Two routes to precarious success: Australia,New Zealand,COVID-19 and the politics of crisis governance

Abstract

Australia and New Zealand are routinely presented as sharing more in common than the federal and unitary systems separating them. As two modernising Antipodean settler societies, their governing trajectories have embraced waves of public administration/management reform. Shared pathways seem matched by their relative, although precarious and fragile, early successes in the crisis challenges of COVID-19. This article contextualises and examines one crucial point of separation: two very different crisis governance routes to such outcomes. Australia’s federal variant of multi-level governance, more used to addressing diverse regional challenges than shared national threats, has been characterised by an evolving balancing act of multi-jurisdictional agendas and bureaucratic–political conflicts. By contrast, New Zealand’s unitary system of governance, well-versed in the centralisation of power, has produced lower levels of intergovernmental conflict. Our analysis of these differing pathways also makes a contribution to our conceptual understanding of successful crisis governance.

Points for practitioners

Administrative arrangements based around federal or unitary systems are both quite capable of contributing to successful outcomes. Essential for both are inclusive crisis discussions that are consistent with the norms of the respective systems. Success can be fragile, especially in a pandemic. Appropriate inclusive discussions can facilitate responses to cascading crisis developments and act as a safeguard against complacency.

Keywords

coronavirus crisis management public administration public management

Introduction¹

The global pandemic stemming from COVID-19 in the year 2020 is a crisis personified. It exhibits classic crisis ingredients of high and cascading threats, deep levels of uncertainty about their impact, and exceptional time pressures for action (Weible et al., 2020). It is also an exemplar of transboundary crises, the ‘ultimate nightmare’ of crisis managers (Boin, 2019: 95), where volatile and interlinked threats cascade across national borders.

All countries have faced shared but unique challenges in shifting from routine to crisis governance mode, with varying degrees of success (and failure) in containing the virus and minimising damage to their economies. Australia and New Zealand are two particularly interesting cases. They are routinely presented as ‘most similar’ comparisons, sharing more in common than the federal and unitary systems separating them. As two modernising Antipodean settler societies, their governing trajectories have embraced waves of public administration/management reform amid struggles to address the poor health outcomes and life chances of First Nations peoples. Shared pathways seem matched by their relative, though precarious and fragile, success in the crisis challenges of COVID-19. By early June 2020, Australia, with a population of 25 million, had 7200 cases, 102 deaths and only a handful of new infections per day; some three months later in mid-September, a second wave in the state of Victoria and ongoing lower levels of infection throughout Australia had increased the figures to 26,942 cases and 854 deaths – still placing it in the lowest quartile of global deaths per capita.² In early June, New Zealand, with a population of just under 5 million, had 1500 cases and 22 deaths, and had declared the country as entirely free of the virus (Johns Hopkins University, no date). A small number of infections from overseas travellers continued but there was no community transmission until early August, with a highly unexpected and unexplained nine new cases. By mid-September, the new total was 1815 and 25 deaths.

The seeds of three particularly interesting issues germinate here around explaining different forms of successful governance, the limits of governance in being able to produce successful outcomes and broader conceptual understanding of crisis governance. Our broad goal in this article is to explain two different crisis governance routes to managing COVID-19 in Australia and New Zealand with relative success but we translate our three issues into specific questions: (1) ‘How did two very different governing systems both manage to be relatively successful?’; (2) ‘What are the limits of success as reflected in ongoing vulnerabilities?’; and (3) ‘What broader lessons can be learned about precarious success in crisis governance?’ Our article constitutes an early contribution, based on an analysis of the initial five-month period from early March to mid-September 2020. Our research is based on an examination of a wide range of Australian/New Zealand planning documents, departmental and crisis committee websites, blogs, and news commentary, while drawing on a variety of literature from the fields of crisis governance, crisis management, public management, public administration and Australia/New Zealand politics and policy.

Australia’s and New Zealand’s institutional contexts, administrative cultures and path dependencies

As Tilly and Goodin (2006) argue, viable descriptions and explanations of political processes depend on understanding the contexts in which they operate. Here, we identify a range of key contexts, from the institutional configuration of each political system to the role of political actors, partly as inhabiting the different institutional configurations of each system, and partly as agents who are faced with classic crisis leadership challenges (Boin et al., 2016; Drennan et al., 2015).

