Loose Threads: The Tell-Tale Inquiries – How Three Westminster Nations Chose to Remember the Pandemic

21/11/2025

A nation’s character is revealed not just by how it handles a crisis, but by how it chooses to remember it. When the crisis is over, when the emergency powers have been invoked and the extraordinary measures taken, the real test begins: the reckoning. What questions are asked? What is examined? What do we let one another see? These are not neutral, technical choices. They are profoundly political acts that reveal what a nation believes about power, accountability, and the relationship between citizen and state. Today’s Loose Threads looks at three Westminster democracies and three inquiries. It is prompted by today’s release of the United Kingdom’s second report.

Across the old Commonwealth, three Westminster democracies, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Aotearoa, have each undertaken formal inquiries into their pandemic responses. They have all produced lengthy, detailed, and expensive reports. But they are not telling the same story. Read together, these three inquiries form a kind of constitutional insight: documents about what each nation believes governance is for and what it can bear to confront. One chose confrontation, one chose deflection, and one chose a mix of deferral and deference. And I offer below that those choices matter more than the findings themselves.

I have been following these inquiries closely since they began, not as a casual observer but as someone researching how government choices during the crisis reveal fundamental truths about the state and its social contracts across the Westminster tradition. The political theorist Bonnie Honig, in her work Emergency Politics, argues that emergencies pose a profound danger to democracies (Honig, 2009). In a crisis, the state asserts extraordinary powers, often with the public’s consent, reshaping the boundary between individual liberty and collective security. The crucial question is what happens afterwards. Does the state retreat, restoring the old balance of power, or does the “state of exception” become a permanent feature, subtly expanding state authority and normalising intrusions that would have been unthinkable before?

These inquiries are the first draft of that reckoning. They are not neutral records of events but mirrors reflecting what each nation’s political culture can bear to examine. They reveal our priorities, our anxieties, and our blind spots. And when you place them side by side, the differences are startling.

The United Kingdom: Confrontation

The UK’s official COVID-19 Inquiry delivered its second report today, and it reads like a prosecution (UK COVID-19 Inquiry, 2025). Baroness Hallett’s inquiry is a two-part report of breathtaking severity, a forensic and utterly scathing indictment of political failure at the highest level.

The language is not that of a traditional Royal Commission, measured and diplomatic. It is the language of a verdict. The response was “too little, too late,” the failure to act sooner “inexcusable.”

It names names: Johnson, Hancock, and others are held directly responsible for their failures of leadership and judgment. It even puts a price on those failures, estimating that 23,000 lives could have been saved in the first wave alone had a lockdown been imposed just one week earlier.

This is not merely criticism. This is a raw exercise in political accountability, designed to assign responsibility for a national catastrophe. The inquiry treats the pandemic as fundamentally a failure of political judgment, a crisis that demanded decisive action from leaders who proved themselves unequal to the task.

The questions it asks are about individuals, about choices, about moments when the machinery of government was overridden by political calculation or simply failed to function because those in charge could not rise to the occasion. It is an inquiry that believes in personal responsibility at the highest levels of power, and it is unsparing in its assessment.

Australia: Deflection

Australia’s inquiry, which reported in October 2024, took a different path (Commonwealth of Australia, 2024). It is still deeply critical, labelling the nation’s preparedness as “grossly inadequate” and calculating a staggering thirty-one billion dollar economic cost due to delays in vaccine procurement.

But where the UK inquiry confronts the political actors directly, the Australian report deflects. Its central concern is not the decisions that were made, but the outcome of those decisions: a breakdown in the relationship between the state and its citizens.

The Australian inquiry speaks of “resentment about what was lost,” the need to “rebuild the social fabric,” and the failure of a secretive National Cabinet to maintain public confidence.

It identifies a crisis of federalism, in which state and Commonwealth governments competed rather than cooperated, and opaque decision-making processes eroded trust.

Its recommendations are focused on process and healing: more transparency, better communication, and a future response that relies less on the “stick” of punitive measures and more on the “carrot” of encouragement and trust.

It is, in essence, a sophisticated way to acknowledge failure without holding anyone powerful to account. The inquiry avoids the messy business of blame by focusing on the more nebulous, forward-looking project of “rebuilding social fabric.”

The problem, as Australia frames it, was not that particular leaders made particular mistakes, but that the structure of governance itself, the federal system, the National Cabinet, and the communication strategies proved inadequate to the task of maintaining social cohesion during a prolonged crisis. It is an inquiry that treats accountability as a systemic rather than a personal or personality problem.

