbating the formidable challenge of developing and implementing an exit strategy from lockdown. Take the federal government’s recently proposed four-phase plan for reopening borders and ending restrictions. Based on Doherty Institute modelling, it anticipates reopening to be safe enough when 80% of the eligible adult population are fully vaccinated. Although initially approved in National Cabinet, some states almost immediately began to pull away.

The was mainly due to the emergence of two Australias. The first, which includes the two most populous states, New South Wales and Victoria, has suffered major outbreaks and long lockdowns. Consequently, they have abandoned “Zero Covid” strategies and accepted that reopening will involve some risk of the virus’ spread and mortalities.

More from this author

How not to talk to a science denier

By Tom Chivers

The second group, however, led by Queensland and WA, has so far managed to avoid major outbreaks thanks to border closures and snap lockdowns. Although indicating basic support for vaccination as a way out of isolation, their premiers have nonetheless repeatedly raised the threshold for reopening beyond the figures suggested in the Doherty model.

Palaszczuk, for example, recently argued that reopening should only occur after children younger than 12 were vaccinated. This is despite the fact that no country in the world has vaccinated under-12s, no vaccines are currently approved for this age group and their risk of serious illness is vanishingly low. Yet McGowan concurred, and wondered aloud why the federal government would want to “infect” WA. Although Palaszczuk backtracked a few days later, it is clear that reopening Australia, internally and internationally, will be fraught and challenged at every step, and finding a unified position among the federal and state governments will be difficult, if not impossible.

Australia’s federation is thus facing one of the biggest challenges in its history. Australia’s hodgepodge of state-based systems and responses, combined with endless acrimony and buck-passing, contrasts poorly with New Zealand’s more coherent “whole-of-government” approach, even though both countries are effectively following the same elimination strategy. If there’s one lesson for Australia in the past eighteen months, it’s surely that a greater consolidation of powers within the federal government is necessary for ensuring a unified, efficient and effective national response.

Ironically, however, it is likely this crisis will likely have the opposite effect, further entrenching the fragmentation of Australia’s federation, guaranteeing the same problems will recur in future crises. For state governments and their residents will not forget where reserve powers are truly located, and that they may be exercised with little regard for national agendas or citizenship rights.

In the absence of constitutional reform or some other change within Australian federalism, the temptation in future crises will always be for states to go it alone. So, what is the point of Australia? With 54% of WA residents in a recent survey declaring themselves “Western Australians” first rather than Australians, perhaps it is time we stop taking the answer for granted.

This makes the goal of complete virus elimination — Zero Covid — look unrealistic, at least in the short term. But unfortunately for the Prime Minister, who is expected to announce Britain’s “roadmap” out of lockdown on Monday, it by no means answers the question of which route he should take.

When it took scientists less than a year from Covid’s outbreak to create a working vaccine, and not just one but several, relief was twofold. In one sense, the prospect of an end to both the disease’s merciless death toll and the atomised grimness of human life brought general euphoria to the darkness of November. But for politicians and others tasked with steering society between the Scylla of social destruction and the Charybdis of Covid itself, there was a different relief.

Without a workable vaccine, they faced the impossible task of extricating society from a cycle of lockdowns, knowing that doing so would probably mean a rise in deaths that could make the earlier stringent measures seem futile. With vaccines, though, normal life could return without sacrificing tens or hundreds of thousands more lives.

Suggested reading

Inside the Zero Covid campaign

By Freddie Sayers

But, as Number Ten is now discovering, the introduction of vaccines creates an entirely new set of dilemmas for governments across the developed world. For if it is possible, even in theory, to bring the infection rate so low that “test, trace, isolate” is a practical way to control the disease on its own, the current lockdown is probably the last chance to do that. Yet doing so would mean continuing the current stringent measures for months, long after the most vulnerable have been vaccinated; there are even rumours that the Government wants to maintain the current lockdown until cases (not hospitalisations) fall below one thousand a day — less than a tenth of the current figure.

But the first, and subsequent, lockdowns were justified as measures to keep deaths and serious cases at a level that wouldn’t overwhelm health services. If vaccinating the most vulnerable parts of the population breaks the link between cases, hospitalisations and deaths — bringing the impact of Covid down to the level of a seasonal illness like flu — does it matter if infections remain as common as its cousin, the common cold, which infects the average adult two or three times per year?