Core elements and trends

Australia and New Zealand are settler societies, former British colonies imposed upon indigenous peoples (see Fleras and Spoonley, 2000; Maddison, 2019). This colonial process has bequeathed these two states the Westminster model of responsible government (Patapan et al., 2003), with a fused executive and legislature, ministerial responsibility, and a separate public service. The Westminster model emphasises a ‘public interest’ administrative culture, where the role of the state is limited, instrumental and pragmatic (Halligan, 2010; Pollitt and Bouckaert, 2017).

These common administrative legacies of British colonialism stand in contrast to the differing institutional contexts of the two countries. Australia is a federal state, with attendant dispersion of responsibilities between the levels of government, while New Zealand employs a unitary system that concentrates power in the national government. Australia is usually classed as a majoritarian democracy due to its use of instant run-off electoral rules (called preferential voting in the local parlance) to elect its lower house, whereas New Zealand’s mixed-member proportional (MMP) system, first implemented in the 1996 election, has seen coalition and minority governments proliferate in New Zealand’s unicameral parliament (Miller, 2015).

From the mid-1980s onwards, both anglophone countries, alongside the UK, became enthusiastic adopters (more theoretically driven first in New Zealand, as Halligan (2007) argues) of New Public Management (NPM). These shifts, now well documented and analysed, were translated into multiple practical reforms such as establishing quasi-markets, contracting out and performance-related pay for public servants (Pollitt and Bouckaert, 2017). Both countries subsequently grappled with the fragmentation, accountability and responsiveness issues generated by NPM, and have augmented NPM with ‘integrated governance’ (O’Flynn, 2007): joined-up government (JUG) and whole-of-government (WoG) approaches in Australia; and similar all-of-government (AoG) trends in New Zealand (Halligan, 2007). These trends have been emphasised in the recent machinery-of-government (MoG) reforms in Australia of 2019/2020 and proposed changes in New Zealand. The MoG in neither country stays still for very long. New Zealand conducted approximately 259 departmental restructurings between the 1960s and 1997, while Australia conducted 247, compared with 96 in Canada and 100 in the UK (Donadelli and Lodge, 2019).

Another common component of governance is healthcare. Australia and New Zealand are both national health service states, providing government-funded universal coverage, coupled with public ownership and/or control over healthcare delivery. In Australia, the distribution of healthcare responsibilities reflects Australia’s federation. The Commonwealth government is responsible for, among other things, initiatives such as universal public health insurance, Medicare and part-funding of hospitals. In tandem, states and territories are responsible for the operation and management of almost 700 public hospitals, as well as community-based and primary health services. By contrast, and consistent with the more centralised political system, New Zealand’s health system sees overall responsibility fall to the Minister of Health, with 20 district health boards (DHBs) answering to the minister, who is responsible for the planning and funding of health services, and for cooperation between DHBs (Cumming et al., 2014).

Australia and New Zealand have comparatively high-performing health systems and better than Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) average life expectancies (OECD, 2019). However, the exception to these effective health system outcomes is the continuing legacy of colonialism in both countries, which sees a large life expectancy gap between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians (10.6 years for males and 9.6 years for females in 2010/2012) and Māori and non-Māori New Zealanders (7.3 years for males and 6.8 years for females in 2013) (Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, 2018; Ministry of Health, 2018).

Core foundations and trends as cultivators of the response to COVID-19

We know from decades of crisis research that political-institutional systems, administrative cultures and trajectories can shape crisis responses (Boin et al., 2016). We identify four pertinent issues here.

First, there is the distribution of powers of crisis resolution. Crisis management can exhibit three main, non-mutually exclusive, dynamic and often tension-ridden flows of power in crisis episodes: centralisation and the upwards transfer of powers; decentralisation of powers and the transfer of powers to ‘local’ authorities; and the fragmentation of decision-making across different bureaucratic venues (’t Hart et al., 1993). The pre-existing political-institutional configuration of each country helps cultivate particular crisis governance pathways. Australia’s federal system, enshrined in a written constitution, cultivates centralisation and national unity in the face of common threats, alongside recognition of the legitimacy of sub-national policy variations and implementation practices – even to the point that it generates intergovernmental and bureaucratic conflicts (Carayannopoulos, 2018). The Australian response to COVID-19 has been something of an evolving balancing act. Crisis governance arrangements (detailed in the next section) are based around national (Commonwealth)-led collaborative efforts across all states and territories (as well as the private sector and public health experts). These arrangements also enabled state-level variations over issues such as schools staying open, internal border controls and lockdown measures.

