Pandemic policing and the construction of publics: an analysis of COVID-19 lockdowns in public housing

ABSTRACT

COVID-19 responses have cast a spotlight on the uneven impacts of public health policy with particular populations or sites targeted for intervention. Perhaps the starkest example in Australia was the ‘hard’ lockdown of nine public housing complexes in inner-city Melbourne from 4 to 18 July 2020, where residents were fully confined to their homes. These complexes are home to diverse migrant communities and the lockdown drew public criticism for unfairly stigmatising ethnic minorities. This article draws on media articles published during the lockdown and the Victorian Ombudsman’s subsequent investigation to explore the implications of broad, top-down public health measures for culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) communities. Drawing on Lea’s (2020) conceptualisation of policy ecology, we analyse the lockdown measures and community responses to explore the normative assumptions underpinning health policy mechanisms, constituting ‘target populations’ in narrow, exclusionary terms. We argue that the lockdown measures and use of police as compliance officers positioned tower residents as risky subjects in risky places. Tracing how such subject positions are produced, and resisted at the grassroots level, we highlight how policy instruments are not neutral interventions, but rather instantiate classed and racialised patterns of exclusion, reinforcing pervasive social inequalities in the name of public health.

KEYWORDS:

• COVID-19 responses
• lockdown
• culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) communities
• policy analysis
• health publics
• public housing

Introduction

COVID-19 has laid bare existing social fissures, reinforcing existing inequalities and disproportionately affecting vulnerable communities (Weng et al., 2021). The impact of the pandemic on marginalised communities highlights the pressing need for inclusive health responses in times of crisis. Although Australia’s public health measures typically address the public in universal terms, their implicit understandings of care, ‘essential’ work, and family do not adequately address the needs of culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) communities (Grills & Butcher, 2020). A recent survey of temporary visa-holders in Australia found that CALD temporary migrants have faced greater precarity and job losses during the COVID pandemic, yet their visa status has prevented them accessing social support services (Berg & Farbenblum, 2020). Evidence from multicultural organisations bears this out, with CALD communities reporting loss of income, financial stress, social isolation and mental health issues due to COVID-19 (Ethnic Communities’ Council of Victoria, 2020).

Australia’s harshest restrictions have targeted areas with a high proportion of CALD residents, including local government areas in South-West Sydney and Melbourne’s inner-city public housing complexes (Jakubowicz, 2021). In Melbourne, without warning, the Victorian state government locked down nine public housing blocks in inner city areas including North Melbourne, South Melbourne and Flemington, subjecting more than 3000 residents to a heavy police presence and severe restrictions not imposed in outbreaks in more affluent areas. The residents of these blocks were mainly from refugee and migrant backgrounds (Couch et al., 2021). The lockdown prevented residents from leaving their homes for at least five days, during which they were only permitted restricted periods of exercise within the housing block property (Ryan et al., 2022). While the rationale for the restrictions was the COVID-19 outbreak in the complexes, the lockdown was later investigated by the Victorian Ombudsman and found to violate residents’ human rights including their ‘right to humane treatment when deprived of liberty’ (Victorian Ombudsman, 2020).

Notwithstanding the Ombudsman’s landmark finding, there is limited research addressing the impacts of COVID restrictions among marginalised communities in Australia with empirical work largely confined to survey-based research (e.g. Weng et al., 2021; Mude et al., 2021) or policy briefs (Miletic, 2020). While contributing valuable insights into population-based trends and attitudes, such research is unable to yield first-hand accounts of the experiences of affected communities, and the sociocultural implications of pandemic responses. Recent qualitative research has begun to address these questions by highlighting community care practices (Olivier et al., 2022) and the need to consult CALD communities on the design and implementation of public health measures (De Nardi & Phillips, 2022; Wild et al., 2021). In this piece, we build on this work to explore the specific constitutive effects of policy that are often overlooked in broad public health responses, tracing the ways in which policy constitutes particular publics or ‘communities’ as sites for intervention.

