DAN JERVIS-BARDY: Did we interrogate the COVID-19 nightmare enough?

Next Monday, the findings of an independent inquiry into the response to COVID-19 are due to be handed to the Federal Government.

It will be the most in-depth national probe into the most significant event of the 21st century, a dual health and economic crisis that killed tens of thousands of Australians, collapsed the economy and, for a time, rewrote the very rules of society.

Yet if the reception to the report’s completion and eventual public release matches the level of interest in the inquiry itself, it will pass without so much as a collective shrug from much of the population.

The Federal Government rejected calls for a full-blown royal commission in favour of a limited, largely secret 12-month inquiry headed by an ex-public servant, an economist, and an epidemiologist.

The panel published the more than 2000 submissions it received but did not hold open hearings to publicly interrogate the evidence.

It ran a series of closed-door roundtables on topics like “health modelling” and “freight and logistics”, but our insight into the feedback is limited to “what we heard reports” summarised in a series of dot points.

If you didn’t even know this inquiry was on, I don’t blame you.

A highly politicised royal commission that put (now former) premiers and chief health officers in the witness box would have been a circus of blame-shifting that benefitted nobody.

But in eschewing any form of high-profile public inquiry, the Federal Government risks missing out on the lessons that sometimes only true scrutiny can dig up.

COVID-19 was the nightmare no one wants to revisit.

But to avoid the mistakes of the past, sometimes you don’t have a choice.