We are living in the era of state capacity.

Government competence became the difference between life and death, freedom and tyranny.

My long read for The Weekend @Australian’s Inquirer puts Victoria and NSW under the microscope. https://www.theaustralian.com.au/inquirer/victorias-incompetence-could-not-be-more-stark/news-story/f718c83ecb87b939c977f02c539c7698

COVID-19 has been a dramatic test of governments across the globe.

Success has been mixed: Britain has had over 35 times more deaths per capita than Australia; the US has had almost 50 times more than South Korea.

Even within Oz, Vic has recorded 19 times more deaths than NSW.

The usual explanations — from the gender of the leader to the political system, health spending or urbanisation — fail to explain success or failure.

Instead, it was a question of competence or “state capacity”: the ability to effectively decide and implement good policy.

The states that did the basics well — border measures and extensive testing and tracing, advise hand washing and social distancing, cancel large events, stockpile personal protective equipment, and expand hospital capacity — succeeded.

In Australia, all states and territories appeared to be on a similar buoyant trajectory, helped by early national border measures.

Then, cascading governance failures created the exception that shows Australia is not simply the Lucky Country.

Victoria’s lacklustre infection control in hotel quarantine seeded a new outbreak into the community. Then inept contact tracing failed to catch cases in time.

Melbourne consequently had one of the most prolonged lockdowns in the world.

Victoria’s contact tracing system used pens, paper and fax machines. It was too slow: contacts waited up to nearly two weeks to be notified about a potential exposure.

The tracing was operated centrally, in contrast to NSW or South Korea, which use decentralised local area health districts.

The result is striking: between June and October last year, only 3% of NSW cases had an unknown origin, compared with 22% in VIC.

Hotel quarantine and contact tracing is just the tip of the iceberg of Victoria’s lacklustre governance.

During lockdown, for instance, Victoria required the manual printing and hand signing of forms for work travel permits.

By contrast, in NSW citizens could use Service NSW to apply for a digital border crossing permit.

This was possible only because of a longer-term investment in state capacity by the NSW.

Service NSW was established in 2013 to improve customer service using modern technology.

Good governance coupled with useful technologies does not just make lives easier, save taxpayer money, and help business creation; it has much bigger implications for the future of our institutions.

“Nobody wants to engage with government,” Paul Shetler warned. “Nobody cares about the DTO, ATO, DHS, DSS — the whole alphabet soup — nobody cares about any of that. Nobody really wants to engage with it because people just want to get stuff done.”

Services should be delivered at people’s fingertips, in a personalised, integrated and streamlined manner, across levels of government and departments.

In the past many who advocated for smaller government gave up on the technocratic task of improving state capacity.

Small is beautiful. But it is foolish to entirely abandon improving the state.

We, the taxpayers and users of services, have a very strong interest in the best possible bang for our buck.

Governing is a challenging task: the scale is massive, antiquated systems are hardwired and politics is constantly changing.

Reform is a radical exercise that takes political will to push back against bureaucratic inertia and entrenched interests.

We have learnt the hard way this year that state capacity really does matter. It is simply too important to ignore.