Lockdown charts Victoria’s pandemic response, from the first case of Covid-19 in Melbourne’s south-east and the spread of the virus into aged care and out of hotel quarantine, to the so-called border wars, the vaccine mess, and the six lockdowns Melburnians endured because of all this. It takes us right up to our present moment, which some call ‘post-pandemic’, when ‘the massive bureaucracy built to administer and enforce our public health response has been disassembled’. There is a narrative trajectory to the book which Melburnians will be all too familiar with; what is more interesting, however, is the way Le Grand fills the gaps to show just how we ended up where we did and why we were so willing to accept it.

The book blends analysis with anecdote and personal accounts with expert testimony and post-facto interviews with the decision makers to give a well-rounded picture of those unprecedented times. The approach is even-handed, if tilted slightly against the Andrews government, never straying too far from the official line that governments did their best in response to an unknown situation, while at the same time acknowledging that their best was far from good enough. Le Grand starts from the premise that in controlling the rates of infection and death, Australia’s approach was a success compared with other countries. Victoria’s approach, however, ‘remains a bitterly contested story’. At best, the decision to lock down a city for months on end was a ‘radical policy prescription’ designed to save lives; at worst, an ill-considered and overreaching quest for the white whale of Covid zero dreamt up by scientists obsessed with modelling and enacted by politicians obsessed with power.

Interestingly, the Victorian government did not plan to use lockdowns as the primary means to control the virus, with public health officials urging caution because of the broader social and ethical implications. Le Grand describes the government’s justification for its use of lockdowns as ‘powerful and simple’. Without the extreme measures taken, many more lives would have been lost. While this may be a ‘fair assessment of Melbourne’s pandemic experience’, the end did not necessarily justify the means. To justify its actions, the government relied heavily on ‘crude’ modelling, meaning that Melburnians would spend months ‘confined by some of the world’s most severe COVID restrictions, for a crisis which never arrived’. Add to this a growing culture of risk aversion among politicians and public health experts and you have a situation where our ‘initial understanding of the disease was skewed by a necessary and unavoidable focus on the critically ill and dying’.

The turning point, according to  Le Grand, was the adoption in Victoria of an ‘absurd’ elimination strategy. As he points out, if elimination ‘was never a possibility, much less seriously contemplated’ in European countries, why did it dictate policy in Victoria, and how did it become the single driving impetus behind our response? Further, why, when lockdowns supposedly bought us time
to shore up the public health system, improve contact tracing, and even produce a vaccine locally, were we still in lockdown? For Le Grand, when Victoria ‘set itself on the path to COVID-zero’, it ‘abandoned proportionality’. What he calls ‘a form of public-health zealotry’ resulted in the ‘banning of activities that carried no practical risk’. Even the World Health Organisation didn’t favour rolling lockdowns as a means of dealing with the virus. Its suggested strategy was ‘test, trace and isolate’. Lockdowns have their place but should not be the sole means for controlling a virus.

These were dark times for many and a low point in governance which functioned by instilling terror less over the virus than over the consequences of flouting at times ridiculous and arbitrary embargoes such as curfews and the closure of playgrounds, ‘enforced by an overt police presence and the threat of fines’. What was lacking for Le Grand was agency, something he discovered in a trip to Tokyo to cover the 2020 Olympics. Japan’s constitution prevents governments from compelling the public to follow health directives; it can only encourage them to do so, for the greater good. Initially, Commonwealth and state governments here were split over whether people would willingly comply with control measures or need to be compelled. New South Wales went down the former path, Victoria the latter, although once Covid zero became a political rather than a health goal, New South Wales soon followed Victoria’s lead: ‘when people feel panicked about a potentially lethal virus, there is little political downside for leaders who favour hard-and-fast restrictions’. Le Grand’s experience in Japan revealed to him the ‘paternalism at the heart of our pandemic response’.

What Le Grand calls the ‘trauma of our long COVID winter of 2020’ was ultimately the result of three things: a ‘degraded’ and underfunded public health system, a woefully mismanaged hotel quarantine program, and the ‘basket case’ state of aged care in Australia. If Victorians in general, and Melburnians in particular, felt as though they were being punished for crimes they didn’t commit, it is because they were. For most of us, the trauma of the lockdowns has faded. The virus ‘isn’t something to be feared anymore’, even though it ‘remains a constant, unwelcome presence in our lives’. Fears of imminent lockdowns have also faded, and it is clear the Andrews government has no plans to resort to them again, at least in the lifetime of the current pandemic. In short, everyone wants to forget, and this is why Le Grand’s book is both timely and important.