Aotearoa: Deferral and Deference

And then there is us. Aotearoa. Our Royal Commission delivered its Phase One report in 2024, and it is a masterclass in technical problem-solving (Royal Commission of Inquiry into COVID-19 Lessons Learned, 2024).

It starts, rightly, from a place of profound success. By any objective measure, particularly our mortality rate, among the lowest in the OECD, our response was world-class. The health system was never overwhelmed, and the elimination strategy, for all its costs, bought us time that other nations did not have and saved thousands of lives. The inquiry’s findings proceed from this foundation of success, examining not what went fundamentally wrong, but what could be refined and improved.

From there, our inquiry proceeds like a meticulous engineer, examining the machinery of state to see how it can be made to work better for the next crisis. Its focus is operational: better coordination, more precise lines of accountability, and a new pandemic preparedness agency.

It has a uniquely Aotearoan lens, rightly criticising the response for its failures to uphold Te Tiriti o Waitangi, and acknowledging that Iwi, Hapū and whānau institutions were often more effective than the centralised state apparatus in getting information out, getting people vaccinated, and supporting families during the regional lockdowns. It identifies genuine shortcomings in the machinery’s functioning and produces a detailed set of recommendations for institutional improvements.

But in its focus on the machinery and procedure, it largely defers the deeper questions about the pandemic’s societal impact to a future Phase Two. It acknowledges the “undeniable harm” of lockdowns but frames this as a necessary trade-off in a successful public health campaign, not as a subject worthy of sustained inquiry in its own right.

It is a pragmatic, managerial, and quintessentially technocratic approach: we built a machine that worked, now let us make it work even better. The question of what the machine did to the people inside it and on the receiving end of it, what it revealed about state power and individual liberty, what it means for the social contract, appears to be a matter for another day, another phase, another conversation we are not quite ready to have yet.

What the Choices Reveal

These three inquiries, read together, reveal something more fundamental than their individual findings. They show us that there is no shared understanding across the Westminster tradition of what accountability for a crisis actually means.

Is it about assigning blame to individuals who failed in their duty, as the UK believes? Is it about repairing trust between the state and the citizen after that relationship fractured under pressure, as Australia contends? Or is it about improving systems and processes for next time, as Aotearoa insists?

The answer shapes not just how we remember the pandemic, but what we believe governance is for. The UK’s inquiry treats the pandemic as a failure of political judgment that demands personal accountability. Leaders made decisions, those decisions had consequences, and those leaders must answer for them. Australia’s inquiry treats it as a breakdown in the social contract that requires collective healing. The problem was not individuals but systems, not decisions but relationships, and the path forward is about rebuilding trust rather than assigning blame. And Aotearoa’s inquiry, at least so far, treats it as a test of state capacity that, while largely passed, revealed areas for improvement. The machinery worked, but it could work better, and our focus should be on refinement rather than recrimination or reflection. We should defer to the machine.

Each nation got the inquiry it needed, perhaps? But reading them together raises uncomfortable questions. What happens when the next crisis comes, the machinery works perfectly, coordination is flawless, and thousands still die, and no one is held responsible because the process was technically sound? That is not a hypothetical. That is the logic our own inquiry has chosen, at least in its first phase.

The UK has shown us what it looks like to demand personal accountability from those who wield power. Australia has shown us what it looks like to acknowledge systemic failure while avoiding the question of who bears responsibility. And we have shown what it looks like to focus on technical excellence while deferring the harder questions about what the state can demand of its citizens and what citizens can expect from the state in return.

These are not just different approaches to pandemic review. They might be different theories of democratic accountability, different understandings of what the state owes its people, and different levels of comfort with occupying the uncomfortable space between success and harm, between necessity and overreach, between what worked and what it cost.

The question before us now, as Phase Two of our own inquiry approaches, is whether we are ready to ask those harder questions. Or whether we will continue to be more comfortable examining what we need to do than confronting what we have become.

References

Commonwealth of Australia. (2024). Commonwealth Government COVID-19 Response Inquiry Report. https://www.pmc.gov.au/resources/covid-19-response-inquiry-report

Honig, B. (2009). Emergency politics: Paradox, law, democracy. Princeton University Press.

Royal Commission of Inquiry into COVID-19 Lessons Learned. (2024). Whītiki Aotearoa: Lessons from COVID-19 to prepare Aotearoa New Zealand for a future pandemic – Phase One main report. https://covid19lessons.royalcommission.nz/

UK COVID-19 Inquiry. (2025). Modules 2, 2A, 2B, 2C: Core decision-making and political governance. https://covid19.public-inquiry.uk/module