For the covid spending and the previous government not listening to the Treasury about slowing down spending.
The pandemic was a unique situation. So, some of the decisions you have to make and live with.
My opinion is the decisions early in the pandemic should be more immune to criticism. They should still be reviewed and learnt from.
The pandemic response went on for a few years, so the decisions made later on, like the Treasury advice to slow down, should be more open to criticism. As you have the previous years to learn from.
I've done a lot of work in business continuity. How do you recover from a disaster or from a cyber event etc. The pandemic response is pretty similar. We closed our borders, similar to how a business would cut off its connection to the internet to resolve the breach or patch/rebuild its machines. Similar to vaccinations.
After the fact, you'd have a report to learn from it.
As much as we heard about "saving lives" and health. How much have we seen about health since the pandemic ended? Not the health system but the actual health of the population?
One of the reasons we had lockdowns was our hospitals wouldn't cope. When we finally changed our response and the cases increased, we saw the hospitals become overrun. Headlines for that continue after covid.
Going into the last election and since the election. How much have we heard about investing in our health system? We have probably heard more about roads or other things instead. A sign that things have moved on. But also a worry for the next pandemic.
The other concern for me is education. A lot of kids will be behind where they should be due to being stuck at home.