Our work also builds on Ryan et al.’s (2022) recent analysis of the biopolitics of pandemic policing in relation to Melbourne’s tower lockdowns. The authors critically review the Ombudsman’s report, arguing that the police powers enacted in the tower lockdowns are forms of biopolitical governance directed at the urban poor, ethnic minorities and public housing residents in the name of protecting the wider community. Important to note here is the racialised history of social housing in Australia and the fact that, as the Ombudsman’s report concluded, the hard lockdown violated the rights of tower residents, a ‘significant proportion’ of whom were from ‘non-European backgrounds’ (Victorian Ombudsman, 2020, p. 5; Russell et al., 2022). Ryan et al. (2022) suggest that the emergency enforcement mandate and the state’s authority to restrict tower residents’ liberty in the name of population health served to extend police powers and inoculate the police from accountability, while singling out disadvantaged communities for differential treatment. Extending this account of pandemic policing as a mode of biopolitical control, we argue that the policy logics underpinning the hard lockdown in Melbourne differentially construct public health subjects according to a classed and racialised view of compliance and non-compliance.

Approach: tracing the ‘unruly logics’ of policy

Our analysis is informed by the analytic approach of anthropologist Tess Lea (2020) who traces the wider social and political frameworks that shape policy. Lea (2020, p. 26) proposes a focus on policy ecology attentive to ‘policy artifacts and policy ambience’. This approach shifts the focus of policy analysis away from a teleological model of emergence, effect and evaluation, and towards an exploration of the sociocultural, political and historical conditions that shape particular policy measures. This alternative orientation allows fine-grained attention to policy effects often dismissed as ‘unintended consequences’. As Lea explains, ‘when policy is considered as wild to begin with, it is no longer a stable body of rational thought whose deviations in practice might be traced as “unintended consequences”’ (Lea, 2020, p. 12). This approach aligns with Carol Bacchi’s (2009) poststructuralist policy analysis, particularly her attention to the differential effects of specific policy problematisations. Bacchi’s approach starts from the premise that ‘some problem representations create … forms of harm for members of some social groups more so than for members of other groups’ (1999, p.15). The interrogation of policy harms often framed as ‘unintended consequences’ also resonates with recent research that critiques the depoliticising discourse of ‘unintended consequences’, arguing that many sociopolitical structures are ‘in fact intended to cause harm, but designed not to appear so’ (Broom et al., 2023, p. 2, original emphasis). Harm is therefore actively administered rather than merely an unintentional consequence of particular policy or social structures. Applied to our concerns here, this understanding situates policy consequences within longer histories and broader contexts veiled by, in this case, the urgency of COVID containment measures.

While expert advice and due consideration is presumed in public health policy contexts, the practical misalignment between health advice, politics, and expediency attests to the lack of ‘original policy coherency’ (Lea, 2020, p. 24). An example from the public housing lockdowns is instructive:

The Deputy Chief Health Officer – the expert on infectious diseases acting as Victoria’s Chief Health Officer on the day – told us that although she signed the directions, the timing was not on her advice. She was given less than 15 minutes to consider the terms of several lengthy documents and their human rights implications. (Victorian Ombudsman, 2020, p. 4)

Crucial here is the imperative to take immediate action in the context of a rapidly changing public health emergency where responses are contingent on evolving scientific knowledge, infection control modelling and uncertain futures (Rhodes & Lancaster, 2020; Lancaster et al., 2020). While unique in many respects, the COVID-19 example of policymaking in an emergency undercuts any ‘original policy coherency’ and instead captures what Lea (2020, p. 12) argues is policy’s ‘steady-state irrationality’. In other words, the conditions of policy’s emergence and the various actors involved necessarily shape the processes of policymaking. A policy ecology approach is thus particularly useful for how it expands the ‘agents of policy’ to include not only policymakers, politicians and service providers but also those impacted. In doing so, Lea (2020, p. 30) develops a ‘policy hauntology’ that considers policies as produced in relation to other historic policy effects and as enabling conditions of ‘privilege and impoverishment’ in the present and future.

