Peter Hobbins reviews Steven Hamilton and Richard Holden’s Australia’s Pandemic Exceptionalism: How We Crushed the Curve but Lost the Race (UNSW Press, 2024).
It makes for interesting reading when you realise that a book’s subtitle should have been ‘we told you so’.
In Australia’s Pandemic Exceptionalism, academic economists Steven Hamilton and Richard Holden historicise our national policy responses to the Covid-19 pandemic that – it must be recalled – we are still living through. Their title refers to the extraordinarily low rates of Covid that Australia enjoyed during the first 18 months of the pandemic, alongside an exceptional public policy response that averted financial collapse as much of our economy shut down.
Hamilton and Holden’s fundamental tenet is that while the disease comprised a global biomedical emergency, its social impact also sparked an economic disruption unrivalled in nearly a century. They argue that while Australia mounted an outstanding response to the financial crisis, our early public health successes were squandered through ill-informed procurement decisions and thrombotic regulatory processes.
‘How could the same government, the same cabinet, the same public service generate two such wildly different performances in the same circumstances, under the same pressure, facing the same monumental stakes?’, the authors ask (pp. 201–2). Bizarrely, however, they don’t refer to the unprecedented bushfires of 2019–20, which primed the federal Coalition government to respond urgently to the next catastrophe. The bushfire crisis heated federal-state tensions and politically embarrassed Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, practically mandating vigorous Commonwealth leadership as the health crisis unfolded – despite the fact that with the pandemic, jurisdication lay clearly with the states.
Australia’s Pandemic Exceptionalism focuses on the first two years of Covid, with occasional nods to historical precedents. It occasionally cites the 1918–19 influenza pandemic, the 1930s Great Depression, the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) outbreak of 2004–05 and the 2008 Global Financial Crisis (GFC). The latter, unsurprisingly, is the authors’ touchstone for asking whether fiscal and monetary policy interventions should buttress economic stability today.
The book’s answer is a resounding ‘yes!’. Indeed, as they repeatedly tell readers, Hamilton and Holden constantly prosecuted this argument through 2020–22. Their foresight is foregrounded with anecdotes, such as Hamilton returning to Australia from Washington on 22 March 2020: ‘Before departing, he had sent a piece to the Australian Financial Review with a view to advancing in Australia those same arguments he had been making in the United States’ (p. 68) – namely, that the government should financially assist employers to retain their employees. That same evening, JobKeeper was approved.
Drawing upon global comparisons – particularly the United States – their analysis roundly critiques neoliberalism and urges a return to neo-Keynesian interventionism. As Hamilton and Holden wryly note, Australia’s GFC experience led Morrison’s Coalition government to spend up big as economic catastrophe loomed. ‘The efficacy of fiscal stimulus is ultimately an empirical question’, they insist; ‘it either generates additional consumption, and an associated increase in economic activity, or it doesn’t’ (p. 43).
The silent hero, the book proposes, was not a person but a system: the Single-Touch Payroll package rolled out by the Australian Taxation Office in the decade prior to Covid. Unlike many other advanced economies, Australia’s investment in regular salary reporting provided the ‘plumbing’ necessary to transmit dollars to employers. As then-Treasurer Josh Frydenberg attests, ‘we really wanted to ensure that … small- and medium-sized businesses weren’t obliterated’ (p. 61). Indeed, JobKeeper largely obviated the chronic unemployability that resulted from job losses during the 1990s recession. Yet banks and universities were notably excluded from this largesse, a policy decision barely explored in the book.
On health, Hamilton and Holden pull no punches. They praise the efficacy of quarantine and some of the original contact-tracing programs. However, the authors roundly criticise the choice to rely on pathology providers to deliver polymerase chain reaction tests, when rapid antigen testing (RAT) kits offered a faster, cheaper and more decentralised solution. But their position is inconsistent: Australia funds a comprehensive pathology network, spending as much on biomedical assays as we do on general practitioners. Isn’t this, therefore, the same sort of ‘plumbing’ that they suggest we should deploy during crises? Moreover, they ignore the fact that RATs shifted both costs and reporting responsibilities from government to consumers – surely another neoliberal stratagem?
On our vaccine purchasing decisions, the authors insist that Australia’s Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) was tardy to the point of irresponsibility, adding that they ‘did it again and again with different vaccines’ (p. 92). The problem, Hamilton and Holden state, was compounded by the government backing only two candidate vaccines, which turned out to be duds and further delayed widespread rollout of immunisation.
There is little appreciation that therapeutics are not economics. One reason why Australia enjoys such high immunisation rates is the trust that citizens place in TGA-approved vaccines. History helps us here: consider the 1928 ‘Bundaberg tragedy’ where a contaminated serum not only led to the deaths of 12 children, but undermined public confidence in biomedicine and delayed mass immunisation campaigns by several years.
‘If this book is about anything, it’s state capacity’, remark the authors. They single out Australia’s Single-Touch Payroll system as an outstanding ‘product of initiatives by successive governments of both political persuasions’ (p. 155). This is certainly the central thrust, but – if we take Hamilton and Holden at their word – Australia’s Pandemic Exceptionalism is also about tensions between the upper echelons of federal economic decision-making and the inconstancies of institutional memory. The book also shows that in making policy on the fly – as necessitated by the exceptional circumstances of the pandemic – bureaucrats were willing to trawl social media and op-eds for novel solutions.
Which leaves us to ponder the value of research and expertise, especially at a moment when our tertiary sector was excluded from fiscal nourishment. Hamilton and Holden can say ‘we told you so’ because, in the darkest years of Covid-19, they chose to apply their academic expertise to this urgent economic and social problem. So too did scholars from many other disciplines, from virology and epidemiology to sociology and history. But to pivot to public engagement in the midst of a crisis requires the security of ongoing employment, an opportunity denied to many academics as the university system underwent an exceptional contraction. As it continues to shrink, so too do the national intellectual resources available to face future challenges.