New Zealand’s unitary system is exceptionally centralised (Hawke, 2020). In the absence of a written constitution to specify power sharing with ‘lower’ levels of government, national decision-making power rests predominantly with a political executive drawn from the ranks of the majority party or parties in the legislature. This system cultivates a more centralised response. Hence, the response to COVID-19 closely paralleled ‘normal’ top-down impetus. As the next section explains in detail, the crisis governance of COVID-19 was led by the National Crisis Management Centre (NCMC).

Second, both countries placed heavy reliance on the capacities and symbolism of public healthcare systems. One advantage of public healthcare systems in a pandemic is that the principles of universal and free (or low-cost) access help reduce the barriers to self-reporting. While we cannot know how crises would have played out under alternative crisis scenarios, it is plausible that Australia’s and New Zealand’s public health systems pre-delivered strong front-line crisis capacities, while creating surge capacity in the event of escalation.

Third, both countries were reliant on hybridised governance mechanisms (Dickinson, 2016) that would invoke some legacy NPM (such as a key role for the private sector) and WoG-type integrated measures, including the 2017 Australian Government Crisis Management Framework (AGCMF) and the New Zealand 2014 Coordinated Incident Management System. Fourth, both countries were on policy pathways, necessitating that indigenous communities be incorporated into their crisis management paradigms. The role and plight of indigenous Australians in shaping policy has always been a fraught and racialised issue in Australian politics (Maddison, 2019), with the lack of constitutional recognition of indigenous peoples permeating indigenous-specific COVID-19 policy initiatives. New Zealand rooted Māori within its response, drawing on an administrative culture where (unlike Australia) indigenous rights are embedded in a national treaty, the Treaty of Waitangi (Fleras and Spoonley, 2000). Despite the existence of many inequalities in both societies, the legacy of colonialism hangs over both countries. We have chosen to incorporate and recognise indigenous impacts into our ‘mainstream’ analysis, rather than assuming that the governance of COVID-19 and each nation’s indigenous peoples can be hived off simply to ‘indigenous research’.

Australia’s and New Zealand’s governance structures, coordination mechanisms and institutional dynamics

There is no direct line of causality between (1) Australia and New Zealand’s political architecture, administration cultures and policy trajectories, and (2) pathways to specific crisis governance structures and dynamics. Empirically, however, we argue that our cases exhibit two crisis governance pathways that broadly mirror shared values and trajectories, reflecting broader public sector reform trends towards coordination in anglophone Westminster democracies (Halligan, 2020). The cases depart in terms of the ease with which these coordinating and centralising impulses of national crisis management can be accommodated, reflecting the importance of formal institutionalism. New Zealand’s exceptionally centralised institutional design made coordination a relatively simple process when compared to the structure of Australian federalism that Commonwealth and state leaders had to negotiate.

Pandemic planning in Australia and New Zealand

There is no ideal-type blueprint for contingency planning, but some assumptions include: having a plan is better than none at all; plans should be integrative of all key institutions involved; and plans will always require high levels of adaptation and improvisation in real contexts (Eriksson and McConnell, 2011). It is unsurprising, therefore, to find common threads and points of departure in comparing Australia and New Zealand. Standing crisis plans and pandemic/COVID-19-specific plans flow from the differing institutional contexts of the two countries. Australia’s crisis framework emphasised WoG coordination across the layers of Australia’s federal system, while New Zealand’s crisis framework was geared more to AoG coordination of the relevant health, emergency and disaster departments and agencies.

