They therefore must know that they are telling lies, day after day.

All the wilful exaggerations. All the facts not mentioned. About the efficacy of masks, lockdowns, curfews, distancing, contact-trace and vaccines, to name just a few of the major ones.

SETTLED

And every other bright idea they have come up with that overturns nearly a half century of settled medical science.

If they are lying, then why are they lying? Who or what is behind the COVID State’s lies? What is really going on here? On this view, there must be something hidden and menacing in play.

The second clue for COVID conspiracies, related to the first, is the fact that so many of the decisions taken by democratic governments are just so patently stupid. Stupid and pointless.

So much of what has passed for rational decision-making – we are simply following the science – is simply risible.

Not only is it not scientific. It is all palpably irrational. Take your pick from the following, by no means exhaustive, list.

• Locking up the healthy rather than protecting the vulnerable?
• Making people wear masks that, for decades, we have known not to work?
• Allowing people with life-threatening illnesses go down the gurgler for want of attention from supposedly stretched hospitals and doctors?
• Wrecking the economy?
• Printing money we do not have?
• Changing the rules every other day on a whim?
• Closing internal borders?
• Shutting down whole city-regions when outbreaks are localised?
• Curfews?
• Spending billions on contact-trace technology that achieves nothing save spreading further, needless panic?
• Crazy rules, of which there are hundreds of examples?
• All the BS associated with COVID Theatre?
• The very idea that governments can control, let alone eliminate, rapidly spreading viruses?

Most of the folks know, deep down, that all this is nonsense (despite what they might tell the pollsters).

Why would moderately intelligent, rational politicians make so many stupid decisions?

It must be for a reason, so the conspiracy thinking goes. There must be something else going on.

Now, there are a number of explanations other than the two obvious ones – conspiracy or stuff-up – that seek to explain the flight from rationality of our politicians and their “expert” advisers these past 18 months.

SMASHING

Political science 101 tells us that there are several models of decision-making seeking to explain why politicians do the things they do.

How do these stack up in the age of COVID?

As well as smashing the rights and freedoms of citizens, ruining the education of a generation, causing distress and economic hardship, redefining words like “vaccines” – about which we thought we knew the meaning – the past 18 months of amateur-hour decision-making has done something else.

It has totally redefined political theory, and turned the way we think about our leaders and their decisions on its head.

One theory of how politicians reach decisions and make policy is called “the rational actor model”, and it might well sum up what the ordinary punter believes to be abilities and motivations of governments.

This model assumes that well-motivated, well-informed politicians with a clear understanding of the policy problem to be solved think through the options then simply pick the best choice.

Perhaps even use some cost-benefit analysis. Clarify the problem, list the options, weigh the issues carefully, consider likely outcomes, recognise the downsides of any actions taken, be consistent, measure success with standardised and agreed methods – shampoo, rinse, repeat.

Isn’t this how decision-making should work? It would be, well, rational.

The rationality model has the following features:

1. Problems are clear.
2. Objectives are clear.
3. People agree on criteria and weights.
4. All alternatives are known.
5. All consequences can be anticipated.
6. Decision makers are rational.

I know – try not to laugh. But the rational actor model certainly once had cache, and probably best described how the bureaucracy at least worked, back in the day.

Frank, fearless advice based on research and understanding of issues was offered to elected officials by objective, value-free, professional, disinterested public servants.

That proposition, in the era of a politicised civil service, short-term contracts instead of tenure, bureaucrats that have fallen under the spell of post-modern ideologies and multiple rewards for doing the government’s bidding, is as naïve as believing that their political masters are rational actors.

But you would like to think that policy-making should be something like this. That politicians should aspire to be well-motivated, well-informed and determined to achieve the best outcome possible for the good of the country or State over which they preside.

Yet we seem to be falling very, very short of the ideal.

Politicians are nowadays greedy, motivated by career, factionalised, prone to lying, forever focused on polling, controlled by outside interests, fearful of losing their power, speaking in cliches, and seemingly will do just about anything to get off the hook.

