Andrew Bolt: Why we must be spared the Cult of Dan
Victoria’s crazy Cult of Dan is backed by polls showing strong public support for our most authoritarian Premier yet. It is extraordinary that the more people who die from his disasters, the more the survivors praise him for his strength, writes Andrew Bolt.
Andrew Bolt
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Victoria’s Cult of Dan is the craziest thing I’ve seen. So many people acting like abused wives who kiss the hands that beat them.
In Melbourne, houses fly black banners with slogans hailing Premier Daniel Andrews: “Thanks Dan, We stand with you” and “Thanks, Dan. We (heart) you.”
On Twitter, #IStandWithDan is trending. “This man is the number one Premier — He should be PM,” rhapsodised one, praising the Premier of the state responsible for 90 per cent of Australia’s virus dead – 737 of 824.
“Chairman Dan. He’s a bloody legend,” declares an “aspiring human rights lawyer”: “He’s reminded us what real leadership looks like.”
The left-wing Age publishes whole columns of adulation. Former ABC presenter Jon Faine urged Andrews not to bow to “relentless, shortsighted, reckless and self-interested bullying”.
On Wednesday, a journalism lecturer — dear God — begged him to pause from his heroic labour and the “heavy weight of protecting us”, and get some sleep: “You haven’t rested properly since the bushfires.”
What’s more, this Cult of Dan is backed by polls showing strong public support for the Premier.
What makes this cult even more extraordinary is Victoria once made heroes of anti-government rebels. This state produced Ned Kelly and voted into parliament a ringleader of its Eureka Rebellion.
Now it’s licking the jackboots of its most authoritarian Premier yet, and possibly the most incompetent. It’s wild: the more people who die from his disasters, the more the survivors praise him for his strength.
This virus was virtually beaten here until it escaped again from Victoria’s quarantine hotels, killing another 700 people.
The mismanagement is impossible to exaggerate.
Andrews refused an offer of army help to run the quarantine hotels’ security (and then seems to have lied about it), and also let Victoria Police decide not to do it, either.
He instead hired amateurs for this critical job — private security companies that often hired staff through WhatsApp and gave them no training.
What’s more, his insanely ideological government hired a company, Unified Security, that wasn’t even a preferred tenderer which qualifies as Aboriginal-owned.
(Its main shareholder is a pale-complexioned man who identifies as Aboriginal). As the public servant who hired it explained, this was “in keeping with the state government’s social procurement objectives of utilising Aboriginal businesses”.
That’s putting race politics above public safety — and look at the disastrous result.
The guards it hired got sick from the people they were meant to keep in quarantine, and then spread the virus outside. About 99 per cent of the infections in this second wave came from two quarantine hotels, most from the one guarded by Unified.
More bungling added to the disaster. The government rejected a computer-based tracing system used by other states and tried instead to track the sick using pen, paper and fax machines. It failed.
And aged-care homes were left too vulnerable for too long. More than three quarters of the dead died there.
So why are Victorians still rallying to a Premier who has overseen such deadly incompetence?
One reason: in Victoria, Australia’s most left-wing state,
what counts most is seeming, not doing.
Andrews seems on top of the tiniest (irrelevant) details. That counts for more than the reality: his government is a shambles.
What’s more, in scary times, people love a tough leader, and Andrews delivers the thrilling smack of a sjambok.
But that toughness, too, is all show. Unable to do his own job — keep the sick in quarantine, trace the infectious, and protect the old — Andrews punishes everyone else with the world’s toughest lockdown, including stay-home bans and even a curfew.
The police — who Andrews should have used from the start to track the sick and make sure they stayed home — are instead deployed in terrorising the healthy.
They have chased grandmothers off park benches, fined youths going for a late-night hamburger, and handcuffed a mum for posting about a protest she was organising.
It’s this fake toughness of a total incompetent that the left love.
They don’t even need this Dictator Dan to make the trains run on time.
In fact, they don’t care if his bans destroy their economy.
Now watch them cry with gratitude as their master permits them tiny concessions from his obscenely tough bans.
We’re allowed a second hour outside! Oh, thank you, Dan!
And, look, fewer new inflections today than you caused last month! Just 41!
Bless you, Dan! This really has reminded us what real leadership looks like.
In Victoria, but nowhere else, that is sane.
Originally published as Andrew Bolt: Why we must be spared the Cult of Dan