Our analysis is also informed by Michael Warner’s (2002) work on the discursive production of publics. As he explains, public discourse actively calls particular publics into being: ‘Public discourse says not only “Let a public exist” but “Let it have this character, speak this way, see the world in this way” (2002, p. 422). On this view, publics take shape through specific discursive practices including those associated with policy. Also key to our analysis is the concept of ‘risk’ which we define following Beck’s classic ‘risk society’ thesis as ‘a systematic way of dealing with hazards and insecurities’ that have emerged through the technoscientific advances of late modernity (1992, p. 12). These include pandemics and other health threats associated with globalisation. Beck later elaborated on his original formulation, adding that ‘[r]isks are social constructions and definitions’ and are therefore open to contestation and change (2009, p. 30). Implicit here is the recognition that risks are not objectively real, but rather are based on agreed social definitions of what constitutes a ‘hazard’. In the case of infectious disease control, understandings of epidemiological risk are the ‘calculative basis on which the health status of a population is determined or rendered visible’ and therefore are an important foundation for public health interventions (Brown et al., 2012, p. 1185). As such, assessments of risk play a key role in governing populations. In what follows we combine these insights to explore first, how the use of police to enforce lockdowns constituted residents and broader publics in terms of their ‘risk’ profiles, and second, how the community responded to the unintended impacts of the lockdown measures.

Method

Our analysis draws on Australian and international media articles from 4 July 2020–10 October 2021, the majority of which were published during the period 4–18 July 2020, coinciding with the hard lockdown of the North Melbourne and Flemington public housing complexes. The analysis is part of a larger interview-based study that explores residents’ first-hand accounts of the lockdowns. However, our focus here is on contemporaneous media and public commentary reporting resident experiences in order to analyse the immediate impact of the lockdown on them and how they advocated for their communities in response. Consistent with policy ecology’s attention to diverse accounts, the media and commentary provide a valuable projection of tower residents’ voices and their resistance to the lockdown.

We conducted multiple keyword Google searches for the above date range, using the terms ‘COVID-19 lockdown’, ‘[public housing] towers’, ‘North Melbourne’ ‘Flemington’, ‘hard lockdown’. This search yielded over 300 sources. The corpus was supplemented with relevant articles hyperlinked within publications found through the original keyword search. Relevant articles establish the policy context of the hard lockdown or quote residents directly. We excluded material that did not address the hard lockdown directly (e.g. general news articles on COVID-19 or other lockdowns) to generate a corpus of 41 local and 9 international media articles and 16 local community or public commentaries. While most of the media articles are from Australian news outlets, we also included relevant international coverage on Melbourne’s hard lockdowns and expanded the initial time frame to include 14 articles published in the months post-lockdown, as well as the Victorian Ombudsman’s investigation into the lockdowns published in December 2020. The investigation is a key facet of the COVID-19 policy landscape that comes into view via a policy ecology approach. Drawing on contemporaneous and key pieces of subsequent coverage enabled us to identify some of the lingering effects of the lockdown and how it may shape future public health policy measures.

Analysis

Policing and the creation of risky, racialised subjects

The lockdown of the Melbourne public housing towers was dogged by multiple issues from decision-making to implementation (Victorian Ombudsman, 2020, pp. 13–14). While the lockdown at one of the sites in North Melbourne was deemed justified and reasonable, the Ombudsman reports that a less restrictive option was available and the lack of appropriate planning and speed of the lockdown’s implementation violated ‘human rights, including the right to humane treatment when deprived of liberty’ (2020, p.179). Heavy policing, lack of community consultation, and haphazard, changing rules made for a complex situation eroding residents’ trust and heightening tensions. One participant in an African community forum captured some of the frustration stoked by the tower lockdowns, stating, ‘I don’t believe the issue was the lockdown, it was the lack of connection with community’ (quoted in Robinson et al., 2021, p. 1709). The erosion of trust was exacerbated by the immediate deployment of police to the towers, which heightened the stark differences in enforcement in different areas. The immediacy of these differences are clear in tower resident Hana’s statement, quoted in an article published on the first day of the lockdowns: ‘You had other suburbs where they had 48 hours warning before they were put in lockdown … How come we are any different? It just feels like we have been singled out’ (quoted in Wahlquist & Simons, 2020).

