AUSTRALIA’S PANDEMIC: ASSESSING OUR ECONOMIC AND PUBLIC HEALTH RESPONSES – RICHARD HOLDEN

Richard Holden is Professor of Economics at UNSW Business School and President of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia. Co-author, with Stephen Hamilton, of Australia’s Pandemic Exceptionalism. On Wednesday 14 May 2025, Richard Holden addressed The Sydney Institute to outline the good and bad in Australia’s response to the Covid pandemic explaining that while we bounded out of the blocks at the start, grave failings on vaccines and testing meant we stumbled, escaping the pandemic many months later than other countries and plunging us into unnecessary lockdowns.

AUSTRALIA’S PANDEMIC: ASSESSING OUR ECONOMIC AND PUBLIC HEALTH RESPONSES

RICHARD HOLDEN

The starting point when discussing anything about a pandemic is this: pandemics really suck. And it’s relative to that counterfactual that we must judge how they are handled.

My broad view about how Australia handled the pandemic is summed up in my book with Steve Hamilton Australia’s Pandemic Exceptionalism: How we Crushed the Curve but Lost the Race. We did incredibly well, at least initially, on the public health front. Then we bungled our purchase of vaccines in a way that I still struggle to understand. This was almost surely the largest public policy mistake in Australian history, and it cost us dearly. Economically and socially. And it was completely obvious in real time, not with the benefit of hindsight. I know because I wrote about it at the time and got yelled at by members of the government.

On the economic front we did incredibly well. A Coalition government that had originally been elected on the back of phrases like “debt and deficit” enacted, almost overnight, a program of economic supports totaling a third-of-a-trillion dollars.

On the weekend before, Treasurer Josh Frydenberg announced the JobKeeper wage subsidy program he spoke to John Howard. He recollected:

I told him what we were doing and that it was expected to cost $130 billion. And he said, “You know, Josh, at times of national crisis, there are no ideological constraints.” John Howard’s approval, as Australia’s second-longest-serving Prime Minister and someone I greatly respect, was important to me.

In the remainder of this address I will document the facts of Australia’s pandemic performance, and put those facts in the context of the challenge we faced. I’ll then talk about what was so good about our economic response, before turning to what was so bad about our vaccine purchasing strategy.

I’ll then turn to some important related issues. How we handled schools. The Melbourne hotel quarantine problems. And, finally, I’ll address the issue of whether our economic response triggered the subsequent surge in inflation. I’ll conclude by offering some thoughts about how we handle the next pandemic. And, yes, I’m afraid there will be a next pandemic.

How we did

When Australia reopened to international travel on 1 November 2021, we had 71 deaths per million, compared with 2202 in the United States, 2492 in the United Kingdom and 1425 in Sweden. South Korea’s deaths per million was 55 at a comparable time, and New Zealand’s was a remarkable 5.4 per million. By that point 1866 Australians had died due to COVID-19. But, had Australia experienced America’s death rate, nearly 58,000 Australians would have died – 56,000 Australians were alive who otherwise would not have been. Australia was among a tiny trio of countries that passed the pandemic’s ultimate test: saving lives.

Meanwhile, Australia’s economic performance was also among the strongest in the world. With a third of a trillion dollars (or 16 per cent of GDP) of well-designed and implemented fiscal measures, as well as support from monetary policy in the form of a lower cash rate and substantial quantitative easing, the Australian economy essentially shrugged off this massive shock.

Unemployment peaked at just 7.5 per cent in July 2020 and had returned to below its pre-pandemic level of 5.1 per cent just ten months later. The employment-to-population ratio, which also accounts for participation in the labour market, fell just 4.4 percentage points – less than half as much as in the United States. Within a year, it had returned to its pre-pandemic level and now is well above it. Far from permanently disenfranchising a generation of workers, Australia’s economic performance has drawn millions of new workers in. This is against a backdrop of Treasury warning in March 2020 of a possible fall in June-quarter GDP of 20 per cent and an increase in unemployment to 15 per cent.

The challenge

The fundamental public health challenge posed by the pandemic was keeping the virus from spreading exponentially. That meant doing two things. The first was to make sure that we weren’t importing infections from overseas. This required closing the border to foreign nationals and ensuring that any Australians returning went into quarantine. That quarantine period would, ideally, mean that if people entering Australia were infected, authorities would have sufficient time to deal with this without those infections spreading. The second was to make sure that whatever cases already were in Australia didn’t start spreading out of control. This required imposing movement restrictions on the broader population.

