The government’s Covid-19 inquiry, the results of which were announced this week, can be summed up in five words: ‘The Spectator Australia was right’. Indeed, whatever the cost for this inquiry and its report – and you can be sure it wasn’t peanuts – a far cheaper option to the taxpayer would have been for the Department of Health to simply take out an annual subscription to this august publication.

Fo three ghastly years, The Spectator Australia stood alone against virtually the entire Australian media insisting, among other things, that: there already existed potential successful (and inexpensive) remedies against the coronavirus that were worth exploring; following the closing of the national borders in early 2020 there was no point in further locking down individual states or indeed locking down the citizenry other than to protect nursing homes and the elderly; school lockdowns were a disgrace and would have deleterious effects on young people, including likely mental health problems; QR codes and other such digital restrictions were an anathema to a free society; mandating that shopkeepers and small business people enforce draconian bureaucratic measures was egregious; censoring and punishing the free speech and opinions of those who dissented against lockdown measures and mandates was an abomination; our state premiers and their chief health officers were almost universally second-rate bureaucrats whose advice many of us probably wouldn’t bother seeking even for an ingrown toenail; the national cabinet was an obscenity and nothing more than the federal government avoiding accountability at the same time as handing ludicrous and unwarranted powers to the state apparatchiks; the wide-ranging JobKeeper cash splash was ill thought through and would prove to be an unforgivable waste of billions of dollars, plunging us back into the red, distorting the economy for years to come and blowing to smithereens the Coalition’s hard-won economic credentials; vaccine mandates were a fundamental abuse of human rights and in direct contradiction to global public health and Western government protocols established after the vile activities of the Nazis during the second world war; mRNA vaccines could not prevent transmission and therefore mandating them made no sense; in the cost-risk balance, there was an unacceptable risk in taking the experimental vaccines to all but the elderly or compromised; there was a possibility that the vaccines were leading to excess mortality; and that all of the above would lead to a dramatic loss of trust in our governments that would take decades to overcome.

Of the above rather lengthy list, the last point was the only one that the inquiry focused on, noting the need for governments to ‘rebuild trust’ with the public and that ‘many of the measures taken during Covid-19 (were) unlikely to be accepted by the population again’. According to the report, Covid restrictions became ‘increasingly inappropriate’ and too ‘heavy-handed and controlling’. According to Health Minister Mark Butler, ‘trust (in the government and bureaucracy) is easily lost, hard to regain’. Quite.

Under its terms of reference the Covid-19 inquiry was supposed to avoid looking into the state governments’ actions and to limit itself to reporting on Canberra’s actions. This was a blatantly political exercise, designed to throw mud at Scott Morrison and his Coalition government. And it landed at the predictable but insane recommendation that the solution to all of the problems of Covid was not less government and fewer bureaucrats but more government and more centralised health bureaucracy. Depressingly, the report insists on the establishment of an Australian Centre for Disease Control (CDC), similar to the American counterpart the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. This is a farce; the American CDC was largely responsible for almost everything that went wrong during Covid, especially the draconian measures and authoritarian censorship.

The sad reality of this situation is that an Australian CDC, staffed by denizens of the Canberra swamp, would in all likelihood simply rubber stamp the decisions of the unelected World Health Organisation and its socialist, authoritarian diktats. In other words, the last thing Australia needs.