The Covid-19 pandemic has left its mark on all of us. How could it not? The shuttered small businesses; the warring states; the spectre of aged care residents, hands pressed against glass, unable to touch or receive relatives. The Centrelink queues, the taped-up playgrounds, the closed borders. The stranded cruise ships, the panic buying of toilet paper, the unrelenting and crushing boredom of our four walls. Personally, I can’t see a North Face jacket without a visceral flashback to our erstwhile Victorian premier and his trademark press conference opener: ‘We right to go?’ The desire to forget all of this, to move on from the pandemic, is what makes Australia’s Pandemic Exceptionalism: How we crushed the curve but lost the race such an important contribution to the literature of Covid-19 post-mortems.

Economists Steven Hamilton and Richard Holden were regular contributors to the op-ed pages during lockdowns, heartily supporting the fiscal response, and lambasting our costly dithering in vaccine procurement (an ‘unmitigated disaster’) and the sluggish roll-out of rapid antigen tests, or RATs (‘unconscionable’). They have synthesised their individual contributions into a shared argument: the Morrison government both succeeded and failed in its response to Covid-19, and there are vital lessons to be learnt.