Covid Policies: Two Years and Too Few Answers

If vaccines are of any interest to you, you would by now know of Queensland Supreme Court’s decision which held that Queensland police’s mandatory COVID-19 vaccination policy for employees was ‘unlawful’, and a similar policy by Queensland’s ambulance service was ‘ineffective’. Naturally, this will have ramifications for similar disputes that are underway across the nation, with teachers, nurses, frontline workers and more who were dismissed from their government jobs for refusing to be vaccinated for COVID-19 challenging the decision. What has been revealed so far is how little thought public servants gave to life-changing decisions they was asking others to take during the pandemic emergency. 

Here’s the kicker. The Court didn’t rule the directive by former Queensland Police Commissioner Katerina Carroll (who resigned recently) was unlawful because it wrongfully impacted the human rights of the police officers but because Commissioner Carroll didn’t even bother to properly consider whether it would or not in the first place. 

See also No jab, no nob, no basis is in law

This was no small decision. It led to the loss of livelihood of police officers who – regardless of their views on COVID-19 vaccine – had nevertheless served the force with dedication and professionalism. One would think she would feel some duty of care towards them when making decisions about taking away their employment. Her testimony speaks for itself. 

I recommend downloading the decision and reading pages 29 to 42 (it is quite readable). It deals with her cross-examination about how she arrived at the decision that police officers who refuse to be vaccinated should be dismissed. Here’s what Judge Martin had to say about one of the most senior public servants in Australia: 

Unfortunately, she [Commissioner Carroll] did not appear to have given her evidence much thought before she entered the witness box. Her recollection was poor and she seemed unfamiliar with some of the documents which were at the heart of the case. She frequently had to peruse documents, sometimes at length, and sometimes when she was being asked questions unrelated to any documents. (page 32)

It is a polite way of saying the former Police Commissioner (for reasons known only to her) appeared to put minimal effort into preparing or delivering a professional articulation of what had occurred under her watch. Specifically, she seemed unable to explain how she arrived at the decision that would leave numbers of police members unemployed. 

On page 37, the decision discusses how at the time of making this directive, the pandemic had been in existence for more than 18 months and yet the Commissioner didn’t have any information about:

♦ Whether any police officer who had contracted COVID-19 had transmitted it to other police officers

♦ The numbers of police officers who had contracted COVID-19 and transmitted it to members of the community, and

♦ The numbers of police officers who had contracted COVID-19 from members of the community in the course of their duties. 

The documents she relied on as modelling were, according to the judge, ‘nothing of the sort’ and ‘said nothing about the risk of police officers contracting or transmitting COVID-19’.  (page 37)

Commissioner Carroll claimed that she considered one of the benefits of her mandatory vaccination directive to be ‘savings in indirect costs, such as loss of productivity and economic loss suffered as a result of police officers and staff members contracting the virus and developing COVID-19’. Yet, her cross-examination revealed that she hadn’t even tried to quantify these claimed savings. (page 37)

On the stand, the Commissioner frequently justified her decision to be informed via important ‘briefings’ and high level ‘meetings’ she was having in which this issue was discussed – things of which there is little evidentiary trail. On this Judge Martin remarked: 

Her evidence about the decision-making process is consistent – she was reluctant to commit to having read particular documents, she frequently could not recall how she received information or what that information was, and she frequently evaded these issues by referring in a vague way to briefings, discussions, summaries and the like. (page 41)

Is it any wonder Queensland has seen youth crime soar? 

(I focus on Commissioner Carroll’s cross-examination because Dr Wakefield of Queensland Ambulance Services never took the stand to explain his decision-making, but the ambulance service doesn’t come out smelling of roses either.)

Regardless of where we stand on lockdowns and vaccines, we should all be interested to know whether senior public servants, who were given immense powers, arrived at decisions with due care and that they acted with professionalism at all times. We now know the Victorian government spent millions of taxpayer dollars on public polling in deciding when to lift the lockdowns – its most contentious and destructive Covid policy. It was not based solely on mere health advice, as claimed at the time. What other factors played into the government’s response? 

We are all still living through the consequences of decisions made during the pandemic in form of severe shortages of staff across teaching, nursing, police and other government services, loss of learning among children, liquidation of businesses, ballooning debt and cracks in social cohesion that have just not refilled two years since the pandemic officially ended. 

A royal commission into the response to Covid leading up to the 2022 state elections needs to take place. There are far too many questions and far too few answers. 

Nick McGowan is the Liberal member for  the North Eastern Region in Victoria’s upper house