Already and this is this is the Daily Off.
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Oh, now it makes sense.
Good morning and welcome to the Daily OS. It is Thursday, the thirty first of October. Happy Halloween.
I'm Billy, I'm Sam.
A new report into the federal government's response to COVID nineteen has found it was not adequately prepared for a pandemic. It also found that public trusting government has been eroded and that more transparency around decisions made during a health emergency is needed. Plus, it has recommended Australia establish a new Center for Disease Control. What does all of that mean We will explain in today's podcast. But before we get there, Sam, what is making headlines today?
Prices rose by a two point eight percent in the year two September twenty twenty four. That's according to new figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics. The annual inflation figure is down from the last quarter, when prices rose three point eight percent over the previous year. This means prices arising at a slower rate than before, and according to the ABS, the slowing of inflation was driven by discounts on energy bills from federal and state governments, which
came into effect in July. The cost of fuel also fell from July to September, which the ABS said was due to quote lower global demand bringing down the cost of oil.
The Corruption WATCHDOCK has announced it will reconsider a decision not to investigate several officials over the unlawful Robodet scheme. Robodet was a debt collection system used by the government from twenty fifteen to twenty nineteen. It resulted in over one point seven billion dollars of unlawful debt notices. This year, the Robodet Royal Commission found several Code of Conduct breaches
by senior officials who worked on the scheme. It then made six referrals to the National Anti Corruption Commission, calling for it to conduct further investigations. However, in June, the National Anti Corruption Commission said it would not pursue these inquiries. Now, the watchdog says it will reconsider its position after a commissioner involved in its decision making processes failed to declare a conflict of interest.
The owners of Wakari White Island in New Zealand have launched an appeal against a conviction for breaching workplace safety laws. A volcanic eruption on the island killed twenty two people, including seventeen Australians in December of twenty nineteen. Last year, an Auckland court found the owners of the island, Wakari Management Limited, failed to uphold their health and safety obligations
at the time of the eruption. The company, owned by three brothers, was ordered to pay millions in fines and compensation to victims. This week, lawyers filed an appeal on behalf of WML in Auckland's High Court, seeking to overturn the criminal conviction, arguing that tour operators who brought visitors to the island on the day of the eruption should be held responsible, not the island's owners.
Day's good news. A PhD student from Tulane University in the US accidentally discovered a lost mine city in Mexico under dense forest cover. Archaeologists uncovered temples and pyramids in the city they've named Valeriana. Using laser survey technology. Researchers were able to produce a digital recreation of monuments and
structures that would have existed beneath the greenery. PhD student Luke called Thomas told the BBC that the three sites were uncovered when he was quote on something like page sixteen of Google search and found a laser survey done by a Mexican organization for environmental monitoring.
Okay, so, Billy, this was an inquiry into how Australia handled the COVID nineteen pandemic. Havn't done episode on COVID in a little while before we get into what the report actually said. What was the intention of government asking for this report to be written in the first place.
Yeah, So this inquiry was announced by the government in September last year, and the aim was to understand how Australia went with the benefit of hindsight, how did we go in our response to the pandemic, not just looking at what went well, but also what didn't go well at all during the pandemic. And the intention of that is so that Australia can be better prepared for the future and for the next national health emergency.
I've seen a couple of countries do similar reports, so it's not like we're the first people in the world.
No, not at all.
I think it's a really important thing to do, especially
when something as big as the pandemic did happen. One thing to note before I get into what the findings were, I just want to point out that this report was entirely focused on the actions taken by the federal government, not by the individual states and territories who, as we know, especially as a pandemic you know, went on, they made a lot of the decisions about the pandemic, and that was actually something that the government was criticized for when
they did announce this inquiry was why aren't you including the decisions made by the state and territory governments?
Interesting?
I also just want to mention that it was fully independent. So it wasn't the government looking into the government, or the labor government looking into coalition government.
It's different governments.
Yeah, it was done completely independently.
It was done by experts in public health, government and economic policy.
Okay, so last September they said that they would like this report to be written and these independent writers are going to put it together. That report is now with us and anyone can read it. What does it say?
So it was a nine hundred page report, nice and brief. Yeah, it was very fun reading for my Tuesday night. It was really extensive so I'll go through some of the high level findings.
First, I want to mention.
That although it did get to what did not go right, and that was a large part of the report, it did acknowledge that Australia was quote unquote recognized globally for our response. And they said that although we lost too many lives, we also saved thousands, and they said this needs to be understood as we do reflect in terms of what could have been done better. I'd say one of the big findings was that trust has been eroded.
They used those words a lot, that trust has been eroded, and they said that the population today are broadly more skeptical and more critical of government decision making because of how the decisions were made in response to the pandemic. And they said that the way to fix this is by increasing transparency over how decisions are made and specifically sharing the evidence that the decisions they are making are based on.
When we talk about this a lot in talking about the early days of TDA, because this was kind of one of the first times where young Australians at least in our generation, had to really understand how government decisions are being made. Because it mattered about whether you could see your partner or whether you needed a vaccine, and there was a renewed sense of curiosity as to how the sausage is made in the government, and that's obviously reflected here.
