That's pretty much the gist of it. We also had a huge in-fighting between state governments and a stubborn refusal to work together or coordinate properly that led to some really bad outcomes.

Almost the entire time this was compounded by flight after flight of VIPs arriving in Australia for 'diplomatic' purposes, or of course to play sportsball. We barely even stopped normal tourist flights either, yet our own expats were not allowed to fly home until months later. None of it made any sense.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-53776285

This incident in itself made me highly suspicious of our governments competence and motivations. This was one of our major seeding incident here. Under no circumstances should this have been allowed to happen, yet this is just one of a long string of borderline malicious decisions by those in charge. We all forget too quickly.