Perth Indymedia

Lockdowns, travel bans, two-week mandatory quarantines. These draconian measures became all too familiar to Australians during the years of the COVID-19 pandemic. And yet, none of these 'policy levers' were part of the country's long term pandemic response planning. Addressing a collective trauma from which almost none of us have even begun to properly recover, political scientists Tom Chodor and Shahar Hameiri set out to discover just why Australia's response to COVID-19 was so badly bungled at every step, and why the rise and rise of a neoliberal regulatory state came back to haunt us amid the worst public health crisis in a hundred years.