Coordination of influenza pandemic planning across Australia’s federal layers has been in place since 1999. The last major update was in 2014, incorporating lessons from the H1N1 ‘swine flu’ pandemic of 2009, and there was a minor update in August 2019: Australian Health Management Plan for Pandemic Influenza (AHMPPI). The Australian variant of JUG is expressed in the AHMPPI in WoG logic. Similar JUG language is evident in the New Zealand pandemic plan, in place since 2002. The plan was updated in 2010 in response to the H5N1 ‘bird flu’ and H1N1 ‘swine flu’ outbreaks in the 2000s, and a minor update initiated the current New Zealand Influenza Pandemic Plan (NZIPP) in August 2017. Both countries applied and modified their crisis frameworks to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Crisis governance in Australia

Crisis plans provide the basic template for organisations and institutions to shift into ‘crisis’ mode. We know that centralisation – often pre-planned but also improvised – typically plays a key role in crisis governance (’t Hart et al., 1993). In federal systems, centralisation must accommodate (sometimes uneasily) sub-national interests, while in unitary states, the accommodation of diverse institutions is primarily for functional reasons. In Australia and New Zealand, therefore, their crisis governance modes for COVID-19 proceeded down different tracks, while retaining some commonality in terms of indigenous peoples.

The Australian response began in January, with public statements from the Australian Chief Medical Officer on 19 January, activation of the National Incident Room in the Health Department on 20 January and adding ‘human coronavirus with pandemic potential’ to the Biosecurity (Listed Human Diseases) Determination (2016) on 21 January. This assessment prompted the activation of a number of pandemic arrangements, including daily meetings of the Australian Health Protection Principal Committee (AHPPC) and meetings of federal, state and territory health ministers. On 25 February, the Australian government activated the National Communicable Disease Plan, and two days later, the COVID-19 Plan was agreed upon and activated by the National Security Committee of Cabinet.

In Australia, three key institutional forums were at the centre of its COVID-19 crisis governance decision-making. Most important was the National Cabinet, a streamlined intergovernmental forum established on 13 March to manage and coordinate the federal, state and territory governmental response to COVID-19. On 29 May, it was announced that the National Cabinet arrangements would be made permanent, replacing the previous intergovernmental forum, the Council of Australian Governments (COAG). The purpose of the National Cabinet is similar to COAG’s in addressing issues of national significance (including COVID-19), but it is more personalised and relatively unburdened by the formal agenda and mechanisms of COAG (Morrison, 2020). There was broad-ranging support for reform given the complexities of providing coordinated input from, and recognition of, diverse state/territory jurisdictions and leaderships, in spite of transparency and freedom-of-information concerns. At the time of writing, it is too early for a fulsome analysis of how the new National Cabinet compares with the former COAG arrangements, but it has been widely recognised as a successful forum for intergovernmental COVID-19 coordination, effectively managing the ‘flattening of the curve’ and engendering public trust in the intergovernmental response (Saunders, 2020). The National Cabinet plans to meet more frequently than COAG in the post-pandemic future and will look to reduce and consolidate the number of COAG councils (issue-area streams that informed and supported COAG’s operation) from its current 12 in number.

Second, on 25 March, there was the creation of the National COVID-19 Coordination Commission (NCCC), subsequently changing its name to the National COVID-19 Commission (Advisory Board) (NCC) to reflect its evolving business advisory role on economic recovery. Chaired by former Fortesque Metals Chief Executive Neville Power, the NCC is based in the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, with membership drawn from the private as well as the public sector. The composition of the NCC reflects hybridised governance mechanisms (Dickinson, 2016) that incorporate and extend the WoG crisis approach to include a market and business-driven approach to recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic.

Third, an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Advisory Group on COVID-19 was established on 5 March, tasked with developing and delivering the Management and Operational Plan for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Populations (MPATSI). Learning from the deficiencies of the ‘one size fits all’ 2009 H1N1 ‘swine flu’ response, the group comprised a variety of indigenous public sector and third sector stakeholders and public health experts. The recommended co-designed measures included legislative changes to minimise travel to remote and vulnerable communities, culturally specific health promotion materials, infectious disease modelling, epidemiological tracking, rapid testing, and infrastructure and workforce preparations (Crooks et al., 2020). As evidence of the success of these efforts, as of 13 September 2020, there had only been 145 cases of COVID among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples (representing 0.5% of total cases versus 3.3% Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander people as a percentage of the Australian total population) (ABS, 2018; Australian Government Department of Health, 2020).