The deployment of police as compliance officers relies on a presumption that residents would not comply with the lockdown orders, a deficit-based and stigmatising framing of CALD residents. Indeed community leader Ring Mayar suggests that lack of trust stemmed from the deployment of police to enforce the lockdown of residents, many of whom have fearful and distrustful relationships with police due to experiences of overpolicing and racism: ‘People were suspicious of government, given some experiences of racism and lack of communication’ (quoted in Robinson et al., 2021, p. 1708). Social worker and resident, Ahmed Dini, observes the emotional impact of the police presence on tower residents, especially given the many refugee populations with histories of state-based trauma: ‘Right now, do you know how scary this looks?’ (quoted in Estcourt et al., 2020). The framing of communities as non-compliant and rule-breaking to the extent that police were necessary to enforce compliance disregards their sustained efforts to comply and help each other throughout the lockdown (Fang et al., 2020).

The architecture of the towers is also an important factor when considering policy impact and the potentially exacerbating role of police. The design of the high-rise, high-density towers underlines the policy logic behind the tower lockdown, i.e. that high-density living with shared common areas and no personal outdoor space leads to increased transmission risks. However, the spatial design also makes lockdowns more difficult to manage, producing a classed hierarchy of policy effects. Resident Hiba Shanino (2020) observes this difference: ‘People need to understand that here on the estate our experience of Covid is very different from people who live in the suburbs’. When the use of police to enforce the lockdowns is added to this mix, the carceral effect is reinforced. Mukhtar Muhammad, a volunteer during the lockdowns, said that ‘It’s literally like a prison, no backyard, nowhere to go’ (quoted in Fowler & Booker, 2020). Tower resident Tehiya Umer points to the carceral logic of the lockdowns: ‘We are in a pandemic; it’s not just people who live in high-rise [flats …] They are treating us like criminals for nothing’ (quoted in Fowler & Booker, 2020, emphasis added). As socio-legal scholar Matthew Weait has observed, public health orders which confine ‘at risk’ populations (especially ethnic minorities and poorer communities) can operate as a form of ‘criminalisation by the back door’ (2007, p. 12), reinforcing the stigmatisation of public housing residents (Sisson, 2022).

While the lockdowns were premised on risk of transmission, they also created additional risks such as mental distress and other socioeconomic constraints for the residents themselves. Resident Anisa Ali describes the flow-on effects of being locked down with no access to outdoor space: ‘A lot of us are really low on vitamin D and not having that sunlight and getting a walk in, it can be quite bad for your mental and physical health, so I’m quite concerned for a lot of people in this building. How they are going to cope?’ (quoted in Blakkarly, 2020). Ikram also describes the ‘claustrophobic’ conditions that come with being confined within a high-density housing block/estate: ‘Everyone is everywhere […] It’s a bit too much. As a teenager […] I would want privacy to myself, but the fact that I’m in the same household, everyone near the same spot, not much space, it’s too much’ (quoted in Truu & Yussuf, 2020).

As these accounts show, the impacts of the lockdown exceed the public health rationale of the policy in important ways. Coercive strategies dependent on police enforcement are predominantly used with marginalised communities and serve to exacerbate, rather than prevent, harm (Fowler & Booker, 2020). The bifurcation of the city across early July when only certain areas of Melbourne were under police-enforced hard lockdown throws this unevenness into stark relief. Risks then not only multiply under the conditions of the original lockdown but also emerge as part of a larger policy context that cannot be disentangled from media and political rhetoric, and enduring histories of policing marginalised communities (Weedon, 2020). Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews defended the lockdown measures, stating ‘This is not about punishment but protection. We cannot have this virus spread’ (quoted in Blakkarly, 2020). Appeals to the notion of ‘protection’ authorise the intervention as justified by the infection risk. Within a broader context of the public health strategy to ‘flatten the curve’, protection indexes the shared burden of containment that formed the foundation of Victorian and broader Australian COVID-19 messaging. However, protection also inadvertently reinforces the perception that residents of high-rise buildings pose a risk to the imagined ‘general public’: it constitutes them as risky disease vectors whose movement must be contained to prevent the spread of the virus to the wider community. It also constitutes their residences as disease accelerators, neglecting the ways in which the design of the public housing towers (with common areas and high-density living) puts residents at greater risk of infection. Indeed, as other scholars have noted, public health discourses often appeal to the concept of vulnerability to suggest marginalised communities are at increased risk of illness, which tacitly reinforces racialised hygiene discourses (Russell et al., 2022).

