While not as prolonged as Victoria, the ACT government also went overboard in the first weeks of our lockdown last year: the contact tracers put something like one in seven Canberrans into isolation, you couldn't go outside for more than an hour a day and had to be masked and you were expected to remain in your district of Canberra.

The path out of the lockdown was unnecessarily prolonged compared to NSW and involved some silly attempts to micro-manage people's lives (no more than two people per lane in a swimming pool for example). It ended with an absurd incident when NSW opened retail up earlier than we did and the ACT Health Minister announced that the health advice was that it was safe to go shopping in NSW but not in Canberra.

I also agree that this has undermined subsequent health messaging. There's a risk that people now ignore the health officials who went overboard last year as they lost credibility from doing so. Canberra's booster rates aren't as good as they should be, for instance.