Locked-up Country

Donald Horne famously called Australia ‘ the lucky country'' . So how did we become the locked-up country and how might the future look different? Australia has changed enormously since Horne'' s 1960s, but its response to the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrates the enduring truth of his thesis that our ‘ luck'' was undeserved and wouldn'' t last. By closing its borders and imposing a nationally coordinated lockdown, Australia unexpectedly eliminated COVID-19 in 2020, achieving one of the world'' s lowest excess mortality rates. But as governments proceeded to bungle key planks of the pandemic response, by mid-2021, Australia was ‘ locked up'' – closed off to the world and fragmented along state and territory borders, with its major cities enduring repeated and extended lockdowns. It soon became clear that Australia'' s regulatory state had let us down. But these failures were not inevitable, and we can manage future crises more successfully. In The Locked-up Country, political experts Tom Chodor and Shahar Hameiri identify the source of Australia'' s recent challenges and suggest a better way forward.