Australia toward the middle of 2021
was in a really difficult position
that A, eventually the virus would find a way in,
and B, that Australia cannot be cut off
from the world indefinitely.
We want freedom!
Such unprecedented shift
in how we live our lives was made
in face of this pandemic.
This story was about the really difficult transition
that Australia needed to pull off
in terms of figuring out how the country
was gonna move into the future
in a world where COVID is just a part of life.
So if you think back to February 2020,
things changed incredibly fast.
We had a confirmation
of human to human transmission in Wuhan,
and then very quickly,
it's first case, first case, first case
in just country after country,
all over the world.
In those critical weeks in Australia,
there weren't a lot of domestic measures
taken at that point.
There was no sign of the panic
that was then really just starting to take hold
in parts of Europe and the United States.
My name is Anika Stobart.
I work at the Grattan Institute.
which is Australia's leading policy think tank.
I work in the Health and Aged Care Policy Program.
A key contributor to the cases in Australia's first wave
was the Ruby Princess cruise ship.
People had been sick,
and these people didn't actually end up in isolation.
They ended up back into the community.
They contributed to a lot of Australia's deaths
in that first wave.
Australia was grappling with the idea
of how to manage the COVID pandemic long term
when there weren't any vaccines available at the time.
And this is when this unique idea
of the COVID Zero approach emerged.
We are upgrading the travel ban on Australians
to level four for the entire world.
The travel advice to every Australian
is do not travel abroad.
They just closed the borders completely.
No one in and, and remarkably,
as the policy evolved it became clear
that the rule was no one out either.
You needed to actually apply for permission
from the Australian government
in order to leave the country.
On the theory that anyone leaving
would eventually need to come back in,
and would thus be a problem for the Australians
to keep COVID out.
There was a lot of debate
about whether that was the right way to do it.
Essentially, there were two courses
that the state minister could take.
One was to accept
that there would be a lot of community transmission,
and therefore have to limbo in and out of lockdowns
to control cases.
And the alternative option
was to actually lockdown very strictly
in a way that enabled us to get to a point
where there were effectively zero cases.
No tourists, no business travelers.
The few people who were allowed to come in
spent 14 days in hotel quarantine,
and it was enforced by the military.
For anyone who breaches quarantine,
they face fines and even jail.
The penalties ranging from as much as $50,000 in WA
and 12 months behind bars,
11,000 or six months jail in New South Wales,
while Queensland, Victoria, and South Australia
all had the power to punish.
These were devastating public health measures
for many people.
Australia is a nation of immigrants.
Something like 30% of the population was born abroad.
So the inability to travel had huge costs,
personally, economically, for many millions
of people in Australia and outside of it.
It was difficult for people.
Most Australians have connections
with communities overseas, family, friends.
Many businesses that relied on international tourists
really struggled.
But when the country emerged
from this first wave of lockdowns,
life, very rapidly
took on something like its pre-COVID normalcy.
You would go to bars and beaches and restaurants.
Hamilton even went on stage in Sydney.
♪ I'm runnin' with the Sons of Liberty and I am lovin' it ♪
People were going into offices.
Because we are an island nation,
We had the opportunity to actually have very few cases
in the community
until a vaccine would hopefully arrive in the future.
Nationally, the daily case numbers in some periods
were in the single or at most the double digits.
They could go months without a single COVID death
when the US, for example,
was recording literally hundreds of thousands of deaths,
Australia might record a death every few months
When Australia locked down, they really did.
They got the level down very, very low.
We never really locked down as well
or as completely as Australia did.
So epidemiologically, in terms of protecting lives,
these policies were spectacularly successful in that period.
Once Australia was able to return to normalcy
so much faster than the rest of the world,
you had overwhelming public support.
And so much so that anyone who suggested an alternative
was almost shouted down.
Virgin CEO has courted controversy
while calling for Australia's international borders
to reopen before mid 2022.
At one point, the CEO of Virgin Australia
said eventually the borders would have to open.
And that when they do, people may die.
Political figures attacked her vociferously.
Scott Morrison said he could have no truck
with comments like that.
And it was a real warning
to other public figures in Australia,
that proposing to live with the virus was a taboo.
It was something you couldn't say.
It became the third rail of Australian politics for a time.
Whereas a lot of other countries,
the UK, Canada, the US,
moved to lockup vaccine supplies as soon as they could,
Australia took a different approach
and a somewhat leisurely one in retrospect.
There was this kind of sense that,
from the government at least,
that things had been sorted.
That there was this sense of complacency.
And that kind of rolled over into how they thought
about the vaccine rollout,
which was a key failure of the government's response.
Australia didn't make a deal with Pfizer
until November 2020,
well after other countries had done so.
Instead, Australia's strategy
was to focus on the AstraZeneca vaccine
through local manufacturing.
So when we started the vaccine roll out
with the AstraZeneca,
we had couple of fatalities.
