Over the last few weeks, Australians have lived through a governmental failure unprecedented in living memory. For hundreds of thousands, attempting to get tested for COVID or accessing the health system has exposed a remarkable degree of dysfunction. For most, it’s extremely stressful. For some, it’s life-threatening.

As the rising caseloads overwhelms the public health system, there will be avoidable deaths and unnecessary pain. Indeed, the experience of watching state and federal governments lurch from ad hoc announcement to ad hoc announcement has driven anxiety and obliterated remaining confidence in government. For health workers, the moment is nothing short of traumatic.

How did it come to this? Australia’s governments had two years to plan for this moment. For most of 2020, state and federal governments told us that once the vaccination rates reached a high enough level, we would have to open up and “live with the virus.” You’d be forgiven for thinking there was a plan in place to deal with this new stage of the pandemic. In reality, however, both federal and state governments were woefully underprepared. Understanding why this was the case lays bare the limits of the political-economic frameworks that have dominated Australia since the 1980s.