The task really was that straightforward, at least in principle. The virus spreads exponentially when each infected person passes it to at least one other person on average. And the virus dies out when they don’t. These are the only two possibilities. Australia chose wisely, for the entirety of the pandemic before near-universal vaccination coverage was achieved, for the latter to be the objective of its health policy settings. In the initial phase of the pandemic, that meant widescale lockdowns to bring the spread under control. In later phases, after we had effectively achieved COVID-zero, the approach could be refined to be less blunt and more targeted in most places for most of the time. That’s how a country is supposed to manage a pandemic, and for the most part that’s how Australia did it.

Of course, if you lived in Melbourne this is not the perspective you would have. And you’d be right. The Melbourne experience was wrenching for the millions of people involved. It was also entirely avoidable, stemming from a strikingly bad decision about how to manage hotel quarantine. I’ll come back to this later. The Melbourne experience was made worse by arbitrary, non-scientific decisions. Preventing people from sitting alone on a park bench, closing children’s playgrounds and enforcing nightly curfews were questionable at best, provided unclear public health benefits, and surely eroded public trust. They were a Petrie dish for breeding conspiracy theories.

The economic challenge the pandemic posed was very different to a traditional recession, such as the financial crisis of 2008. In a traditional recession, a collapse in demand generates a large increase in unemployment. I stop spending to protect my household balance sheet. That affects your income, so you stop spending to protect your household balance sheet. And we get trapped in a bad equilibrium. A kind of macroeconomic prisoners’ dilemma.

The only way out of the bad equilibrium is for the government to solve this coordination problem. The central bank cuts interest rates and the treasury enacts large-scale fiscal stimulus. This is what people mean when they speak of “Keynesian stimulus”.

That’s what the Rudd government in 2008, enacting more than $50 billion in fiscal stimulus, alongside aggressive interest-rate cuts from the Reserve Bank. The Kevin Rudd-Ken Henry stimulus prevented Australia from falling into recession, maintaining its streak of uninterrupted economic growth since the early 1990s.

But in 2020, Australia faced a very different type of economic crisis. In late March 2020, virtually overnight, much of the economy effectively shut down. This happened either by government mandate or people did so voluntarily out of fear of the virus (what I described at the time as the “self lockdown”). This had ripple effects on demand throughout the economy. All of this played out unevenly across different sectors of the economy. Some sectors would shut entirely, while others would experience booming demand, shortages and rising prices.

The fact that so many sectors of the economy were out of action meant traditional fiscal stimulus wouldn’t work. One can’t reinflate a shut-down economy. The 2008 Rudd-Henry approach wouldn’t work in these circumstances. Giving people money to spend doesn’t help a business that is closed. Overnight a raft of business – particularly small businesses – would shutter, laying off workers en masse.

This would transform what should be a temporary crisis, caused by a pause in activity while the virus was brought under control, into permanent damage to the economy. Much of the “firm-specific capital” embodied in those firms would disappear. The valuable “matches” between workers and firms that support productivity would evaporate. And workers detached from their employers may be shut out of the labour market indefinitely, in what economists call “labour market scarring”, a phenomenon observed in the early 1990s recession in Australia.

Unlike in 2008, there was no playbook for policymakers about how to deal with a pandemic. They had to formulate a response immediately that was both of sufficient magnitude and tailored to the unique circumstances. It’s remarkable that they did so well.

This unusual recession required an unusual set of fiscal measures. Instead of broad cash stimulus, the focus was on providing financial support to vulnerable businesses tied to keeping their workers on the payroll. The idea was to support these businesses and their workers through the temporary period of reduced activity until the virus could be brought under control. Meanwhile, generous unemployment benefits would be provided to support those workers who were laid off—but not so generous as to encourage them to quit. This was a tricky balancing act. The hope was that the economy would be more-or-less the same on the other side of the crisis. In the end, it would turn out to be even better on many measures. And before you say “what about inflation”, let be pre-emptively say “Noted. I’ll come back to that.”