As the media highlighted fatality,
and inadvertently caused panic.
I think the government,
they should have prepared the public
about those rare side effects.
And at the same time,
speeded up the Pfizer MRNA-based vaccination.
A major public education campaign was underway.
visit Australia.gov.au.
But it was mainly addressing the mainstream Anglo-Saxon
background communities and society,
and they left the non-English speaking community
through that public educations campaign.
And the weakest point for the spread of that virus
was in people who were not targeted
by a public educations campaign.
I started in front of my house
a COVID assessment and testing clinic,
and it was a drive-through.
I used that also as an education area
where I can send the right messages
to our local community in the Canterbury Bankstown area.
There was much influence of pseudo science on social media
and a lot of propaganda and conspiracy theories.
The public did not have the right information
about COVID pandemic and the virus itself.
And unfortunately,
that gap needed to be addressed very soon.
A few months ago, Australia was the envy of the world,
winning the war against COVID.
Borders closed, but businesses open.
Life, relatively normal.
But as the highly infectious Delta variant takes hold
and our vaccine roll out lags,
we're becoming headline news for all the wrong reasons.
Delta became the dominant strain,
and made its way to Australia
through leakages in hotel quarantine,
and ended up causing a major outbreak
In March, 2021, around 3% of Australians
had been fully vaccinated
whereas the US and UK were well on their way
to vaccinating the bulk of their populations.
A more transmissible variant
in an undervaccinated population
is kind of a nightmare scenario.
So Australia had to panic,
and that meant these very harsh lockdowns.
And it also meant an effort to step up vaccination
as quickly as they could.
It started in Australia's most populous state,
New south Wales,
and then eventually spread to Victoria,
Australia's second most populous state.
Half the country was in lockdowns
Schools closed, offices closed,
all of these freedoms that Australians had taken for granted
for the better part of the last year
were once again taken away.
All Australians need to accept a hard truth.
COVID is here to stay.
Delta was just too transmissible.
The genie was outta the bottle.
Australia was never gonna be able to get back to COVID Zero.
Australia needed to come to a new understanding
of what living in the COVID age looked like.
That today, it was confirmed and fully agreed
that the national plan, that pathway,
that takes us to the position where we live with this virus.
And we live with the virus
where we ultimately start saying goodbye to lockdowns
once we reach 70% vaccination of the population
This U-turn was politically controversial.
There was a lot of criticism,
particularly Western Australia and Queensland.
The premiers of those states were not really on board.
Politics with a battle erupting
over how the states manage the virus.
Mark McGowan insists WA's freedoms need to be maintained.
We don't need rash decision making
on the basis of what is occurring in New South Wales.
There is an Australia outside of New south Wales.
Let's have a look at the number of cases
in New south Wales,
and Queenslanders don't wanna see those cases numbers
coming to Queensland,
so that is why there is a border closure
But there was, I think,
a sense of resignation
that this was the only way to go.
This cycle of of lockdowns, and freedom lockdowns,
and freedom had to stop.
And that the only way to stop it
was to try a new approach.
Easing restrictions, but only easing restrictions
for people that were double vaccinated.
People that were unvaccinated
would essentially continue
to have the lockdown restrictions
apply to them indefinitely.
18 months of isolation and frustration
boils to breaking point.
So-called freedom rally in Melbourne,
seeing violence break out between protestors and police.
Some people felt like this was imposing on them
in a way that they didn't support.
We want freedom!
There were some protests against vaccine mandates
which got pretty ugly at times.
Governments did not back down.
There was really very little compromise at any point.
You must be double vaccinated
in order to enter Australia,
with essentially no exceptions.
One example of that,
kind of spectacular example of that was Novak Djokovic.
Arguably the best tennis player in the world,
was kicked out of Australia
because he had entered without being double vaccinated
to play in the Australian Open.
Djokovic had his visa revoked
after being held at Melbourne Airport for several hours.
There should be no special rules
for Novak Djokovic at all.
That is an example of just how serious
the Australian government is going to take
the vaccination issue.
Once vaccination rates in Australia reached high levels,
this triggered different levels of liberalization.
We saw an end to lockdown measures.
Things like restaurants and nightclubs reopened.
In November, the borders reopened in some respects.
The first flight from Los Angeles today
was QF12 under the new conditions.
And there was a real party mood down here
at Sydney Airport's arrivals terminal.
Omicron has come in and has arrived
with the same full force that it did elsewhere,
but high vaccination rates have done the job
of preventing large numbers of deaths.
So I don't think there are many strong arguments
against the policy mix that Australia pursued.
It saved an incredible number of lives.
Economically, it's a little less clear.
If you look at 2020 GDP performance across major economies,
Australia was more or less flat.
And part of that was simply being able
to get back to normal.
Resuming normal life for most people
most of the time was a a bigger economic positive
than closing the borders was an economic negative.