Crisis governance in New Zealand

New Zealand’s centralised political institutions, and recent trends towards greater coordination in the public sector and crisis and pandemic planning, facilitated a ‘command and control’ form of COVID-19 governance (Macaulay, 2020). On 24 January, New Zealand’s Ministry of Health set up a COVID-19 monitoring team and installed the New Zealand national security system on 27 January. On 6 March, the New Zealand AoG system and structure was activated to respond to COVID-19, including the initiation of the NCMC process and arrangements, with the specific aim of strengthening and deepening cross-government coordination. The NCMC was to act within the framework and processes established by the 2014 New Zealand Coordinated Incident Management System, New Zealand’s framework for coordinated emergency responses across responding agencies. An All-of-Government Controller, John Ombler, was appointed to lead the NCMC, and was supported by: the Director-General of Health; the Director of Civil Defence and Emergency Management (CDEM); strategic operations oversight from the Police Commissioner; and national strategy and policy support from the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment. Regional CDEM groups coordinated across agencies for the local-level response, in keeping with national-level direction. An Operational Command Centre was established within the NCMC to provide day-to-day operational oversight and coordination of the AoG response.

The NCMC also developed several national action plans to deal with the COVID-19 crisis. New Zealand’s national action plans were informed by the 2017 New Zealand Pandemic Plan (NZIPAP). AoG coordination was centred on what the national action plan calls COVID-19 response pillars with associated lead agencies: Health – Ministry of Health; Supply Chains & Infrastructure – Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment; Welfare – National Emergency Management Agency; Education – Ministry of Education; Civil Defence Emergency Management-National Emergency Management Agency (CDEM – NEMA); Economic – Treasury; Border – Customs NZ; International – Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade; Law & Order – NZ Police; and Workplaces – Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE). The Operational Command Centre coordinated the COVID-19 pillars by work streams, with the work streams focused on specific themes. The work streams were tasked with coordinating with the private sector regarding the crisis response, similar to Australia’s hybridised governance via the NCC.

Also important was the Covid-19 Māori Response Action Plan to support iwi, hapū, whānau and Māori communities and organisations. The plan facilitated the employment of culturally appropriate approaches in the design and delivery of services, and the prioritising of health equity. Much like Australia, New Zealand has learned from the poor health outcomes of Māori and Pasifika peoples during the 2009 H1N1 ‘swine flu’ outbreak (Baker et al., 2009). As of 25 September 2020, data indicated that COVID-19 cases for Māori were 10% of total cases, and for Pacific peoples were also 10% (Māori and Pacific peoples make up 17% and 8% of New Zealand’s population, respectively) (Ministry of Health, 2020; StatsNZ, 2020).

Actor strategies, solutions and opportunity management

As indicated by structure–agency debates, political actors may reside in and be ‘creatures’ of their institutional settings, but they are not determined by them (Capano and Galanti, 2018). Such perspectives are echoed in the crisis leadership literature (Boin et al., 2016; Holenweger et al., 2017). Put simply, actor approaches and strategies matter.

Australia and Scott Morrison: an ‘aggressive suppression’ strategy

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison is the leader of a conservative Liberal–National coalition government at the Commonwealth level. This arrangement can produce tensions between the partners but, nevertheless, has been an unusually permanent and consistent Commonwealth coalition relationship since 1922 (see Brett, 2003: 76–77). Morrison came to the challenges of COVID-19 as the worst of the Black Summer bushfires (December 2019–January 2020) began to subside. The fires were the most extensive and damaging in Australian history and Morrison’s reputation declined significantly after public criticism of his handling of the crisis – including taking a family holiday to Hawaii at the height of the fires and a reluctance to clearly link the bushfires to climate change. Net dissatisfaction with Morrison recorded a high of 59% dissatisfied throughout January (The Poll Bludger, no date). COVID-19 held the potential to recoup some of this lost political capital, suiting his masculine ‘blokey’ semi-presidential style. Yet, Australia’s federal system meant that he would need to lead the country through the crisis in conjunction with state and territory leaders (five Labor-controlled, three Liberal or Liberal/National-controlled). Morrison’s COVID-19 management successes have seen an overwhelming recovery of his popularity, as high as 68% satisfied with his performance as Prime Minister (The Poll Bludger, no date).