Vaccines: How we Lost the Race

The first case of COVID-19 arrived in Australia on 19 January 2020. But the beginning of the end of what would become the COVID-19 pandemic occurred just over a week earlier on January 11. It was on that day that a consortium led by Professor Yong-Zhen Zhang at Fudan University in Shanghai announced to the world – via a tweet by University of Sydney professor Eddie Holmes – that they had sequenced the coronavirus genome from the Wuhan outbreak.

In that DNA sequence lay the building blocks of vaccines against the virus, and with it what would turn a once-in-a-century pandemic into a comparatively routine public health challenge. The journey from a collection of bases that began “attaaaggtt” to near-universal jabs in arms had plenty of steps in between. And those steps weren’t simple. Vaccines had to be developed, tested in three different phases of clinical trials, manufactured, distributed and injected. The challenge for policymakers around the world was to transform those steps from being complicated to being inevitable. They needed to convert mass vaccination from a possibility into a certainty.

The good news for Australian policymakers was that the hard parts of this process were either already done, or being done remarkably effectively overseas. Way back in 2005 Drew Weissman and Katalin Karikó from the University of Pennsylvania had developed a technique to produce customised “messenger ribonucleic acid” (mRNA) that could instruct cells in the human body to produce any sequence of proteins that scientists wanted. They had patented this technique in 2006—and that patent was eventually licensed to Pfizer and Moderna to create the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines.

On 15 May 2020 President Donald Trump announced “Operation Warp Speed” to coordinate and accelerate the development of COVID-19 vaccines. This provided US$11 billion in funding to eight companies to develop and test vaccines. And, crucially, it included so-called “advance purchase agreements” whereby the US government would pledge to purchase a certain amount of the vaccines once they were developed, tested, and approved by the Food and Drug Administration. In July 2020, the US government placed an advance purchase order of US$2 billion with Pfizer for 100 million doses of its vaccine.

As early as April 2020, Bill Gates pointed out that manufacturing facilities needed to be put in place while the vaccines were being developed, rather than waiting to discover which vaccines would work and then scaling up specific facilities. As he put it:

We aren’t sure which vaccines will be the most effective yet, and each requires unique technology to make. That means nations need to invest in many different kinds of manufacturing facilities now, knowing that some will never be used. Otherwise, we’ll waste months after the lab develops an immunisation, waiting for the right manufacturer to scale up.

Indeed, the Gates Foundation committed hundreds of millions of dollars to do exactly this – build the vaccine supply chain even before there was vaccine supply.

So, between two Ivy League scientists, the former host of American reality TV show The Apprentice and the world’s second-richest man, the critical elements of successful vaccines had been put in place. There was vaccine development to be done and clinical trials to be run, but the table had been set and drug manufacturers had powerful commercial incentives to move quickly and effectively.

What then, one might well ask, was there left for Australia to do? Three things. First, we had to purchase a sufficient and timely supply of whichever vaccine would turn out to be the most effective. Second, we had to convince the Australian public to get vaccinated. And third, we needed to quickly and efficiently get jabs into arms. All three elements were essential for Australia to exit the pandemic. On this test for policymakers there was no partial credit. They had to nail all three.

What the Australian public got from its leaders was a stellar performance on the second and third elements, and abject failure on the first. Since we needed all three, ultimately our government failed us.

This failure unnecessarily prolonged the pandemic in Australia. It cost hundreds of lives. And the additional lockdowns it necessitated cost the nation more than $30 billion in direct economic costs alone—and billions more in indirect costs. It was a failure that was immortalised in one, succinct, memorable and profoundly stupid phrase from Prime Minister Scott Morrison. On 10 March 2021, Morrison said of the vaccine rollout, “This is not a race.” He went on to repeat that phrase four times that month.

But it was a race. It was a race to end the pandemic. It was a race to save Australian lives and to reopen the economy. It was a race to put lockdowns behind us. And it was a race that we could have won, but failed to because of poor preparation, bureaucratic failure and an absence of political leadership. Both sadly and ironically, it was – to borrow the phrase commonly used to describe one of Australia’s most iconic sporting events – “the race that stopped the nation.”

Once Australia did get moving, our vaccination rates were world leading. As late as June 2021, Australia had hardly vaccinated anyone, and severely lagged behind countries like the United States and Israel. By October – just four months later – Australia had erased that deficit and continued to vaccinate more and more of the population.

Yet, for far too long, Australia’s vaccination rate was dismal.

