I would not call the federal government “wildly popular”. Most people are (rightly, IMO) laying our pandemic success at the feet of state politicians and realising that the federal level had been ineffective at best.
Australia does have competitive federalism, and so many of the localised decisions have been from the states, but the major decisions for seeding - closing borders, acquiring vaccines, etc, along with fiscal backstopping - are federal.
The federal government (under ScoMo) has never polled so well as it has during covid, and for good reason.
(NB: I am no blind Coalition supporter, but they have made decisions which are very popular, and no amount of directing attention to the states would absolve them from blame if we had a situation more like Europe or the US.)
Not really sure why the politicians get the slack. Which measurement was highly effective that could also be done in a country with neighbors.
Ps. I'm not pro Facebook. Just curious
... All of them? I'm not sure why so many people seem to think water is required to make a border effective.
You should assume it's ten or twenty times worse than the figures show, AT LEAST, in any countries that aren't fully transparent and rich enough to test widely.
Compare 477 to 16,000:
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/01/su...
But politics responds much more to outcomes than causes