PETER VAN ONSELEN: Albo drops Covid report in a desperate bid to get YOU to forget about his Qantas freebies. So, did it work?

You can imagine the brain trust in the Prime Minister’s entourage as they sat yesterday afternoon pondering the fallout from his trainwreck media conference an hour earlier.

The one in which he combatively insisted there was nothing wrong with his decision to proactively call the Qantas CEO no fewer than 22 times to ‘request’ personal flight upgrades for business, even when he was minister responsible for aviation.

They desperately needed the news cycle to move forward, and fast.

Next week’s US presidential elections are too far away. What news can they reveal to the public now to help Albo through this latest crisis?

Meet Albo’s ally and Health Minister Mark Butler. He had prepared a report on the Covid pandemic and waited for a good time to release it to maximize political advantage.

Yesterday was supposed to be that moment. Albo needed a distraction, and this report was important enough to help.

The COVID 19 report was more damning for state governments than expected, which is one of the reasons why Labor reflected on it and considered how best to make use of it. They expected the government to be highly critical of the Morrison government, but that was not the case.

There was still enough contempt to go around. Anyway, it didn’t matter. Albo needed saving, so he was keen to release it straight away, even if it would spill a lot of you-know-what on some of his Labor colleagues.

An independent panel of three – a health worker, an economist and a former bureaucrat – ruled that the federal and state governments responded too harshly to the pandemic.

There were major inconsistencies in policy, they discovered, and too much money was being wasted. And the consequences of going too far during the pandemic mean that the next time such a crisis hits, it will be harder to convince voters to follow the rules.

Anthony Albanese had hoped to be part of the media conference where scathing criticism of his predecessor Scott Morrison would be unleashed. He would especially like to crow about the report’s concerns that the federal government spent too much money.

The report even took a swipe at the Reserve Bank for cutting interest rates too quickly, which contributed to the subsequent house price rise before inflation subsequently spiraled out of control.

But unfortunately for Albo, he had to be hidden from view when the report was released, leaving it to Treasurer Jim Chalmers to make the announcement alongside Butler, the Prime Minister’s friend.

So Chalmers – the alternative that some in Labor are quietly considering in case they have to let go of Albo – took his chance to attack his predecessor, former treasurer Josh Frydenberg, for “some poor policy choices during the pandemic”.

Whatever mistakes were made, the simple fact is that Labor always wanted to go harder and spend more during the pandemic, exactly the actions that were criticized in the report, even in the more moderate form of the then incumbent coalition government.

But in politics, facts rarely get in the way of distortion, and that’s doubly the case when Chalmers has something to say.

The treasurer had the podium, his boss had to go into hiding and Frydenberg is no longer in parliament.

So it didn’t matter that Chalmers, as shadow treasurer, wanted the then coalition to spend even more than it did on JobKeeper, to provide broader relief to taxpayers, and the Labor Party also pushed for even tougher restrictions than Morrison allowed.

As Frydenberg said yesterday, Labor ‘even wanted to buy an airline’.

I’m sure there’s a joke in there somewhere that could take us back to Airbus Albo and its flight upgrades, but now is not the time.

The key recommendation from the COVID 19 report is to establish a $250 million Center for Disease Control (CDC) to better manage the next pandemic.

The Minister of Health promised to immediately implement the recommendation. Whether Butler can do that in a way that will ensure success is a genuine question that we’ll have to wait and see in the coming months and possibly years before he gets a proper answer.

Dr. Nick Coatsworth was one of the few senior health officials to question the rationale for some of the restrictions imposed during the pandemic, writes Peter van Onselen.

The person who should clearly be asked to lead a new CDC is, of course, former deputy chief medical officer of the pandemic, Dr. Nick Coatsworth.

Not only is he an infectious disease specialist by training, but Coatsworth was also one of the few senior health officials willing to question the rationale behind some of the restrictions imposed during the pandemic.

Especially those that yesterday’s report was more critical of.

In other words, the findings of this report have confirmed the concerns that Coatsworth had and expressed in real time, which is why he yesterday welcomed both the report’s findings and recommendations.

Coatsworth should therefore be the logical choice to lead a new CDC: he has the right medical training and experience in health management, plus it is the top recommendation in a report that justified his major calls during the pandemic.

But is the Albanian government capable of successfully completing such an appointment? Free from petty partisan thinking? I highly doubt it.