Yet, for far too long, Australia’s vaccination rate was dismal. The population-weighted average vaccination rate among advanced economies (the 38 OECD countries) was well above Australia’s for the greater part of 2021. Shockingly, in mid 2021 just 6 per cent of the population had been vaccinated, compared to the average among OECD countries of 32 per cent. For more than two months in 2021 Australia had the very worst vaccination record among all OECD countries. We weren’t first. We weren’t among the best. We weren’t above average. We weren’t a bit below average. We were stone-cold last. We did worse than Mexico, Turkey and Portugal, to name just a few countries with far lower levels of economic development and traditionally far less functional administrative states.

If you find this hard to believe, you are not alone. When we mentioned that we were last in the OECD to one of Australia’s leading journalists, they just didn’t believe it. In fact, without prompting they reminded us that Mexico was a member of the OECD and disputed that we could possibly be doing worse than Mexico. But we were.

Australia did not face significant vaccine hesitancy – something that dogged other countries, like the U.S. We didn’t have any serious politician expressing the view that Australians shouldn’t be vaccinated. We had a long history of compulsory vaccination against childhood diseases like measles, mumps and rubella. Evidently, we had a government willing to marshal massive economic resources to combat the pandemic.

But we pursued a flawed vaccine strategy from the very start. Rather than ensure a large supply of all the possible vaccines, we gambled on just two. We pinched pennies instead of buying insurance at a time when insurance was incredibly cheap and the risks we faced were extremely large. We confused industry policy with health policy in trying to back the University of Queensland vaccine and the manufacturing capabilities of CSL. When it came to our vaccine procurement strategy, we did everything wrong. And this isn’t just obvious with 20:20 hindsight. It was abundantly clear at the time. Getting the vaccine purchasing strategy right didn’t require specialised medical knowledge or negotiating prowess. All it required is the sort of basic economic logic that is taught to first-year undergraduates.

Schools

Few areas of pandemic policy presented a sharper trade-off than schools. Schools were closed in many parts of the country early in the pandemic but had been reopened everywhere by early June 2020. Later in the pandemic, closures would begin again in response to outbreaks in different parts of Australia. This led to very different lengths of school closures across the country. For instance, in the period from the start of the pandemic until late May 2021, students in South Australia missed just four days of school, while students in New South Wales missed 30 days, and in Melbourne (for Grade 9 students) 109 days.

There’s no doubt that the school closures – even in the first wave – were unfortunate, unpleasant, harmful to kids’ learning outcomes and harmful to parents’ productivity. Many Melbourne parents in particular would rightly complain that their kids missed a lot of school over this period. And they might be inclined to blame what they perceive to have been Australia’s over-zealous COVID-zero fanaticism for the lockdowns and associated school closures. But, in truth, Melbourne schools were closed for roughly the same number of days through 20 May 2021 as in the average OECD country. Sydney’s school closure days were among the very lowest in the OECD. Had we abandoned our strategy, school closures were likely to have been even worse. Even so we should have adapted.

It was clear reasonably early that the threat of COVID-19 to children was significantly lower than for other age groups. It was and still is a disease that disproportionately took the lives of older people

What drove school closures wasn’t so much the harm to students themselves, but the potential for schools be a vector of transmission. Anyone who has raised little kids and sent them off to childcare or primary school understands this. There was a notion early in the pandemic that it was hard for kids to transmit the virus to other kids. The early evidence on this came from a very small sample of households and became conventional wisdom based more on supposition than anything else. But the reality was that transmission among children could indeed occur. At the same time, keeping schools open was incredibly important for the educational attainment of students and their parents’ ability to work.

Keeping schools open would raise R; closing them would lower it. Just as keeping bars open would raise R while closing them would lower it. School closures also imposed significant costs, including negative effects on student learning outcomes and the reduced productivity of parents having to perform full-time-carer duties. And these costs would not be borne equally across the student or parent populations, as I wrote with Rosalind Dixon on 5 July 2021 in the Sydney Morning Herald:

Shutting down schools in April 2020 while we established effective contract-tracing and testing was clearly the right call. But that doesn’t mean it was costless. Some kids learn quite effectively from home, some don’t. There is an obvious socioeconomic skew to these costs with better-resourced families able to provide a more effective and more enjoyable home-learning environment. And school closures are clearly bad for working parents. Their wellbeing and productivity both take a hit from trying to juggle home-schooling, working from home, and household duties during a pandemic. It is also clear that this has a negative gender skew. Women, on average, end up bearing more of these costs than men. They work harder and experience more stress but earn less. And the global evidence suggests that these effects can persist long after the lockdown is over.