Not only are residents positioned as risky subjects, police are also constituted as compliance officers, arbiters of who can cross the boundary from risky tower residents to the at-risk broader community. Sergeant Gatt, Victorian Police Association secretary, sought to remind people of the police’s role in relation to the lockdowns: ‘These are important tasks and the police don’t in anyway relinquish their responsibility to actually help out. Our members have been at the frontline for four months helping the community and putting themselves out there in harm’s way’ (quoted in McArthur et al., 2020). The phrase ‘help out’ belies the partiality of the police force and minimises their role in enforcing the lockdown: they are law enforcement officers authorised by the government to manage a public health issue that would ordinarily be the rightful preserve of public health agencies. As Ryan et al. (2022, p. 130) note, the surveillance of those seen as posing a risk to public health highlights a key tension ‘between the idea of police helping to promote pastoral care and guidance of the population, and policing as a practice charged with the responsibility for enforcing public order’. Sergeant Gatt’s use of the term ‘helping out’ glosses over this tension and contrasts with the claim that police are putting themselves ‘in harm’s way’, which serves to reinforce the presumed status of tower residents as risky subjects posing ‘harm’ to the wider community. Nevertheless, Gatt continues, ‘Please remember [police are] not there to harm or hurt anybody, we’re simply there for the safety of others’ (McArthur et al., 2020). ‘Others’ here refers to both residents in the towers as well as broader publics. Reading Andrews’ and Gatt’s statements together suggests, however, that the safety and protection of the wider community is prioritised over the safety and protection of those in the towers, especially when considering the harms that residents experienced, partly because of police enforcement of the lockdowns (Wood et al., 2022, p.vii).

Our analysis shows that the lockdown measures enacted a set of dividing practices to exclude public housing residents from the imagined ‘general public’, constituting them as risky disease vectors, in the process reinforcing the stigma and discrimination faced by already marginalised communities. Indeed, the Victorian Ombudsman’s (2020, p.5) investigation into the lockdown found that supporting documents suggested ‘the towers were a hotbed of criminality and non-compliance’. The Ombudsman denounced these concerns as unfounded and inflected with raced and classed assumptions, noting: ‘It is unimaginable that such stereotypical assumptions, leading to the ‘theatre of policing’ that followed, would have accompanied the response to an outbreak of COVID-19 in a luxury apartment block’ (Victorian Ombudsman, 2020, p. 5). Crucially, the framing of residents as likely to resist the lockdown flies in the face of many residents’ explicit recognition of the need for these measures. For example, 85-year-old resident Gong Kehui said of the lockdown, ‘It is beneficial for ourselves and others’ (quoted in Fang et al., 2020). Similarly, resident Hannah Ibrahim notes, ‘We are more than happy to be tested. We want this virus under control. Just not like this’ (quoted in Kwan et al., 2020). In an extended account that captures residents’ ambivalent sentiments, Shanino (2020) notes:

There are two sides to how we are feeling right now. Mixed with the sense of outrage is a bit of relief – that the government is paying attention. And we do believe that we should be locked down, that this is an important health issue. We have a lot of people here who are vulnerable, and a lot of elderly people, so now it’s good that there is an awareness of what is going on in our community, and some help.

But Daniel Andrews should understand that he can’t just put immediate lockdown on a community, when other suburbs got hours or days’ notice. […] Now we have parents who can’t go to work. We can’t leave. There is a strain on us economically. There is a strain on our mental health. This is going to have a domino effect on our community.

We are encouraging people to get tested. We are saying: ‘Hey, listen. We are all in this together. We have to support each other’. This is the most important time for community spirit. But at the same time people are dealing with the effects of last night [the first night of lockdown], the shock of it, the trauma.

The assumption of non-compliance underpinning the police enforcement of the lockdowns also overlooks more measured responses that do not involve severely curtailing the liberties of thousands of residents, e.g. quarantining residents with a positive COVID-19 diagnosis to contain the spread (as suggested by Ryan et al., 2022, p. 141).