The coalition’s crisis governance of COVID-19 pursued an evidence-informed but politically filtered approach of suppression, based on ‘flattening the curve’ and introducing increasingly restrictive measures when necessary. Over the course of several months, measures included stay-at-home restrictions, 14-day quarantines for travellers coming into the country, bans on social gatherings of more than two people and strict local travel restrictions, coupled with testing and tracing measures (including a smartphone COVIDSafe app). Economic packages included a JobKeeper allowance to help businesses retain workers, childcare financial relief, additional payments to welfare recipients and a stimulus package to help banks and other financial institutions lend to ailing businesses. Some of these measures, particularly the increased welfare payments, were unusual for a conservative government more inclined to curbing public expenditure and welfare spending.

The dynamics of these strategies and the tensions within them played out in ways that are not unfamiliar to observers of politics in Australia. During the first wave and the near eradication of the virus from Australian shores, some main points of inter-jurisdictional or bureaucratic tensions were between states over border controls (particularly New South Wales and Queensland) and in the blame games over who authorised (notably, NSW Health or the Australian Border Force) 2671 passengers, including 110–120 sick passengers and crew, to disembark from the cruise ship Ruby Princess. This decision would contribute to 28 associated deaths and be the subject of a commission of inquiry that ultimately laid responsibility with NSW Health (New South Wales [NSW] Government, 2020).

The second wave, located principally in Victoria, increased Australia’s positive tests threefold within a period of just over one month, resulting in a Stage 4 lockdown in metropolitan Melbourne and Stage 3 in the broader state. Meanwhile, Australia as a whole had shifted focus somewhat from ‘suppression’ to considerations of economic recovery, and was confronting many apparent trade-offs in doing so. Such tensions were manifested particularly in interstate disagreements escalated over border restrictions, though there were also disputes over two key inter-jurisdictional issues: (1) breaches of hotel quarantining of overseas travellers (private security contractors were used and disagreements ensued over whether the Australian Defence Force had offered help); and (2) the spread of the virus through aged care facilities (funded and regulated by the Commonwealth government).

Also familiar in Australia is a gradual accrual of powers to the federal level since the 1950s (e.g. taxation, industrial relations and competition policy) (Wanna and Weller, 2003) and the precedent of crisis as an opportunity for reform (e.g. nationwide gun control reforms after the 1996 Port Arthur Massacre, and immigration reform after the 2001 ‘Children Overboard’ affair, where asylum seekers were incorrectly accused of throwing their children into the sea). While the period to mid-September 2020 is still ‘early days’, the initial near wipeout of the virus demonstrated reformist inclinations that conform to past precedent, that is, using the opportunities of crisis to reinforce and even accelerate existing trends. For example, the easing of social movement restrictions and the withdrawal of economic support measures reinforced traditional gender biases, privileging the construction industry and sport, while marginalising childcare by withdrawing fee-free childcare. Australian universities (one component of Australia’s third-largest export), particularly the leading Group of 8, which are subject to frequent conservative criticism, were given virtually no support. The bulk of crisis funding was instead allocated to the skills-based tertiary and further education sector.

The crisis also produced the first signs of accelerating ongoing reforms of the public service. The process had begun with the 2019 Independent Review of the Australian Public Service (the Thodey Review) and attendant Australian MoG reforms that occurred in late 2019/early2020. The MoG reforms ostensibly emphasised addressing bureaucratic silos and rigid hierarchies, but also demonstrated unspoken political objectives, such as the ‘subsuming of the environment functions into the Department of Agriculture, Water, and the Environment’ (Carey and Buck, 2019). Tangibly, during the pandemic, the newly established Chief Operating Officers Committee used the Thodey Review to develop common arrangements around workplace safety, communication and mental health. Indeed, the challenges of COVID-19 enabled the bypassing of long processes of reform deliberation. While the evidence surrounding these shifts is still emerging, it seems clear that the COVID-19 crisis is having at least some effect on the high-level framing and acceleration of the Australian public service reforms recommended in the Thodey Review.

