Protecting the health of the public is the responsibility of governments. Australia managed to supress SARS-COV-2 in the first 2 years of the pandemic by imposing public health orders and non-pharmacological measures when community transmission was detected. Such measures were matters of expert disagreement, and, over time, drivers of increasing amounts of public dissent and civil unrest. These tensions highlighted important gaps in understanding how members of the public perceive responsibility during a health crisis; who they believe should act, under what conditions and why. Scholars are beginning to scrutinise the effectiveness, secondary impacts and ethical acceptability of vaccination programs and population level infection control and prevention measures. However, little attention is being given to how the public perceive responsibility across individuals, institutions and governments in the context of a pandemic, and how these perceptions shape public responses to emergency measures. We report on a modified two-stage Delphi survey that explores these dimensions with a representative sample of the Australian public. By placing participants within evolving pandemic scenarios involving different at-risk groups (i.e. young adults, children and older adults), the survey captures if and how responsibility attribution shifts in relation to perceived vulnerability, capacity to act and societal values. It also explores trust in public health communication and institutions, motivations for compliance and the perceived legitimacy of punitive versus cooperative measures. This novel approach offers critical insights for improving risk communication strategies, tailoring future interventions to different population groups and enhancing the legitimacy of public health policies in future crises.