Closing down businesses has important costs of its own, but this could be addressed with financial compensation. But the adverse effects of shutting down schools are not so easily remedied – for parents or for their children. And this is especially true for the impact it has on gender and socioeconomic equality. This means that school closures should have been at most a last resort for keeping the virus under control. As Rosalind and I wrote: “We should close almost every other indoor venue before we consider closing schools – and even then, we should pause before doing so.” Instead, in many places and at many times, it seemed to be almost the first resort.

There were of course also the completely legitimate health concerns of teachers that needed to be considered. At this point in the pandemic, not nearly enough teachers were fully vaccinated. Government should have recognised the importance of prioritising the vaccination of teachers, just as health workers had been prioritised. However, because there are so many teachers, this wasn’t going to be an easy lift.

This was another costly lesson in the consequences of our vaccine bungling. It wasn’t really a choice between schools being open or closed. Rather, we could have kept schools closed for perhaps two weeks at the start of term while teacher vaccinations were prioritised and indeed insisted upon. In the end a rich brew of bad politics, clashes with teachers’ unions, poor information, and lack of creative thinking conspired to keep our schools closed for longer than they should have been.

Melbourne Hotel Quarantine^[1]

Melbourne, sadly, experienced extremely long lockdowns. And while, over the course of the pandemic, one can point to several reasons for that, there was one that was more important than any other. The hotel quarantine debacle where private security guards were used and the nicest way to describe it is that they “misbehaved.”

What can economics tells us about why this happened? Thanks to the literature on “incomplete contracts” that led to a Nobel Prize for Harvard University economist Oliver Hart, quite a bit. Using private contractors for hotel quarantine was destined to fail. It all boils down to a trade-off between costs and quality. Using private providers is a good option when keeping costs low is more important than high quality. This was not such a case.

Hart’s classic 1997 paper on “The Proper Scope of Government” (co-authored with Andrei Shleifer and Robert Vishny) mostly considers privatisation in theoretical terms, with some discussion of prisons, garbage collection, schools, health care, policing and a few other things.

The animating idea behind the “incomplete contracts” approach is that there are some contingencies that contracts, no matter how detailed, can’t cover. This could be because parties can’t conceive of all future contingencies. Or perhaps they understand what’s at issue but it is hard to codify that in a way a non-specialist court could understand.

For instance, a famous legal case concerned the definition of a chicken, with the judge writing: “The issue is, what is chicken? Plaintiff says ‘chicken’ means a young chicken, suitable for broiling and frying. Defendant says ‘chicken’ means any bird of that genus that meets contract specifications on weight and quality …”

Philippe Aghion and I expanded on incomplete contracts and prisons as well as many other applications in the Journal of Economic Perspectives in 2011. To keep things simple, imagine there are two things someone running a prison can put effort into: reducing costs or improving quality. Improvements in quality could involve increasing rehabilitation rates, reducing violent incidents and or minimising escape risks. Lower costs lead to lower quality. For example, employing fewer guards might result in more escape attempts or prisoner-on-prisoner violence.

When the government owns the prison and employs a warden to run it, it doesn’t have to rely just on a written contract to get what it wants in terms of investment in quality. It can tell the warden what to do, and replace them if they don’t do so. If it’s serious about quality, though, the government will likely have to provide more resources. Quality costs. When a prison is privatised, the government’s control over how the operator acts is limited to its contract.

In a perfect contract, the government could stipulate how much the private contractor is allowed to reduce costs and how much it must improve quality. But these things are difficult to write into contracts. Wherever there are gaps, any contractor providing a fixed-price service will look to cut costs instead of improving quality.

So that’s the trade-off. When low cost is very important, private contracting is best. But when quality is more important, government ownership is optimal.

What’s more important in hotel quarantine during a pandemic: cost or quality? The Hart-Shelifer-Vishny framework tells us the Melbourne hotels shouldn’t have been policed by private security contractors, because the highest possible standards were paramount. Moreover, even if one could write a complete contract, it doesn’t really matter. There’s no real recourse in this case for a breach of contract. The cost is billions of dollars in damage to the economy already. What good is a contract with a bankrupt contractor?