Broader still, Australia has long been noted for not fully confronting the plight of indigenous communities and producing policy initiatives that are more of symbolic political value than of practical value in improving the health, lives and opportunities of indigenous peoples in Australia (Lea, 2008). When the Black Lives Matter protests came to Australia in early June, they were treated by Morrison as a tremendous inconvenience and barrier to the COVID-19 response, despite flagging the reopening of ticketed venues holding up to 10,000 people at the same time.

New Zealand and Jacinda Ardern: an elimination strategy

New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern, leader of the Labour government in a coalition with the New Zealand First party, is New Zealand’s youngest ever prime minister and the first to give birth while in office. Ardern had already been widely praised for her compassionate response to the 2019 Christchurch mosque attacks, and similarly offered empathy, compassion and a precautionary science-led response to COVID-19 (Wilson, 2020), which garnered strong popular support and international recognition.

New Zealand’s response to COVID-19 evolved quickly into an ‘elimination’ strategy (Baker et al., 2020), emphasising aggressive early intervention and the rapid move to Stage 4 of four-stage measures, including ‘lockdown’ stay-at-home measures, the closure of schools, universities and non-essential businesses, the rationing of supplies, and severe travel restrictions. After 100 days with no new community cases (and only a very small number of overseas travellers in quarantine), a second wave emerged and the country again moved swiftly to Stage 3 restrictions in the Auckland region and Stage 2 elsewhere.

One point of difference with Australia, and reflecting the political architecture of New Zealand, is that the functional AoG approach did not have sub-national and jurisdictional elected leaders (beyond a small input from local government). The prime minister of New Zealand has never had to fight too hard for their political authority (because formal authority flows from the unitary system) in the same way as the Australian prime minister (who has to contend with elected sub-national leaders, who have substantive responsibilities for portfolios such as hospitals, schools/universities, transport and infrastructure). Hence, there was a remarkable level of cross-party unity and public support for the Ardern-led response. One international poll (Colmar Brunton, 2020) found New Zealand citizens offering the highest level of support when compared to G7 countries, with 88% indicating a ‘trust in government to make the right decisions on COVID-19’.

In many respects, New Zealand is a reformist nation. Indeed, many reforms have emerged from crises, including NPM reforms in the wake of economic crisis, regulatory reform after the global financial crisis, healthcare reform after the 2010 earthquake and gun control reform after the 2019 Christchurch mosque attacks. While the focus in the first half of 2020 was on eliminating the virus, the period from June onwards with the lifting of restrictions (prior to a second wave) began to see a movement to reinvigorate an economy suffering from slow growth for the previous five years. Emerging initiatives included a four-day working week and a long-term trade recovery strategy.

Broader reflections: two routes to precarious success and crisis governance

While further research is needed over a longer period of time, we offer here three, interconnected reflections that help us address our research questions, as well as adding to our understanding of crisis governance. First, there is the issue of how we explain two very different governance routes to ‘success’, however fragile or transient it may be. Our explanation here is one based on plausibility (Hay, 2017) rather than quasi-scientific causality. Explaining success is a surprisingly under-researched issue. However, recent work by Compton et al. (2019), examining 33 cases, identifies two different routes to successful outcomes in ‘normal’ times. One is inclusive processes with a fast pace and low levels of innovation. The other also involves inclusive processes but with a slow pace and high levels of innovation. The crisis governance of COVID-19 does not fit with either. A unique combination of both a fast pace and high levels of innovation is essential because the costs of delay and inaction can lead to rapid escalation of the spread of the virus and the disease. Put simply, inclusiveness is the only constant. Our preliminary view is that it acts as a counterweight, balancing out the high risks of crisis management and the high risks of constant cycles of rapid innovation that can often be counted in hours rather than weeks and months.

Crucially, however, this inclusiveness should be contextualised. Expectations and broad acceptance of executive power is much stronger in New Zealand than in Australia, where other political interests are embedded in institutional structures stemming from its federal system (Kumarashinghman and Power, 2015). Australia’s federal variant of multi-level governance is a political, evolving and often contested balancing act between those seeking Commonwealth-led common solutions to shared policy problems, and those seeking diversity in accordance with state/territory needs and circumstances. In Australia’s federal system, we argue that multiple jurisdictions and political/bureaucratic interests lead to the expectation of a high degree of inclusiveness in a national response – especially from states, which have key front-line responsibilities on issues such as hospitals, testing and contract tracing, curfews, policing of gatherings, and interstate border control.

