
Despite claims about foreign governments and bad luck, it’s clear that the vaccination rollout debacle was very much made within the Morrison government. It was the government that failed to plan for the predicted outbreaks of vaccine nationalism, and the government that placed too much reliance on a single vaccine.
That adds to the two other major pandemic-related failures by the Morrison government — the expensive and useless COVIDSafe app, and the failure to protect aged care residents in Victoria.
On the economic front, the government has been far more successful: JobKeeper worked very well (although profitable corporations have been allowed to keep billions of dollars in unmerited taxpayer support) while the HomeBuilder program kept the construction industry going.
That is, when the challenge was to rapidly turn on the fiscal spigots, the government proved competent. When it needed to design and build something, coordinate a major delivery program or effectively use its regulatory powers and administrative institutions to protect people, it failed abysmally.
There’s a pattern here. The National Broadband Network (NBN) has ended up severely compromised by the Coalition’s imposition of a profoundly flawed Multi Technology Mix that delivered neither the more rapid rollout nor the cost savings promised, and instead left the government to announce it would pump billions more into the crippled network to make the original Fibre To The Premises model available.
The government’s decision to build a new generation of submarines in Australia is already plagued by cost blowouts and delays, with promises of local production looking unlikely to be met.
Its energy policy, apart from being driven by climate denialism and the Coalition’s fossil fuel donors, is a shambles that has required state governments to lead on new infrastructure and the transition to renewables.
The Closing the Gap initiative routinely missed most of its targets over the last decade, most of which the Coalition has been in power.
Even more symbolic nation-building initiatives requiring Commonwealth leadership such as Indigenous constitutional recognition remain stalled after seven years of wheel-spinning.
The government’s failures in relation to regulation are even more obvious — aged care; financial services; wage theft and worker exploitation; gas and electricity supply (where the government swung from laissez faire to break-up and reservation powers in a matter of months).
Some of these areas involve the Commonwealth having to work with the states. But most are entirely within the direct control of the Commonwealth. The government seems to lack the basic skills of using the powers of government to achieve positive outcomes — to protect people from bank misconduct, or abuses by aged care providers, or to build large-scale infrastructure, or to source and roll out a vaccination program. Its strength is to pour money out rapidly, preferably to business.
Is there an ideological component to this incapacity to effectively use the powers of government? Undoubtedly the last 30 years has seen an acquired helplessness on the part of governments of all levels and kinds as basic roles around infrastructure provision or service delivery were corporatised, outsourced or privatised and the expertise to deliver them was transferred to the private sector.
This manifested itself most obviously in the NBN: the Rudd government literally had to start from scratch developing a capacity to roll out a large scale communications infrastructure project because the government institution that held that expertise had been sold off, and couldn’t be trusted to provide what was required.
Similarly, an aversion to deregulation and a willingness to accept the narrative from business that regulators needed to be kept in check has contributed to the failures of regulation across multiple sectors and over the lives of multiple governments.
But this acquired helplessness doesn’t explain failures during the pandemic: while there have been major failures at the state government level, by and large the states — which have been assiduous outsourcers and privatisers too — have been the key to Australia’s successful suppression of the virus through border closures, contact tracing regimes, international quarantine (a Commonwealth responsibility) and testing facilities.
State and territory governments of course are fundamentally service delivery bodies, in health, education, infrastructure and criminal justice, so they can’t politically afford to be seen to have lost their capacity to deliver the basics. Even Liberal state governments, while mouthing the platitude that the private sector can do it better than government, still preside over vast service delivery bureaucracies.
At the Commonwealth level, however, the distance between the government and service and infrastructure consumers is much greater, and often mediated by state government anyway, so neoliberal notions that private is always better and governments just need to get out of the way and let corporations do their thing are less likely to confront electoral reality (until they do — see the banking and aged care royal commissions).
It appears as though really believing that government should be limited, that its powers should be curtailed and it shouldn’t be allowed to do things, has ended up crippling the capacity of the Coalition when it really has to do things. When the press gallery was insisting all Scott Morrison had to do was successfully roll out the vaccine in order to win the next election, they forgot to wonder whether that kind of task is exactly the sort of thing that the federal Liberals, and their conviction that Government Is The Problem, can’t do, or that the only way it could be done successfully is if the Commonwealth handed over much of the task to the states — which is exactly what it is doing now.
Is it all ideology, though? The other key aspect of the Liberal identity is that it acts as a machine for taking bribes from corporations to deliver policy outcomes (in the same way the Labor Party is a machine for converting bribes from large unions into results for unions, although the latter, given they serve large numbers of workers rather than investors, tend to align more with the interests of working households).