Yeah said that the lack of letting the public know about why the decisions were being made has resulted in the public having less trust in the government at a broad level.
I want to read out.
This quote from the report's conclusion that I think really sums up their findings. So the authors said, quote, many of the measures taken during COVID nineteen are unlikely to be accepted by the population. Again, that means there is a job to be done to rebuild trust and we must plan a response based on the Australia we are today,
not the Australia we were before the pandemic. I know this is audio and that hearing someone read out quotes isn't the most compelling, but it I do think that the quote in this report were very compelling and very strong. There was no minxing their words, so I'll just quickly read out a little bit more. They said, quote, we cannot predict when the next global health crisis will occur.
It may occur at any time in twelve months, in a decade, or beyond our lifetime, but history tells us that it will occur, and it will once again test us in ways that are hard to imagine. They also added, next time, we cannot say it was unprecedented.
I take back my comment about that being soothing. That's quite disconcerting and really strong. Did the report go into how COVID impacted different groups of people differently.
Yeah, went into that quite a bit, and I think a lot of what it outlined is what we would have suspected from you know, anecdotal evidence, but it really confirmed that in really concrete terms. So one example is that it looked at how the pandemic affected women's health, and it found that nearly half of women delayed accessing
at least one health service during restrictions. It also said that more generally women suffered poorer mental health during the pandemic compared to men, and also that women's labor force participation was disproportionately negatively affected.
Wow, but that's just one group of people.
It had a whole list of how it affected different people differently. Sample It also found that people with disability were quote overwhelmingly feeling afraid and forgotten in the pandemic response. It also had a significant impact on the social and emotional development of children.
And young people.
For older Australians, it said that isolation was a big issue, and again there was a whole lot more there, but it was really.
Interesting and it's also really important for the future and for future governments, as they say, next year, next ten is next lifetime to look at how this impacts different groups in society. And there was actually a quote from Mark Butler, who's the current Health Minister during the week he said Australia is less prepared for a pandemic now than we were in twenty twenty. Was that from the report?
No, so that wasn't from the report.
That was from a press conference that Mark Butler did after the report was handed down. But that stuck out to me as well. When he said that, I thought, why are we in a worse position?
You know, haven't we learned?
But I guess that is what this whole report is about. He did explain why he said that. He said, a our healthcare system is a lot more burnt out than it was prior to the pandemic. He also said that the Australian government is in a lot more debt than it was prior to the pandemic. And also he said that the people who were in the positions that got us through that pandemic are no longer in those positions and so that compromises our resilience.
But that is why again this report is happening.
So the report basically paints this picture of a period relatively unprecedented where a lot of mistakes were made. Australia did relatively okay in the world, but there's ways to do it better. What are those ways, according to the report.
So overall, there were nine recommendations that the report made and they also made twenty six short and long term what they called actions to improve Australia's response. One recommendation was developing a national plan for the next pandemic and that would include the possible health, economic and social response. They also recommended reviewing the effectiveness of some economic support measures because it said the health crisis quickly became an
economic crisis, which we are all very familiar with. And one of the big recommendations was to develop something called a Center for Disease Control.
And when I saw this, I thought, God, there's an opportunity to not name it exactly the same as the one in the US, because that's the one in America, right, Yeah, the one.
In the US is called the Center's Centers plural for Disease Control and Prevention.
It's always bigger in America. But what does I mean? Obviously there's an international precedence here, but what would this new center or centers actually do?
Yeah, well, just quickly, you mentioned that there's international precedents. What I didn't know that Mark Butler said in his press conference yesterday is that prior to the pandemic, Australia was the only developed country that didn't have this Center for Disease Control or an equivalent organization. I found that so interesting.
Well, I guess the senior health figure we were looking to besides the Health Minister Greg Hunt at the time, was the chief Medical Officer, who was Paul Keller. And so this center would probably kind of take the control away from a government appointed doctor to more this is experts on just diseases and how they spread.
Yeah, so this would be a national public health body that is responsible for ensuring Australia is prepared for a future pandemic.
Interesting.
I'm hoping that we'll never have to hear from this body in the future. But what this report was really clear in saying is that there will be a future health emergency and we need to be prepared and this body is the answer to that. So the government told us on Tuesday that the body will launch in January twenty twenty six, so in a year and a couple of months from now.
You're absolutely right, that's a body that I don't think we want to be talking about on this podcast anytime soon. But nonetheless, I think that if it seems to be the way that modern health systems are dealing with upcoming emergencies of this kind of nature, that it seems like something to have in the talkit rather than not. Billy, thank you for explaining that nine hundred page report to us on today's podcast. Thank you, and thank you for
joining us on The Daily Odds today. If you liked what you heard, I'd love if you could jump on our YouTube. That's where we're trying to play with some new stuff. You can click follow on our channel and that really helps us grow to an entirely new audience so more people can learn what nine hundred page reports say that's all we've got for you today, though we'll be back again tomorrow.
My name is Lily Maddon and I'm a proud Arunda Bunjelung Caalcutin woman from Gadighl country. The Daily oz acknowledges that this podcast is recorded on the lands of the Gadighl people and pays respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island and nations. We pay our respects to the first peoples of these countries, both past and present.