The fallout from targeted lockdowns in areas with a high proportion of CALD communities extends to an erosion of trust in government health messaging (Dau & Ellis, 2022). Sergeant Gatt implies as much when he asserts that police ‘could not be “everything to all people”’ (Silva, 2020). This assertion demonstrates how seemingly neutral institutional forces, here police but also policy instruments, are uneven in their organising logics where the professed intention of particular pandemic measures – to contain the virus, protect public health and save lives – inoculates them against critique despite their uneven effects (Pienaar et al., 2021). Gatt continues, ‘And so to the extent that there are deficiencies, the government needs to look at ensuring that additional support comes down here to help in the humanitarian effort’ (quoted in Silva, 2020). The recognition of police as partial – not ‘everything to all people’ – and the expressed need for additional support to bolster a humanitarian effort suggests that a more refined policy instrument is needed for both residents and police efforts.

Indeed residents queried why police were needed at all, alluding to the fear that their presence evoked: ‘We don’t need the police, we just need the social workers and the nurses … My kids keep asking me, “Why are the police here?” because sometimes they’re so scared. … I don’t even know how to answer them’ (Lucy quoted in Fang et al., 2020). Another resident, Girmay Mengesha echoes these sentiments, ‘We were so upset. Why send in police instead of nurses, social workers or interpreters to help the community understand what’s going on?’ (quoted in Morrow, 2020). In contrast, some agents of the broader policy sphere, such as the Victorian opposition leader, suggested that the government should have called in the Australian Defence Force (ADF) to enforce the lockdowns (McArthur et al., 2020). As noted above, a collateral effect of the hard lockdown is that a public health issue was rendered a law enforcement one, amenable to a police response with its attendant carceral logics. Using other compliance agents, such as the ADF, would likely only have reinforced these carceral effects (as evidenced in later lockdowns in South-West Sydney where the ADF was deployed [Khalil, 2021]). Implicit here is the assumption that a public health issue can be managed through a law enforcement response. However, police are not healthcare workers and thus their deployment in this context, particularly in the absence or active exclusion of healthcare and social workers, augments health disparities. Cohealth, a Victorian community health organisation, submitted a response to the Ombudsman’s report highlighting these concerns:

The police were placed in a leading role in implementing the lockdown and tightly enforced restrictions on who could enter and exit the apartment towers. This led to difficulties in Cohealth staff obtaining permission to enter the flats to fulfil their role in providing primary health care. (quoted in Victorian Ombudsman, 2020, p.132)

Our analysis has highlighted the intersecting factors that undermined the effectiveness of the public health response to the COVID outbreaks in Melbourne’s public housing towers. These factors include the inadequate engagement of residents, lack of culturally responsive strategies, use of police as enforcement agents and sidelining of community and health organisations to support residents. We turn next to explore how community-led responses addressed these issues.

Community responses

Throughout the lockdowns and in their aftermath, tower residents resisted the dominant policy framing of them as risky subjects in risky places, advocating staunchly for the needs of their communities. Food security emerged as a salient issue, due to the speed with which lockdown measures were introduced. Resident Amina captures the situation succinctly: ‘I am frustrated and angry. I wasn’t prepared at all’ (quoted in Kwan et al., 2020). Likewise, resident Mohamad Yusuf articulates the material impact of the immediate lockdown: ‘We only have the supplies we already had in the house on Saturday [first day of lockdown] and now we are running very low’ (quoted in Kwan et al., 2020). While the government did provide food supplies, it was rife with issues including the provision of expired products (Davey, 2020a), and culturally inappropriate food, such as unlabelled or non-halal food for Muslim residents (Fang et al., 2020). The suitability of food also extends to the amount delivered. Lucy, who had limited supplies going into the lockdown, says that after calling to request food she:

was waiting all day and all night [on Sunday] and they came at midnight. I opened the door and it was one soup packet and five meat pies and that was it … It’s not enough for eight people in the house – I will give it to my kids and I’ll be left here starving myself. (quoted in Fang et al., 2020)

The difficulties in sourcing food also extended to other basic items such as diapers, baby formula and medications (Kwan et al., 2020).

