*|AIIA QUEENSLAND|*

Arguing with Success: COVID-19 and the Failure of Australia’s Regulatory State

Presented by Associate Professor Shahar Hameiri
 

When: Tuesday, June 8, 2021, 6pm until 7pm
Where: The Terrace Room, Level 6, Sir Llew Edwards Building #14,  Campbell Road, University of Queensland St Lucia 

To view a detailed map showing the venue, click here

This is event is free for AIIA members from all states. Non-members pay $10 and student non-members $5

To register and pay, click here


You can attend this event in-person or view it online. If attending in person, please arrive at The Terrace Room at 5.30pm for registration.  Because of COVID restrictions, AIIA Queensland needs to have accurate information about audience numbers. Please register for this event.

Details for viewing online: After registering, on June 8 you will receive a follow-up confirmation email containing further details on how to join the webinar which will commence at 6pm AEST.  If you have not received an email by early afternoon, please check your junk folder. 

About the event
 

Australia is touted as a rare success story in the fight against the spread of COVID-19, keeping infection rates and deaths very low by global standards. Australia’s apparent success, however, has been achieved due to crude, blunt, and coercive policy instruments – long-term border closures, including between Australian states, and large-scale lockdowns – and despite the evident failure of its pandemic preparedness and response systems. Decades of neoliberal reforms have meant that Australian governments at the Commonwealth and State levels have often struggled to mobilise resources and personnel effectively to manage COVID-19. The hollowing out of state capacity, outsourcing, privatisation, defunding of key services, and confusion over lines of authority and accountability – all inherent aspects of the shift to regulatory statehood – explain failures in major policy areas, such as hotel quarantine, contact-tracing, and the vaccine program. As a consequence of their failure to govern, Australian governments have often resorted to border closures and lockdowns to manage even small outbreaks. The Australian experience shows that to avoid a public health catastrophe or more damaging lockdowns when the next pandemic strikes, states must learn to govern again.

About the speaker



 

Shahar Hameiri is Australian Research Council Future Fellow, which is a very prestigious position, and Associate Professor in the School of Political Science and International Studies, University of Queensland. His research mainly focuses on the intersection of security and development in the Asia-Pacific. He is co-author of ‘COVID-19 and the Failure of the Neoliberal Regulatory State’, Review of International Political Economy (2021), and author of ‘COVID-19: is this the end of globalization’, International Journal (2021). His books include Fractured China: How State Transformation is Shaping China’s Rise (Cambridge University Press, 2021), and Governing Borderless Threats: State Transformation and the Politics of Non-Traditional Security (Cambridge University Press, 2015), both co-authored with Lee Jones. He tweets @ShaharHameiri.

Main image: An electron microscope image shows SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, isolated from a patient in the U.S. Virus particles are shown emerging from the surface of cells cultured in the lab. The spikes on the outer edge of the virus particles give coronaviruses their name, crown-like. Source: NIAID-RML

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