ABSTRACT
Australia’s federal system handled the COVID-19 pandemic throughout 2020 remarkably well — lauded, indeed, for the unusually cooperative manner in which it functioned. Australia’s first case, a passenger arriving from China, was confirmed on 25 January 2020. Three decades of economic good fortune in Australia finally ran out as the lockdowns induced the largest quarterly decline in gross domestic product on record — falling 7 percent in the April–June period — and ushering in the country’s first recession since 1990–1991. In design, Australia is a classic ‘dual’ federation made up of the six founding States and the Commonwealth. “Recently the Commonwealth Parliament has passed laws that purport to give it significant control over the management of a certain type of civil emergency, a ‘biosecurity emergency’”. Like most other federations, Australia has an extensive array of arrangements through which intergovernmental relations in the form of ‘executive federalism’ are practised.
