Reviewed by Rama Gaind.
Edited by Michelle Grattan, Brendan McCaffrie, Chris Wallace, UNSW Press, $39.99.
Australia has rarely endured as many difficulties as it did during the COVID-19 pandemic, which dominated the Morrison Government’s term of office, from its 2019 election win to the 2022 poll.
Questions are many. Was Australia’s national government resilient in the face of the massive pandemic challenge, and how were its operations reshaped by it? Was Australia’s national government resilient in the face of the massive pandemic challenge? How did government perform?
These questions, and more, are answered in a penetrating examination of policy and leadership by leading journalists and scholars, including Karen Middleton, Michelle Grattan, Chris Wallace, Julianne Schultz, Katharine Murphy, Stephen Duckett, Brendan McCaffrie, Stan Grant, Geoffrey Watson and Renée Leon.
The term of the Morrison Government was dominated by the management of the COVID-19 pandemic: a crisis of massive scale. The pandemic was all-consuming, demanding complex responses in both health and economic policies. At least for the duration, it transformed how Australia’s federation operated, albeit without any rewriting of the formal distribution of power.
Michelle Grattan says: “Governance has increasingly become a matter of crisis management. Crises provide real-world ‘stress tests’ to the resilience of political systems and the crisis management capacities of leaders.” In the early days of the pandemic, “Australia’s political leaders struggled in semi-ignorance, unclear precisely what they were confronting and how the situation would unfold. They, and the public, watching with alarm as the virus cut swathes through populations abroad. The Morrison Government, and its state counterparts, relied heavily on the advice of experts.”
Michelle Grattan is a professorial fellow at the University of Canberra and chief political correspondent for The Conversation. Brendan McCaffrie is senior research fellow at the Centre for Change Governance, University of Canberra. Dr Chris Wallace is a professor at the Faculty of Business Government and Law, University of Canberra and author of Political Lives.
