Vital Signs: Australia's anti-lockdown tribe battles on against the evidence

By Richard Holden, Professor of Economics, UNSW

You might have thought the “lockdown wars” in Australia were over.

After all, Australia navigated the pandemic better than essentially any other country in 2020.

We closed our international border in March, used an early and relative light lockdown in NSW to get contact testing and tracing up and running, squelched costly hotel quarantine leaks in Victoria with more dramatic measures, and generally kept Australia as COVID-free as possible.

We adopted the wise principle, borne out by so much tragic international experience, that we could not have a functioning…

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