Community responses to food shortages came from inside and outside the towers. Yusuf, already running low on supplies as noted above, recognises both the importance and attendant risks of sharing supplies:

I’m helping out my elderly neighbours. Getting some information to them. Getting some essential stuff like sugar and milk to them. We’re sharing [our supplies]. The virus could spread. But when people don’t have adequate essentials, we have to go out and share stuff. You are promoting the spread of the virus. (quoted in Kwan et al., 2020)

Many local charities, restaurants, and individuals organised donations, plugging the gap left by government processes and provisions (Morrow, 2020). Commenting on food provision, Kon Karapanagiotidis, CEO of not-for-profit organisation, the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre, said, ‘We are making sure families are getting culturally-appropriate, culturally-inclusive food. If you don’t have food that’s culturally appropriate, you don’t have food security’ (quoted in Young, 2020). This comment can be applied to reflect on the far-reaching effects of policy: if policies cannot account for the conditions of implementation and generate deleterious effects for targeted communities, their unintended effects can eclipse their intended benefits, eroding community trust.

An important element of the community response to the tower lockdowns is how CALD communities proactively assumed the job of translation in culturally appropriate ways. Karidakis et al. (2022) explore how local Greek, Italian and Chinese community groups translated and adapted official public health information using tailored strategies including recognition of community language, literacy levels, and channels of information (e.g. health information from international news sources or social media such as WeChat). These channels also provide an important social support function: ‘Since our lockdown was reported by media, my sisters and brothers in those WeChat groups sent their condolences to me immediately. It was very warm and lovely’ (Gong quoted in Fang et al., 2020).

While the immediacy of the tower lockdowns might be one reason for the lack of appropriate communication, this deficiency was identified as a recurrent problem in the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic in Melbourne (Karidakis et al., 2022), and remained unresolved in later lockdowns (Davey, 2020b). For the tower lockdowns, the official government information in languages other than English was only delivered on the fourth day (Victorian Ombudsman, 2020, pp.15, 153), while residents and volunteers generated resources within 24 hours: ‘Some residents put together an information sheet and they translated that into 10 written and five oral languages within 24 hours and distributed it among their networks in order to help get government messaging across’ (Lemoh quoted in Davey, 2020a). As the Ombudsman’s report (2020, p.15) makes clear, the government’s resources came too late. In some cases, the printed information was delivered after the lockdowns were eased, or key information was only accessible via QR codes that require a familiarity with technology described as ‘very cumbersome and very complicated’ (Mengesha quoted in Om, 2020b). In response to these issues, residents, volunteers, local businesses, and community groups translated and disseminated materials. Local writer, artist, and poet Wāni le Frère organised translations into 10 languages by 4am on the 5th of July (Young, 2020). Local individuals and groups also arranged translations into Australian Sign Language (Auslan). Jody Barney, from Deaf Indigenous Community Consultancy, used videos to make information accessible. Of the many First Nations residents with disabilities, Barney says ‘Some of them have Auslan skills but some of them don’t have a deeper understanding so sometimes I have to gesture using Aboriginal, cultural appropriate signs just to give them information’ (quoted in Silva, 2020).

Residents and community organisations are not the only intermediaries who assumed added responsibility in response to the public health and social needs generated by COVID-19. Couch et al. (2021) explore the important role of young people in the wider policy ecology of public health. Young people took on additional caregiving responsibilities and help to implement new practices and digital strategies, such as remote schooling and video conferencing with family and friends (Couch et al., 2021; O’Keeffe & Daley, 2022). In the case of the towers, young people acted as cultural brokers: they ‘were asked to accompany public health workers door-knocking to encourage people to be tested’ (Couch et al., 2021, p. 252), or to represent the community in media interviews and editorials. They also worked as translators, bridging linguistic and cultural differences in the initial phase of policy rollout, as the Ombudsman’s report (2020, p.153) notes:

Residents and advocates observed that owing to initial lack of official information in community languages, it primarily fell upon younger, English-speaking family members and community volunteers to explain details of the lockdown to non-English speaking residents.

As these accounts show, the recognition and empowerment of young people is crucial to mounting an effective response to public health crises.

As part of a larger argument about the differential impacts of policy, Lea’s framework is instructive in emphasising ‘the work of differently situated protagonists operating within, through, and against policy to extract some of the benefits that policies claim to automatically provide’ (2020, p. 14, original emphasis). She continues: ‘the pulling of good out of different policy assemblages can be a labor of resistance against a more normative investment in crafting the appearance of omnimeritorious and necessary policy’ (Lea, 2020, p. 15). Community responses to the tower lockdowns constitute such a labor of resistance, addressing the damaging effects of narrowly conceived lockdown measures that did little to materially support their wellbeing.

