A pandemic fundamentally changes the everyday operation of households, businesses, community organisations and governments. The changes across society in response to the pandemic showed a spirit of innovation, resilience and community.

Our Inquiry heard of countless examples of Australians responding to the crisis with agility: community groups developed phone banks to check in on older Australians living at home; restaurants moved to online delivery to keep trading and the community fed; the Australian Living Evidence Collaboration was established to update evidence‑based clinical guidelines weekly; craft alcohol distilleries pivoted to producing hand sanitiser; school teachers transitioned to remote learning; and Army engineers supported industry to produce ventilators.

Agility in response to a crisis of the scale and scope of a pandemic is critical, but limitations and gaps in the planning and preparation meant that it was even more central to the Australian Government’s response to the COVID‑19 pandemic. Having to ‘build the plane while we were flying’ often had an impact on the effectiveness of response measures. For example, we heard that not all schools had plans in place to deliver remote learning. This put significant pressure on the workforce and resulted in inequities in the type and level of support given to children and young people. We also heard that agility was easier to achieve in areas with existing structures and strong foundations.

During the alert phase of the pandemic, the public sector, like many workplaces across Australia, faced the challenge of maintaining services and navigating the additional challenges of the pandemic.

The Australian Public Service redeployed approximately 1.5 per cent of staff and ceased non‑critical business‑as‑usual activities to focus on the pandemic response, and large government departments moved to remote working over a short period of time. While this was broadly successful, there was room for improvement. In particular, the approach to deploying the surge workforce was described as ‘clunky’²³ with the acknowledgement that more needed to be done to reprioritise current activities and effectively mobilise a surge workforce in the future.

The Australian Public Service has begun to strengthen the emergency management and related capabilities required to effectively respond to crises, including pandemics. This work, which includes the establishment of the APS Surge Reserve in 2021 and jointly driven initiatives by the Australian Public Service Commission and the National Emergency Management Agency, will strengthen the capacity for future pandemic responses. However, work still needs to be done on improving capability within the public service.

The National Coordination Mechanism (NCM) was established early in the pandemic and is an unsung hero of our pandemic response. Bringing together the Australian Government, state and territory governments, non‑government organisations and industry, the NCM works to identify and solve common problems. The NCM was designed to be agile, and able to be established and then decommissioned to deal with specific systematic issues caused by an emergency. From 6 March 2020 to 15 November 2022, 23 different areas were covered by COVID‑19 related NCM taskforces, including aged care, emergency management, essential goods prioritisation, the food and grocery sector, freight, managing international arrivals, pandemic planning, rapid antigen test supply, remote and regional communities, and supply chains.

The establishment and embedding of the NCM represents an important innovation of the COVID‑19 response, and its overall success has led to its being incorporated into ongoing emergency management systems, with improvements continuing to be made to its processes.

Quick and flexible funding was critical during the pandemic. The National Partnership on COVID‑19 Response and the simplification of funding arrangements for community organisations, including the Aboriginal community‑controlled sector, enabled financial supports to be rapidly provided for both COVID‑related efforts and ongoing health service delivery. This helped mitigate some potentially negative impacts on health care generally as well as providing support for the broader pandemic response. However, the Commonwealth grants systems often impeded other measures and supports, particularly for business. At the time, this resulted in a patchy and slow response, with a lack of clarity about the roles of the Australian Government and state and territory governments.

The Australian Government also moved quickly to release research funding prioritised to key areas of the COVID‑19 response through the National Health and Medical Research Council and Medical Research Future Fund programs. Whilst the grant review processes were cognisant of the need to release funds and get research underway, in some cases slowness in accessing data and protracted ethics clearance processes undermined the timeliness of the research and its translation.

Regulators such as the Australian Securities and Investments Commission, the Australia Prudential Regulatory Authority and the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission all demonstrated agility in making changes to regulatory settings or moving quickly to approve novel arrangements during the crisis. These efforts were fundamental to keeping our banking and financial systems sound, protecting mortgage holders and keeping groceries on our shelves.

In a period of such high uncertainty, real‑time data are invaluable, and the Australian Bureau of Statistics developed new data products that provided more timely information on the impacts of the pandemic to policymakers. This included moving from annual mortality reporting, usually only available nine months into the following year, to produce interim mortality reports published within three months. Incorporating new data sources, such as Single Touch Payroll data from the Australian Taxation Office, also demonstrated innovation, agility and the power of strong relationships within government.

Single Touch Payroll, that had only become mandatory for all businesses in July 2019, was also pivotal in the speedy implementation of the nation-wide wage subsidy, JobKeeper. However, there were critical areas where governments were slow to act. In some cases, this was because they had not assessed the importance of some actions as a part of the pandemic response. For example, while governments did eventually respond to workforce shortages during the pandemic through expanding the scope of practice of many health professionals, this took too long, impeding access to health care and slowing the vaccine rollout.

In other cases, a slowness to act was driven by relying on systems that could not be quickly scaled up in a crisis. For example, the consular support system, while well practised in localised crisis responses, was not able to scale up quickly in a global crisis and, as a result, it took too long for those overseas to receive assistance at the start of the crisis.

Building on the experience of the COVID‑19 pandemic will require embedding emergency response in the core capabilities of the public sector and maintaining strong systems and institutions.