Underpromise and Overdeliver: The Failure of Political Rhetoric in Managing COVID-19 in Australia

ABSTRACT

From a ‘lucky country' on the edge of the world, Australia and its governments felt they had weathered the pandemic storm in October 2020. But, the insular approach to combatting COVID-19 cracked in the months since. A series of critical failures in government response has been identified. These include vaccine procurement and roll-out, ‘gold standard' contact tracing that turned out abysmal failures, debilitating border closures and an inability to coordinate policy and governance responses to Delta and Omicron variants of SARS-CoV-2. The liberal federal government architecture cracked—some commentators repeatedly use ‘bungled'—under the pressures in this next chapter in Australia's pandemic response. In this chapter, we do not only describe the deficiencies in the federal and state governments' capacity to plan strategically and coordinate between data and intervention, we also show that the resilience of communities is essential in responding to crises—but to grow and thrive, proactive government policies will still be required. © TheEditor(s) (ifapplicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021, 2022.