More than six years after the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis, the argument about Australia's pandemic response is no longer principally about what governments should have done in the frightening and uncertain opening weeks of 2020. The more important question is whether Australians will ever receive a genuinely independent accounting of what governments subsequently did, why they did it, what evidence supported their decisions and whether the extraordinary restrictions imposed upon ordinary life remained proportionate as knowledge of the virus developed.
Professor Ian Brighthope, writing with litigation lawyer Katie Ashby-Koppens, argues that Australia has so far been denied that reckoning. Their comparison with New Zealand is particularly interesting because New Zealand actually established a Royal Commission. Yet their conclusion is not simply that Australia should copy New Zealand. It is that the New Zealand experience demonstrates something more fundamental: calling an investigation a Royal Commission does not itself guarantee that the powerful will be held accountable. Everything depends upon the terms of reference, the commissioners, the evidence admitted, the witnesses compelled to appear and, ultimately, the willingness of an inquiry to ask uncomfortable questions.
New Zealand's inquiry proceeded in two phases. Brighthope and Ashby-Koppens are critical of aspects of both. They argue that Phase One remained broadly favourable towards the initial pandemic response despite acknowledging that some restrictions continued too long and inflicted substantial social and economic costs. They also point to the involvement of Voices for Freedom, whose participation produced the interesting acknowledgement, according to their account, that the organisation represented a significant minority and had published a considerable amount of scientifically accurate material.
A change of government produced a broader second phase. Voices for Freedom helped develop proposed terms of reference and produced what it called The People's Position, setting out evidence and questions it believed decision-makers should be required to answer. Its experts subsequently spent about nine hours presenting evidence. Yet Brighthope and Ashby-Koppens argue that the fundamental accountability problem remained. Important political and public-sector decision-makers did not give evidence publicly, and although the Commission possessed coercive powers, it did not compel them to appear publicly and answer questions.
That goes to the heart of their argument. An inquiry can possess impressive formal powers while failing to employ them where they matter most. It can collect mountains of evidence, publish thousands of pages and still avoid the central confrontation between those who exercised extraordinary power and those demanding that the exercise of that power be justified.
The New Zealand experience is therefore presented as a warning rather than a model. A Royal Commission can be constrained by its terms of reference. Commissioners can adopt deferential rather than adversarial approaches to witnesses. Important evidence can receive little attention. Questions can remain unasked. An institution established to investigate government can, intentionally or otherwise, become another mechanism through which government draws a line under the past.
Against that background, Australia's response looks even less satisfactory. Australians experienced border closures, lockdowns, school closures, restrictions on businesses and movement, employment mandates and vaccine-certification systems. Governments spent enormous sums of public money and adopted emergency powers affecting millions of people. Whatever one's position on whether those policies were justified at particular stages of the pandemic, their sheer magnitude creates a powerful case for retrospective scrutiny.
Anthony Albanese acknowledged before becoming Prime Minister that an inquiry would be necessary, saying in 2022 that "whether that be a Royal Commission or some form of inquiry, that will need to happen." What his government eventually established, however, was not a Royal Commission but an independent inquiry whose terms excluded actions taken unilaterally by individual states and territories. Brighthope and Ashby-Koppens regard that exclusion as fundamental because many of the measures that most directly affected Australians were state measures.
That distinction is difficult to dismiss. Australia's pandemic response was federal in name but substantially state-driven in practice. Lockdowns, curfews, internal border restrictions, policing of health directions and many other restrictions were imposed at state level. An inquiry into the Australian pandemic response that cannot comprehensively investigate unilateral state decisions necessarily leaves a large part of the story beyond its reach.
This does not mean the Australian inquiry produced nothing worthwhile. As Brighthope acknowledges, it received 2,201 submissions and ultimately produced nine guiding recommendations, 19 immediate actions and seven medium-term actions. There is useful work in examining how Australia might respond better to another pandemic. But that is not the same exercise as determining responsibility for decisions made during the last one.
Here lies perhaps the most important distinction in Brighthope's argument: the difference between learning lessons and imposing accountability. Asking how administrative systems can operate better next time is relatively comfortable. Asking ministers, senior bureaucrats, public-health officials, regulators and advisers to explain under oath why particular decisions were made is potentially much less comfortable.