PERKS

They are patently driven by the enjoyment of power, accessing the perks of office, protecting their mates, setting up post-political-career opportunities and seem only good at settling scores.

And the buck always stops somewhere else.

There is little evidence that they are focused on problem solving (as per the rational actor model), even remotely interested in it or equipped to do it.

A second model of decision-making has been called “bounded rationality”.

This is the idea that time-poor politicians facing difficult and complex problems and with limited information and multiple pressures do not seek the first-best policy, but are satisfied with an “acceptable” solution, with achieving as good an outcome as can be expected under the circumstances.

There are other models of decision-making, and each of them tells us part of the story.

One model is called “incrementalism”. This suggests that no political decision is made in isolation.

Every decision builds on what is already there. Its chief advocate (an American called Charles Lindblom) calls the approach “muddling through”.

MUDDLING

Well, we are used to politicians muddling through, constrained in their choices by what is there and what has gone before.

It might be suggested that nothing like COVID has come before, that March 2020 was “ground zero” in a fundamentally new game. This is rubbish.

We have had pandemics before, far worse than COVID. And there was a massive amount of science – real science, not the fake version currently on parade – to which politicians could have turned.

They simply chose to upend established medical knowledge about viruses and to ditch common sense to boot.

No rationality, not even bounded rationality, and no building incrementally on what were already established health policies.

Another model is that democracies consist of interest groups all vying for influence over decision-making, and that politicians simply respond to these interest groups in the decisions they make.

They especially respond to loud, persistent, clever, monied interest groups. Like Big Pharma, perhaps? Or Big Tech? If this sounds corrupt, well it is.

SELF-INTEREST

Another model of politics – public choice theory – suggests that politicians and bureaucrats have selfish interests just like voters and just like sellers and buyers in the marketplace that is the economy, and that they make decisions according to this self-interest.

Leaders look out for number one. And government failure is just as rife as market failure.

This is getting very warm, and isn’t remotely surprising. This theory passes the pub test. Nothing has been so clear during the COVID affair as the self-interest of politicians, and of massive government failure.

But whatever else they are, our leaders are not being remotely rational. And yes, as Mike Yeadon says, they are lying and they must know their decisions are stupid and, on balance, massively harmful.

So, we have an array of theories trying to explain how politicians make decisions.

But nothing, nothing, in the study of politics or of decision-making explains fully why governments all over the world simultaneously threw sanity out the window in seeking to deal with a middling, flu-like virus that has killed a large number of people but which should not have caused the policy-making meltdown that it has.

Two conclusions can very confidently be reached, however.

LOCKDOWNS

One is that there hasn’t to date been a sliver of very thin paper between the major Parties on the question of lockdowns and of COVID more generally.

Right, Left or centre, they are all equally panicked, all pandering to the fear in the community that they themselves have created, all scared witless – in the age of the social media pile-on – of instant electoral retribution.

All are feckless in their inability to figure a way out of the hole they have dug themselves, and so they merely dig harder and deeper, while ignoring science and crushing dissent – or ridiculing those (few) who question their approach. Enter stage Left NSW Health Minister Brad Hazzard.

None are remotely able or willing to ask their advisers hard questions. They have betrayed the nation by not acting as our representatives in a quest for the truth.

The second conclusion relates to something called the “Overton Window”, which explains what governments are willing and unwilling to do when making decisions.

How far they feel comfortable going. It is their window of opportunity (named after the guy who thought this model up), their area of safety, the constraints that stop them doing anything too “courageous”, as the fictional Sir Humphrey Appleby would have said.

DANGERS

Another name for this is the “meerkat theory of politics”.

Meerkats emerge from their hidey-holes, and take a look around to see what dangers there are, and what possibilities are open to them.

Our COVID politicians are like meerkats. They see what they might be able to get away with. Then they try again, being a little bolder, venturing a little farther from the hidey-hole, but still looking over their shoulders for electoral danger.

The meerkats are normally very timid. Likewise, the Overton Window programs politicians to be cautious. Some might think that, since the COVID scare arrives, they actually have been cautious. But think again.