Of course, police (and other public servants) aren’t always perfect either. But at least there is more training, a code of conduct, a sense of duty and a whole apparatus for disciplining misbehaviour.

The Victoria was destined to fail.  When high quality matters more than low cost, governments shouldn’t outsource unless absolutely necessary.

Inflation

Australia was not alone in experiencing significant post-pandemic inflation. Some of this is explained by the supply-chain kinks that took time to work out, and by the desire of people to travel, eat out and generally get back to normality upon reopening.

It’s important to note that while our fiscal supports were large, they were not as large as many other jurisdictions, and they were better structured. For instance, the US stimulus was far larger at 23 per cent of GDP versus 16 per cent in Australia, and it relied a lot more on broad cash transfers.

It’s also important to realise that successful economic management during a pandemic is an equilibrium phenomenon, and it’s binary. One either succeeds in keeping the economy in good shape, or one doesn’t. And success leads to household balance sheets that permit significant consumption upon reopening.

The real drivers of our post-pandemic inflation were twofold. First, the Reserve Bank failed to raise interest rates quickly enough and decisively enough. We started raising later than countries like the US, UK, or New Zealand. And we raised a full percentage point less than others. This was an intentional strategy from the RBA to “hold on to labour market gains”. But in my judgment, and I haven’t been shy about saying this, it was a serious mistake. It’s simply undeniable that it was inflationary.

Second, government spending expanded massively under the Albanese government. It expanded by roughly 2.5 percentage points of GDP. Anyone who tells you that isn’t inflationary is kidding themselves and misleading you. Of course, such spending is inflationary. And it is a big part of the explanation of why the price level is nearly 20 per cent higher than it was in May 2022.

In sum, it was our shoddy post-pandemic economic management that was largely responsible for our inflationary problems since mid 2022, not our outstanding pandemic economic management.

Lessons for the Next Pandemic

I don’t like to end on downbeat note, but the hard truth is that there will be another pandemic. It might not happen for another century, or it might happen very soon. And there’s a good chance it will be a respiratory virus. We need to be better prepared next time.

First, we need to have mRNA vaccine manufacturing capability in Australia. And there has been fairly good progress on this. The Moderna facility based in Clayton, Victoria will be able to produce 100 million doses per year of vaccines for respiratory viruses. And mRNA vaccines can be developed very quickly. Of course, there is still the clinical trial process to go through, and there are supply-chain issues beyond the facility itself, but domestic manufacturing is a big step forward.

Second, we need to get vaccine procurement right from the start. We should be willing to use significant amounts of taxpayers’ money to purchase what appears at first to be excessive redundancy. Not just of the Australian-produced options, but all the options. The alternative, as we saw in 2020, can be vastly more expensive.

Third, we should procure huge volumes of Rapid Antigen Tests as soon as they become available, and implement a mass testing strategy of asymptomatic people. No more elitist and crony-capitalist monopolisation of testing by allegedly “gold-standard” PCR testing. We need to be much more practically minded, focused on solving the problem we actually face.

Fourth, we need to completely overhaul our medical–regulatory complex. Even if we were never to face another pandemic, this would be important. In our book Steve and I document in almost painful detail its failings, and these haven’t gotten any better since the end of the pandemic. The composition of the medical–regulatory complex needs to change, and so does its culture. In particular, there needs to be a much better understanding of the risks of inaction and not just the risks of action.

***

The pandemic was a wrenching time for many. People were often unable to comfort loved-ones in the final moments, or to say goodbye afterward. Many children fell behind in their education. About a third of our current federal net debt is a consequence of our economic response.

And though it may be little comfort to those who suffered the most, we must keep in mind the counterfactual. We should imagine what it was like to have been in Northern Italy, or Spain, or New York City, or London during the pandemic.

The reason to make the right comparison is not to give due credit to the policymakers who served us well during the pandemic, although we should do that. It’s to remember what we did right and what we did wrong so that we can do even better next time.

If we don’t do that then we risk not having the public will to handle the next pandemic.

1. This section is based on, and quotes directly from, a 24 July 2020 article I wrote in The Conversation, available at https://theconversation.com/vital-signs-victorias-privatised-quarantine-arrangements-were-destined-to-fail-143169 ↑