But despite Twitter nonsense that the government is somehow influenced by MPs’ shareholdings in pharmaceutical companies, there are no transactions to be made in a pandemic; no donation to be swapped for a government contract, no secret meeting between a donor and a minister to secure a regulatory win. Just the challenge of governments addressing the national interest as quickly and effectively as possible, And that’s a political muscle the Coalition is very unused to flexing. So much so that it appears to have atrophied entirely.
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Another NSW vaccine blood-clot death reported this morning. I notice Crikey mentioned a “diabetic” woman in this mornings news feed. Not a “normal” woman. A 48 year old “diabetic” woman. I guess that makes it not do bad.
The point is that diabetes leads to problems with blood vessels etc and make such events more likely.
The only point is, peoples welfare and protection from the side-effects and even death from vaccines is far more important than political point scoring.
Mate, in a perfect world no vaccine would ever have side effects in anyone. Unfortunately no vaccine ever produced has ever been side effect free. Is it your contention that no vaccine should therefore ever be administered?
You are saying that it’s ok if only a few people suffer side-effects and death as long of the majority of people are safe and well.. the guinea pig people aged from 70 years and up. A level of concern?
As Spock said, “…the greatest good for the greatest number!”
Yeah, straight out of the Stalinist Gulag, that one.
Actually it was Jeremy Bentham & JS Mill – two of the greatest social thinkers ever.
I was just curious whether anyone would even notice.
The dumbness of the many outweighs the brilliance of the few.
Apparently it is better if 20 people die from SARS-CoV-2 than if one person dies from blood clots…
Are you paraphrasing Stoneblack’s axiom?
Am I? 🙂 Please enlighten me re Stoneblack and the associated axiom!
Sorry, I was being arch.
Blackstone’s ratio ( better ten guilty escape than one innocent condemned) was widely discussed during the recent la démence du jour.
Whenever people with a prior medical condition suffer adverse serious side effects from a vaccine and especially when someone dies, the the govt in conjunction with the Industrial Health & Medical Complex via the MSM always places the blame on the prior medical condition and not the vaccine. As is the case with the 48 year old healthy woman who had a mild non- life threatening diabetes. If she had not taken the vaccine she would still be alive. The diabetes did n’t kill her. The vaccine did. You are sounding exactly like the MSM Systemic Cover-Up pro vaxxers.
“…, an aversion to deregulation …..”?
Surely, more “an aversion to regulation based on a willingness to accept the narrative from business that regulators needed to be kept in check has contributed to the failures of regulation ….”?
It’s those Crikey proof-readers asleep at the wheel again!
Or do I mean sub-editors? Anyway, an otherwise excellent article.
This flaccid organ has neither.
Agni!!! Honestly, what is it with you and the flaccid organ? 😛
Wishing you a nice weekend! 🙂
Sorry, it’s a bad habit from the old EYE days.
For your delicate eyes, I shall resume the more formal ‘…of this parish‘.
We were having a good chuckle here about what you might by extrapolation call a journalistic organisation that you viewed favourably. I can’t tell you what we came up with because it’s not good for delicate eyes… 😉
Apart from upstanding and dependable?
Yes, wasn’t sure what that comment was meant to mean, given that deregulation has led to a lot of our woes.
‘an aversion to deregulation’ didn’t you mean ‘an aversion to regulation’?
So, tell me, if you inherit a derelict house, do you redesign it and rebuild, or do you stopgap everything.
Seems to me “democratic” governments worldwide have been plugging holes for years. Bit of silicone here and there, a verandah to stop the light from coming in, some patches to avoid rain coming in etc.
Everything is based on old ideologies unfit for contemporary times, while at the same time the threshold for new parties are kept unreasonably high, in order to keep power in a conservative way. That goes for labor too.
No wonder we find ourselves governed by career debaters who have no inkling how to build things, let alone setting up projects that get implemented without problems.
You get an astuteness award for that comment! 🙂
This is an “Accountability, Responsibility and Risk Averse” government – more afraid of bad publicity, than doing things – because doing things involves the risk of things going wrong. They’d rather farm out implementation and thus responsibility – then join in condemnation when things go wrong….. “Holgate”?
No, they’re much happier flogging scapegoats and those they’ve hog-tied, that that can’t fight back.
Farming out also provides the perfect go-to answer when it all goes wrong and questions are asked.
“Commercial-in-Confidence”. Talk about a crock, it’s taxpayers dollars isn’t it?
Didn’t you miss a wonderful opportunity there, Bro-Smart-A Klewso? What about “HOGATE-GATE”??
Yes, it is interesting that these days most ‘reforms’ are actually exercises in not doing things
rather than doing things better.
Some people seem to think they’re interchangeable? And find it easier to say “reform” that than “procrastinate”.