Do we like Brendan Murphy?
Our score: 7 out of 10. A decent public servant with no harmful words or acts turning up, marked down for contested transparency calls and a thin record on the harm test.
Brendan Murphy is a doctor who ended up as the face of Australia's pandemic response. He was promoted from Chief Medical Officer to head of the health department in June 2020, the first doctor in that job in over 30 years. He retired on 6 July 2023.
Early on he was praised for clear communication, but the goodwill wore thin. Critics called him a mouthpiece for then prime minister Scott Morrison. Crikey reported he declined some Senate questions about medical advice and withheld a list of Victorian aged care homes with outbreaks. It also reported he wrongly described Australia's testing as among the world's best, and that he shared the blame for the slow vaccine rollout.
He pushed back on the politicisation claim, saying “I reject that assertion completely.” His line was that public servants serve the government of the day. On his way out he praised Morrison as effective and respectful and called after-the-fact criticism of him unfair. He also said the pandemic response did pretty well against similar countries, and that the proportionality of each stage will be a big question for any future inquiry. Where you land depends on whether you read that as loyalty to the job or as spin.
On the harm test, the searches found nothing nasty. There were no anti-vax claims, no conspiracy theories and no campaigning against trans people or anyone else, and he was running a vaccine rollout, not undermining one. The flip side is that the record on LGBTQ+ issues specifically is thin. He's a public servant, so there's little in his own words on culture-war topics to judge him by.
On the good stuff, he was made a Companion of the Order of Australia in 2022, and ministers from both sides praised his work. Former Liberal minister Greg Hunt credited him with helping save tens of thousands of lives, and Labor minister Mark Butler said his time went beyond COVID. After retiring he was named to chair Australian Red Cross Lifeblood from early 2025.
Nothing new has turned up on him lately, and no court cases or formal allegations against him showed up. The mark against him is a judgment call: whether he was too cosy with a government under fire. For a bureaucrat who ran the biggest public health response in a century, that's a fair way off a villain.