The joys of a conservative government.
So yes, probably because of this conservative government. Even because of these conservative governments (State and Federal).
But not simply because of a conservative government.
The fact is the Australian federation model has an odd separation of responsibilities which makes this challenge uniquely difficult for Australia.
The state governments haven't failed on health though? The federal government explicitly declined to let the states run the vaccination program in the way that they wanted and instead went GP-first (GPs being beholden effectively to the feds).
This is a nothing statement. The state based health services have generally been very well run, with the exception of contact tracing in Victoria during 2020.
The federal health responsibilities (vaccines, quarantine and PPE provisioning) have all been spectacular failures.
Being a conservative government has nothing to do with the slow Vax rollout. Over-reliance on AstraZeneca is to blame with no plan B.
NZ planned to use Australia’s AstraZeneca vaccines too, and has since dumped that plan altogether, has been scrapping together whatever Pfizer it can get and recently found a supply of the US’s unwanted J&J vaccines.
The US arranged the development, logistics and rollout of a vaccine in less than 12 months. Under a conservative government.
Nobody should get credit for #1. Few if any countries could have so easily burdened itself with that kind of debt. At the Federal level the entire political establishment in the U.S. barely blinks at spending tens of billions here or there. The Trump administration deserves some credit for #2 and #3, though suffice it to say it succeeded by ignoring and blocking high-level political officials' attempts to hijack the process.
Mostly the success of the roll out, such as it is, from a logistical viewpoint is due to states. But early on there were plenty of people blaming their own state for fumbling allocation, tracking, and delivery of vaccines to healthcare providers.
If anything, the U.S. could easily be blamed for the slow roll out of vaccinations around the world. We literally cornered the market by throwing money at pharmaceutical companies and requiring preferential allocation. And you could argue that we did so using their (the world's) money, considering how a not insignificant portion of the Federal deficit is financed by foreign investment.
In a world where third world countries are handily running rings around the Australian Government, it shows the emperor has no clothes.
The US' bumbling bureaucracy, as dysfunctional as it was at the time and still is, leapt into action like a phoenix from mediocrity. It wasn't even just the vaccine, it was sourcing of masks, medical supplies and more.
It's not perfect, but under 12 months is literally unprecedented and orders of magnitude faster than a vaccine has been developed, distributed and administered. Of course, this is highly unlikely to be Trump's competence rather than the competence of people he put in charge of the various pieces of the puzzle. But the results were clear.
The entire media establishment, and "experts", claimed the speed at which it was actually delivered was impossible.
I mean, let's take a look at NBC News' "fact check" from May 2020.
"Fact check: Coronavirus vaccine could come this year, Trump says. Experts say he needs a 'miracle' to be right." [1]
Those "experts" said a vaccine before mid-to-late 2021 would be a "miracle".
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/fact-check-cor...
In any event, credit for the development and production of the vaccine is due to the pharmaceutical companies. Absolute production capacity was (and remains) structurally constrained. There was plenty of cash globally to finance production; cash only bought you priority in line. (That's why they were so quick to give up patent rights.) Also, for the mRNA vaccines, most of the development was finished mere days after the genome was published. Conversely, the Federal government bears some responsibility for the egregious production errors with the J&J vaccine because of lax oversight, though most of that laxity was rooted in earlier years.
Regarding timelines, here's Anthony Fauci being reported on March 3, 2020 as saying "[T]he whole process is going to take a year, year-and-a-half at least." The article goes on, "Fauci said vaccines are being developed and will soon be ready for testing, but 'I don't want to overpromise.'" https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2020/03/03/offi... (To be clear, that's March 3, not May 3.)
The first shipment of Pfizer was mid December. That's over 9 months later than Fauci's statement, yet nearly 3 months earlier than the initial 1 year estimate.[1] But in context that's not much of a discrepancy. And the vaccine wasn't really widely available until later. As someone under 50 I couldn't get my first dose until late April, 2021.
People, including public health officials, were reciting the same "12 to 18 months" refrain for several months after Fauci (and others) gave the original estimate. It had become a talking point; a talking point in a context where health officials were fighting political narratives that were hostile to mandatory masking and shutdowns in favor of doing nothing while we waited for a vaccine. It's disingenuous to go back and criticize people for not decreasing the number after every public hearing and news conference. It's especially disingenuous to do so while failing to recall all the times that Trump and others denied and diminished the risk of the pandemic (including its lethality), and gave optimistic (if not outright misleading) predictions for various initiatives and therapies. Remember, Fauci and others were trying to set expectations amidst a cacophony of self-serving claims, and to do so in a way that maximally preserved the credibility of the health community if things went sideways, as they almost certainly would from their perspective in time.
Health officials made some egregious missteps early on; missteps that squarely reflected poor application of known science and medicine. (Mostly they were reciting old science, but that's their fault all the same.) But using a conservative estimate of 12 months as the earliest date for general vaccine availability is hardly one of them. As far as I'm concerned, for a ballpark estimate (and ballparking it is all anyone could have done), it was spot on.
[1] I remember an early NPR interview with Fauci where he gave a flat 1 year estimate; no 1 - 1 1/2 years. But I don't remember the precise date and am not about to go look it up because it's a pointless dispute. Certainly at the time I remember thinking that he's really pulling a number out of his ass because of the huge amount of uncertainty with everything, but that the way he described the general situation (in terms of details and coherent reasoning, including his understanding of the pharmaceutical industry) made me feel that Fauci's estimate was about as well-grounded as anyone's possibly could be, especially considering that he would have been in direct contact with leadership at Pfizer, Moderna, and other companies. In fact, at that time Fauci likely had a more comprehensive perspective of the situation, especially from a logistical standpoint, than anyone else in the world.