Do we like Kerry Chant?
Our score: 8 out of 10. Nothing harmful turned up and plenty of long, grinding public service, held back from a 9 by the Ruby Princess findings against NSW Health.
Kerry Chant isn't a celebrity in the usual sense. She's the NSW Chief Health Officer, a doctor who has been in senior NSW Health jobs since the early 1990s and became the state's top health official around 2008 to 2009. Most of Australia met her in 2020 when she became the calm face at the daily COVID press conferences.
Before the cameras, she came up through public health units in Sydney's south-west, including work on the state's HIV strategy, and then the deputy chief health officer role. That's the quiet, unglamorous side of medicine, and it's a decent clue to who she is: someone who turns up for the boring, important stuff.
The big stain is the Ruby Princess. A 2020 special commission of inquiry found NSW Health's decision to rate the ship low risk was “inexplicable” and “unjustifiable”, and called a delay in testing swabs “inexcusable”. The reporting I could open criticises NSW Health's decisions rather than naming her personally, but it happened under her watch as the state's chief health officer, so it sits on her record.
Harm check: we found no harmful words or acts from her, and nothing about trans people, women, migrants or the climate that went the wrong way. She fronted public health advice through a pandemic, and the heat she copped came from pressure, politicians and pundits rather than anything she said. Her record on LGBTQ+ topics specifically is thin in what we could read, apart from her HIV strategy work, so that's a gap rather than a clean bill.
In 2023 she said she was “very happy” to front the federal COVID inquiry, and admitted there was “a catalogue of things” NSW would do differently. She wouldn't say whether she'd recommend lockdowns again, saying it couldn't be answered simply, and the Premier cut her off mid-answer. Where you land depends on whether you read that as careful or cagey, but she did own that mistakes were made.
The good stuff is the grind. The then Health Minister Brad Hazzard said she had worked “flat out” for over two years, and she was named NSW Premier's Woman of the Year for her pandemic work. One columnist wrote to her about “copping the flak for those behind you”, which is as close to a fan letter as a bureaucrat gets.