The flawed, delayed and inadequate collective government responses to the recent climate emergencies of fire, flood and drought were straws in the wind but COVID really highlighted the problems. National cabinet was a step in the right direction but clearly was not up to the challenge and broke down with the imperatives of state and national politics.

For a number of issues, the Commonwealth held responsibility but lacked the skill and staff to deliver on those responsibilities and had to be bailed out by the states and territories. This was true with vaccination, the under-regulated and under-resourced aged care system, quarantine, and even border entry from cruise ships.

More generally, the Commonwealth government's capacity to plan responses to, or conduct contingency planning for national emergencies, or to understand systems analysis and logistics, appears to be vestigial to non-existent.

These failings on the part of the Commonwealth arose in part because its expertise, apart from Defence, does not generally really lie with service delivery. Crucially, its ability to deliver services in emergencies has been sadly depleted by at least a decade of politicisation and a steady and inexorable depletion of skills within the Commonwealth public service.

But the states and territories were not without blemish. It is generally agreed that NSW fared best because it had higher levels of skills, and those skills were not concentrated centrally, but also available from regional public health units.

And it had a more balanced attitude towards lockdowns than other states that immediately jumped to the Black Death fortress lockdown approach. Victoria, in particular, paid a heavy price in terms of deaths and lockdowns, from a lack of field epidemiological skills and staff in the first year of the pandemic.

Nor, in hindsight, was the health advice spot on from the outset. In the early days, when so little was known about the virus, it might have been expected that the method of transmission in the early cases would have been the subject of intense study.

It took far too long to determine that aerosols and droplets, rather than surfaces, were the main method of transmission and that ventilation as well as masks were critical.

And there was blind faith in over simplistic models which took no account of wider public health, social and economic issues. Models have a role but didn't include the consequences of public health measures - like the mental health and domestic violence consequences of isolation, nor the social and economic effects of households inadequately protected by income support schemes.

Health experts, who seemed to spring out of the woodwork, have a role to play in advising on very significant measures like lockdowns, but ultimately politicians must balance health and other considerations.

That does not mean that politicians necessarily got it right and indeed seemed to have swung from overreaction to underreaction, but it is politicians' role to make such judgments and to wear the responsibility that goes with their decisions.

It should not be concluded that Australia made a mess of COVID. Far from it. Despite the manifest flaws, in many respects it responded comparatively well, to what was in many ways an unprecedented threat. The Fault Lines report shows that while Australia ranked about the middle of the international pack in terms of the number of COVID cases per million between 2020-2022, it was amongst the lowest in the world in terms of excess deaths.

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But that should not cause complacency. The threat of potentially nastier variants, different pandemics or other national threats emerging in the future is real, and there is absolutely no doubt that climate emergencies will only increase in terms of frequency and severity.

So what are the lessons for national emergencies in general and COVID in particular?

Firstly, there needs to be clear definition of national cabinet processes for national emergencies and the respective roles and responsibilities of the Commonwealth, states and territories. The current political climate may provide an unparalleled opportunity to turn cooperative federalism from a slogan to a functioning reality.

So, if increasing climate emergencies are a given, and new pandemics highly likely, a fully functioning federal system would not tackle crises on the run but would establish a national emergency secretariat, staffed by highly skilled Commonwealth and jurisdictional officials to support the national cabinet. It would need to develop contingency plans for pandemics, fire, flood and drought and other potential emergencies.

The roles, responsibilities and resourcing issues for each of the Commonwealth, states and territory governments would then need to be thrashed out in advance, through the national cabinet process.

In addition to government processes, there is a manifest need to drastically improve skill levels, particularly for the Commonwealth, but also for the jurisdictions.

The pervasive nonsensical notion that public service skills are generic, needs to be ditched and replaced by a national training scheme with selective entry into the public service and a culture of lifelong learning, so that for each public servant, the question is what skills and knowledge does this person need to optimally fulfil their role - and this should start at the top. A centre for disease control is a step in the right direction, but each of the health departments around the country needs to ensure that it has the requisite skills for infection control, climate emergencies and contingency planning skills, together with systems analysis and logistical expertise.

Australia can and should show the world how to respond to the inevitable rise of future national emergencies - and it really doesn't need yet another enquiry or royal commission to do it.