Dr Nick Coatsworth: I think we persisted a little too long with lockdowns.

"And I think we persisted a little too long with things like lockdowns. You saw what happened in Victoria. The Victorian population was so forgiving of Daniel Andrews and Brett Sutton up and to the point where it was the fifth lockdown and suddenly you get some of the worst civil unrest that Australia has ever seen. So you can only push so far with these sort of things before the harm starts to outweigh the benefit. And I really think the report shows that very elegantly.

"Well, that harm is still being felt right now. It is. And I think what we have to accept there is that in a pandemic, a pandemic is the health equivalent of a world war. You're going to get a deep hangover afterwards of all sorts of harms. In this case, the question that we have to ask ourselves is, what can we do to minimize the effects, the mental health effects, the effects on young people and young families, those sort of things that that we are still feeling here now in 2024."

"And remember, this isn't about a tick or a cross against every single pandemic decision. The report deliberately doesn't do that. but it does provide a good 860 pages of a really useful roadmap of how to respond if it happens next year, which it well might."

"I think we'd have a real challenge to do that and maybe we don't get a virus where we actually need to do that, but I think that if we did, then we'd have to be exceptional at communicating the reasons for that."