Dead wrong, all along in Covid response

THE thing about the truth is that it always comes out. It may take years, decades or even centuries, but reality has a way of asserting itself. Lies inevitably fall apart. And so more than 2½ years after Covid-19 first came to Australian shores the truth has finally emerged about our various governments’ response to it and the lies have been exposed. Lockdowns were wrong. School closures were wrong. Border closures were wrong. Poor people were hurt the most.

These are the findings of the first and so far only full inquiry into Australia’s response to Covid, an independent review funded by three major philanthropic organisations and headed by Peter Shergold, previously the most senior public servant in the country and now Western Sydney University chancellor.

They are unequivocal, they are damning and they are almost word for word exactly what I and a few other brave souls have been saying from the very beginning of the pandemic. As I have been shouting from every platform I can since 2020, the most egregious act was that committed against our children – the mass shutdown of schools on the basis of no evidence whatsoever.

To their eternal shame, state premiers and chief health officers were complicit in this. They were wrong and they caused untold damage that will be immeasurable and long-lasting. The inquiry makes this crystal clear. “Schools should have stayed open,” the almost 100page report found.

Moreover the school closures were “likely to have significant adverse impacts on children’s outcomes in education, social development and mental and physical health”.

In regards to lockdowns and border closures and other restrictions it found they were effectively inhumane and should only have been used as a “last resort” – not the trigger-happy response of state and territory governments, for which they were cheered on by their acolytes.

And as the SMH and Age reported, it was poorer communities who were hardest hit, especially by the school closures. The papers cited a Mitchell Institute study finding that one in five children in lower socioeconomic postcodes did not have access to a laptop or computer at home and a survey of NSW teachers in 2020 found that only 18 per cent of teachers in low socio-economic status schools had confidence that their students were learning well from remote classes.

This is nothing short of a national disgrace and yet we were warned about it.

They were wrong, dead wrong. Not only the decision-makers who awarded themselves close to messianic status – with powers to match – but the frothing mobs that cheered them on.

And yet anyone who disagreed with them was hounded with such ferocity many have abandoned social media. But history will remember them and history will judge them and history will not be on their side. Because now the truth is here.

Not out there, but right here, right now. And the truth always wins.