This is the new dilemma facing policymakers and, though science can and must inform it, it is at heart a political question. Even government scientists are starting to express frustration about the UK government’s apparent unwillingness to grasp that nettle. As Professor Dame Angela McLean, Chief Scientific Advisor to the MoD and a member of SAGE, told a Science and Technology Select Committee on Wednesday: “It’s one of the things we have cried out for again and again. Could somebody in a position of political power tell us: what is an acceptable level of infections?”

She was answering a question about whether, as Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty has suggested, we will have to live with Covid as we do with flu and other infectious diseases. And she agreed that “other infectious diseases that we put up with are probably a reasonable starting point”. But this in itself still doesn’t solve the political question, because, as Professor McLean pointed out, bad flu winters can still be remarkably deadly. It still comes down to a matter of judgement.

Suggested reading

The risk of eternal lockdown

By Adam Wagner

In recent UK history, the worst years for flu deaths were 1976 and 1999, when more than 60,000 people in England and Wales died from influenza or pneumonia. The best year in the last century was 1948, with under 20,000 deaths. That leaves a range of 20,000-60,000 deaths per year, up to half the Covid casualties so far, and up to 10% of the pre-Covid annual death toll.

After the last year, would that feel like an acceptable number of deaths? Conversely, would we accept another year of lockdowns to reduce the toll of Covid from 60,000 to 20,000? As Professor McLean said: “The question of what is acceptable is not a scientific question. That’s a question for the whole of society.”

It’s worth noting, however, one caveat provided by epidemiologist Professor Mark Woolhouse, who is also a member of SAGE: “Whatever the answer is, it’s not zero.” That is, he explained, because if you take the view that every Covid death is unacceptable, “you are writing a blank cheque to do any amount of harm by the measures you’ve implemented to try and control it.”

Yet this, unfortunately, is the implicit view behind the Government’s policy, which makes it hard to rationally weigh the harms of lockdown measures against the reductions in risk from Covid. Indeed, Downing Street appears to still be following the alarming scenarios modelled by Warwick University, which show that any relaxation of social distancing measures before late 2021 will lead to another wave of deaths. But the authors of the Warwick models themselves acknowledge their assumption that vaccine efficacy applies equally to infection, mild and severe illness. However, they add, “if the vaccine has differential protection against the most severe disease this will impact our predictions for hospital admissions and deaths.”

And this is exactly what early data from Israel and elsewhere is indicating: vaccines may not prevent 100% of infections, but they do seem to prevent over 90% of hospitalisations and deaths. In effect, the Warwick assumptions about vaccine uptake, speed and effectiveness in preventing death, serious illness, and transmission are already being superseded by data. In Professor Woolhouse’s words: “Right now you should be looking at earlier unlocking, because the data is so good.”

This all sounds very positive. But while the R number is below one, it remains that the absolute case numbers are still comparable to those in spring last year. Official positive test results are over 10,000 per day, and the ONS estimates that over 700,000 people in the UK are currently infected, around 1% of the population.

Suggested reading

The Government's Covid comms failure

By Stuart Ritchie

The question now is: what is the end goal of the current social restrictions? Is it to keep hospitalisations within a level that the exhausted NHS can handle? Is it to keep deaths on a downward trend while restoring society to normality as fast as possible? Or is it to bring the rate of infection down to a level that could realistically be tracked, traced and isolated?

Only the Government can answer that question. It’s the responsibility of politicians, not scientists, to balance the risks of Covid against the social, economic and political impacts of the measures taken against it. Scientists themselves say so, again and again.

Risk is too often treated as a purely mathematical problem, but it has other dimensions too: psychological, social and political. There is no mathematical formula to tell any of us whether to take a chance on starting a business, proposing marriage, or riding a bicycle on city streets. We weigh up the possible outcomes and then commit to a course of action, in the knowledge that the future is uncertain and unknown. And in the same way, our leaders are forced to choose a course of action for the country as a whole.

Let us, by all means, be led by data. But data is a sextant, not a destination. What are we being led towards? What level of risk from Covid are we prepared to accept, and what are we prepared to sacrifice to reduce that risk? These questions are not statistical, but political.

Thanks to vaccines, the extra risks introduced to all our lives by Covid will soon be reduced to more familiar levels. Yet, having abandoned a rational approach to risk in favour of the view that “no Covid death is acceptable,” our politicians seem to be struggling to re-establish a grown up conversation about what we value as a society.

Zero-risk life is not an option. When Johnson finally reveals his “roadmap” to freedom, he would do well to start by explaining what kind of risk he is willing to take, and for what purpose.