The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the deep, structural inequities that drive complex need and shape people’s experience of and resilience to crisis.
It also shone a spotlight on the failings of service systems that operate from a single vantage point, such as the health or legal systems, when the reality for many people is that they experience multiple, intersecting problems concurrently.
And it illustrated how difficult it is to navigate a crisis in a democracy when there is a deficit of trust and confidence in decision-makers, and when there has been a failure to invest in building relationships of trust between decision-makers and the people affected by those decisions.
Our submission to the first independent review of Australia’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic drew on our previous work on COVID-19, in collaboration with health and justice practitioners and others, to make recommendations for improving Australia’s resilience to crisis.
Our recommendations
Based on our research and experience during the COVID-19 pandemic, our submission made the following recommendations for improving government response to the next crisis:
- To improve government responsiveness and community resilience during crisis, governments and communities need to invest in community infrastructure, including developing effective conduits for information and decision-making, and fostering relationships of trust and confidence between those who make decisions and those affected by them.
- Governments and services need to work together to expand ways to respond to acute needs among those for whom remote services are a barrier to getting the help they need.
- Governments must create the capacity for services to scale up and adapt to meet the legal and other assistance needs that are likely to arise from crises, including COVID, but also most recently bushfires and flood.
- Governments need to plan for, and support, practitioner wellbeing.
- Government policy responses need to plan and provide support for longer-term impacts, such as the impacts of long COVID on people’s health and wellbeing.