A genuine Royal Commission possesses powers designed precisely for situations in which voluntary cooperation may not be enough. It can compel witnesses and documents and take sworn evidence. Those powers matter because accountability cannot depend entirely upon whether the people being investigated feel inclined to participate. Brighthope therefore rejects Albanese's suggestion that a Royal Commission could have achieved nothing that the government's inquiry could not.
The Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs References Committee subsequently recommended a properly constituted Royal Commission with comprehensive terms of reference, complementary state legislation and public consultation over those terms. The Albanese Government rejected those recommendations. For Brighthope, that decision transformed an inadequate inquiry into a larger question about institutional accountability itself.
The argument does not require one to believe that every COVID measure was wrong. Nor does the refusal to establish a Royal Commission prove that some enormous conspiracy is being concealed. Indeed, Brighthope's article expressly recognises that distinction. The problem is simpler: when governments exercise exceptional powers, the threshold for subsequent scrutiny should rise rather than fall.
There are many questions that remain legitimate regardless of one's original position on lockdowns or vaccines. How was proportionality assessed as the risk profile of COVID changed? What evidence was used to maintain particular restrictions? What dissenting scientific advice reached decision-makers? How were the costs of school closures measured? What evidence supported mandates at different stages of the vaccination program? How effective were vaccine-certification systems at reducing transmission? How well did vaccine-safety surveillance operate? What happened to ordinary medical care during periods of disruption? How independently did regulators operate? How were economic, psychological and social harms incorporated into public-health decision-making?
These are not inherently "anti-vaccine" or "anti-science" questions. They are precisely the questions that should follow any unprecedented exercise of government power.
Brighthope's article also places the accountability issue within the emerging international pandemic-preparedness system. He points to recent academic criticism of the WHO–World Bank estimates underlying calls for approximately US$31 billion annually in pandemic preparedness expenditure. He also notes that although the WHO Pandemic Agreement was adopted in May 2025, work on its Pathogen Access and Benefit-Sharing annex remains unresolved. These developments matter because governments are already constructing the institutions and financing arrangements intended to govern the next pandemic while political argument continues over whether the last one has been adequately investigated.
That creates an obvious democratic problem. Before granting institutions greater resources and preparing governments to exercise emergency powers again, citizens are entitled to know how well the previous system performed. Pandemic preparedness should not mean merely becoming more efficient at repeating the policies of 2020. It should mean determining which measures worked, which failed, which caused disproportionate collateral damage and which should never be repeated.
New Zealand's experience adds a further caution. Even if Australia eventually establishes a Royal Commission, the title alone will not be enough. Its terms of reference would need to be broad. State and federal decisions would need to fall within its reach. Commissioners would need genuine independence. Relevant documents would need to be produced, important witnesses compelled where necessary and competing scientific evidence examined seriously rather than ritualistically.
Most importantly, the inquiry would need to be willing to discover that powerful institutions sometimes got things wrong. That is ultimately the force of Brighthope and Ashby-Koppens' argument. COVID involved one of the greatest exercises of peacetime governmental authority in Australian history. One can believe that some emergency measures were justified while simultaneously believing that extraordinary power demands extraordinary accountability.
Australia has conducted a policy review. What it has not conducted is the full national reckoning that such an extraordinary period deserves.
The purpose of a genuine Royal Commission should not be to vindicate the lockdown critics, punish public-health officials or retrospectively declare every intervention mistaken. It should be much simpler and much more important: put the evidence on the table, put the relevant decision-makers in the witness box, give competing arguments a fair hearing and establish as accurately as possible what happened.
If the decisions were justified, rigorous scrutiny will strengthen their historical legitimacy. If they were not, Australians deserve to know that too. The worst possible outcome is the present halfway house: governments preparing elaborate machinery for the next pandemic while leaving fundamental questions about the last one unanswered. That is not how public trust is restored. It is how distrust becomes permanent.
https://ianbrighthope.substack.com/p/the-royal-commission-australia-was