By contrast, New Zealand’s unitary system of governance, well versed in the centralisation of power, has produced lower levels of intergovernmental conflict and expectations of inclusiveness more along functional, hierarchical lines, rather than political-jurisdictional ones. Further comparative research is required but we would argue that when broadly met (even in two different systems), norms around inclusiveness act as stabilising forces amid the chaotic potential of crisis.

Second, the precariousness of success in both countries indicates that there is only so much that ‘context’ can help prepare for crises. As Tilly and Goodin (2006) argue, context helps us get a grip on phenomena without always being able to offer mechanistic problem solving. The architecture of political systems, governance modes, contingency plans, administrative cultures and more can all help prepare for crises but success is not guaranteed. Success can be shattered by innumerable uncertainties (How to identify symptomatic transmitters? How to explain ‘non-COVID-19’ seasonal increases in deaths?) and the capacity of small incidents and episodes to have significant, cascading effects – such as one person breaching quarantine or one small entertainment venue allowing an illegal mass gathering. There is always an element of contingency and luck that plays a part in our understanding of political life (Shapiro and Bedi, 2007).

Third, the outcomes of both cases can usefully be encapsulated by the addition of ‘precarious success’ to the lexicon of crisis governance. While broader literature on policy success recognises that there exists a normalised and often acceptable ‘second best’ in terms of policy success (McConnell, 2012), as well as a temporal dimension where success can vary over time (Luetjens et al., 2019), our two cases illustrate a phenomenon that is more normatively uncomfortable than second best, as well as a more time-compressed version of success variability over time. Gladys Berejiklian, the Premier of the Australian state of New South Wales, encapsulated this phenomenon by arguing that New South Wales was on a ‘knife’s edge’, despite managing the virus well. While crises, by their very nature, have the capacity to undermine the best-laid plans and efforts (Boin 2019), pandemics have a particular potential to do so because of the ‘invisible’ nature of viruses (unlike, for example, the visible nature of bushfires and tsunamis) and high transmission rates. Hence, ongoing inclusive discussions can act as a safeguard against complacency and prematurely attributing ‘success’ to the crisis governance of pandemics.

In the longer term, when we look back on the separate and shared experiences of Australia and New Zealand in managing what Keane (2020) calls the ‘Great Pestilence’, we will see two ‘settler societies’ engaged in ongoing struggles to address their colonial legacies, trying to forge healthy economies in a globally connected but increasingly bordered world. The window of opportunity afforded by crisis has enabled a reinforcing and recalibration of existing trajectories. Time will tell whether they have been successful, and for whom.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Allan McConnell

Notes

Nicholas Bromfield is a Lecturer in Public Policy and Public Administration with the Department of Government and International Relations at the University of Sydney, Australia. His recent research projects have focused on Australia and New Zealand and the COVID-19 crisis, with interests in crisis administration, policy evidence, and civil society and third sector participation. He also focuses research interests on issues of Australian identity and their effect on policy and rhetoric.

Allan McConnell is based in the Department of Government and International Relations at the University of Sydney, Australia. With a focus on public policy, he has published widely on topics such as policy success and failure, crisis policymaking, hidden policy agendas, placebo policies, and wicked problems.

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Two routes to precarious success: Australia,New Zealand,COVID-19 and the politics of crisis governance

Abstract

Points for practitioners

Keywords

Introduction 1

Australia’s and New Zealand’s institutional contexts, administrative cultures and path dependencies

Core elements and trends

Core foundations and trends as cultivators of the response to COVID-19

Australia’s and New Zealand’s governance structures, coordination mechanisms and institutional dynamics

Pandemic planning in Australia and New Zealand

Crisis governance in Australia

Crisis governance in New Zealand

Actor strategies, solutions and opportunity management

Australia and Scott Morrison: an ‘aggressive suppression’ strategy

New Zealand and Jacinda Ardern: an elimination strategy

Broader reflections: two routes to precarious success and crisis governance

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

Funding

ORCID iD

Notes

References

Introduction¹