Conclusion

Our analysis of Melbourne’s ‘hard’ lockdowns side-steps a teleological, evaluative model focussed on whether the lockdowns achieved their intended effects, by exposing the underlying assumptions and discursive production of the policy measures. As we have seen, the ‘hard’ lockdowns relied on the assumption that a public health issue could be managed through law enforcement. The dispatch of police officers to enforce compliance tacitly reinforces a racialised and classed view of residents as risky disease vectors who pose a threat to the wider community. In this respect, pandemic policing serves as a dividing practice, separating risky subjects from a general public understood to be outside the towers and at risk (see also Ryan et al., 2022). The expressed rationale of the lockdown – to curb the spread of the virus – buttresses a more insidious subjectifying effect: it enacts tower residents as risky subjects, cementing their racialised, classed marginalisation.

As we have noted, public health policy is oriented to the ‘general public’, but is also active in shaping the contours of a particular ‘public’: tower residents and a general public are both inferred here, but as separate vectors relative to COVID and its spread, one as risky, the other as at-risk. In the case of the lockdowns, positioning residents as risky subjects served to stoke racialised and classed views of non-compliance. The targeting of areas with a large demographic of poorer, CALD minorities (Wahlquist & Simons, 2020) through police-enforced hard lockdowns illustrates the wider policy ecology and carceral logics of the lockdowns. The lockdowns are also imbricated in the broader racialised landscape of COVID-19 public health measures, including border shutdowns and lockdowns. In the case of the tower lockdowns, residents expressed fear, lack of trust, frustration, and anger at the speed and stringency of the lockdowns relative to other early hotspot locations. By contrast, police characterised their role as protective and socially minded. Residents and local communities stepped in to simultaneously counter political and police framings of risky subjecthood and to provide crucial material support such as food and culturally relevant health information in the face of governmental failure to do so. These extensive care practices directly counter deficit framings of tower residents as non-compliant, and also attest to their insight into the uneven effects and failings of health policy for marginalised communities.

Our analysis suggests that the speed of the lockdown and its implementation created shaky ground for effectively tailored public health policy. This highlights the need for contingency planning and community consultation in future health policy formulation and implementation. In the case of the tower lockdowns, grassroots community responses were key to addressing policy failures and the material effects of the lockdown on residents: through their mobilisation around food provision, translation, and communal support, these actions demonstrate residents’ wealth of knowledge and capacity to strengthen public health responses. While we have focussed on culturally appropriate food and information provision, and knowledge of conditions in the buildings, resident Najat Mussa also highlights the relevant professional experience of residents, which could have been better utilised to manage the lockdown:

I know three nurses in my building and four aged care workers … We have a lot of health professionals in here and they are helping to spread the message to other residents. … Because I have not seen one community worker or social services worker and we are now into the third day of lockdown. (quoted in Davey, 2020a).

When policy takes a top-down, one-size-fits-all approach, local community knowledge and expertise tends to be sidelined, in the process limiting the effectiveness of policy measures. This is a pressing issue for health equity as we look to a future of living with COVID-19. It is important that communities are engaged as they can point to more effective, tailored public health measures.

Lea (2020, p. 24) cautions against a teleological evaluative model of policy cause/effect, success/failure as it tends to reinscribe a definitive policy rationality. Critical scrutiny of ‘unintended consequences’ is a central part of a policy ecology approach insofar as it disrupts assumptions of policymaking as a rational, linear processes that generates predictable effects (or intended/unintended consequences). As we have argued, public health policy mechanisms operate within a broader policy ecology that includes policymakers, politicians and affected communities who must navigate the unintended, sometimes deleterious effects of particular policy measures, as well as their longer legacies that reverberate into the future. Building on the knowledge, skills and lived experience of affected communities can ensure health policy addresses the needs of diverse health publics, and avoids the exclusionary effects of policy directed at an imagined ‘general’ public.

Acknowledgements

The authors thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on the article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The research reported in this article was funded by a Deakin University Science and Society Network Interdisciplinary Incubator Grant (#861471643), awarded to Kiran Pienaar, Catherine Bennett, Jaya Keaney and Dean Murphy.