Tani Newton
I still haven’t slogged through all 713 pages of the Royal Commission of Inquiry’s Phase One Report, but I would like to bring you a couple of highlights while we work through the report and its ramifications.
Firstly, I’m sure we will all feel deeply relieved and comforted to know how spectacularly well the inquiry was carried out:
[W]e have followed a robust process – weighing, assessing and crosschecking the evidence, testing our assumptions and considering the many possible counter-factual scenarios. As a result, we are confident that all our lessons and recommendations are soundly based.
(p 53)
And the commissioners are just as outstanding as the report. In an email to members of the public who made submissions, John Whitehead has this to say about his fellow commissioner, Tony Blakely:
He has endured regular public challenge and comment about perceived conflicts of interest, despite the rigorous clearance processes all Commissioners are subject to and despite any possible conflicts being strictly managed throughout the Inquiry.
Well, I feel completely reassured…don’t you?
You’ll also be delighted to know that your tax money was not spent in vain on promoting the brand with all those yellow stripes.
The Unite against Covid-19 public information campaign was quickly established as an effective brand achieving high levels of recognition. It later received multiple awards for design and communication.
(part two, p 59)
Now the report does actually discuss some things that are not superb and it’s good to have a bit of light on them. Here’s a standout for stating the obvious:
An already stretched health workforce is now in a worse position because of the pandemic, representing a key vulnerability for the health system going forward.
(part two, p 233)
And this surely has to take the cake for understatement:
Wearing masks made it difficult for the deaf and hard of hearing communities to lip-read.
(part two, p 294)
I would love to make sweeping statements about the whole thing, but I must control myself. Read a book before you criticise it: it’s the bad guys of history who discriminate and condemn books they haven’t read and who make judgements about people they don’t know. We have no right to criticise if we do the same thing ourselves, I keep telling myself, over and over. Whatever we do, we must not surrender the moral high ground.
