Andrew Bolt: Little wonder Daniel Andrews won, when the Liberal Party didn’t even put up a fight

The blame for Dan Andrews’ re-election falls on the Victorian Liberal Party for having little vision and no gravitas or guts.

Daniel Andrews’ third election triumph makes him a Labor immortal. By April, he’ll be Labor’s longest serving Victorian premier.

Yet this winner has been wounded, probably fatally, after being painted as a shifty bully and promising crazy things he cannot deliver.

Andrews also faces an upper house which, on early trends, could be more fractured and mutinous than ever.

So while Andrews will treat this victory as vindication of his dictatorial style and especially his brutal pandemic lockdowns, in his heart he’ll know – should know – he should quit this next term before it all catches up with him.

There’s no way he can pay for his $125 billion suburban rail loop, the costliest and most useless infrastructure project any state ever promised.

There’s no way his hero promise of this election, to cut electricity prices by creating a new government-run State Electricity Commission to power Victoria on green energy in a decade, can work either. The technology isn’t there.

By April, Daniel Andrews will be Labor’s longest serving Victorian premier. Picture: David Geraghty

And there’s no way voters will look at him with the same naive trust they had for nearly eight years, as his infrastructure projects blew out, along with the state’s debt.

They will be more sceptical after this election put Andrews’ honesty and integrity loudly on the line, with his government facing four corruption investigations.

There will be less forgiveness for a premier who’s been forgiven so much already, including, it seems, his disastrous management of his quarantine hotels and his horrific lockdowns that still left Victoria with the highest Covid death rate of any state – 877 deaths per million people, compared to 506 for the rest of Australia.

Andrews knows he’s lost his Teflon. When he cast his own vote it was not in his electorate on election day, but at a booth in the city, secretly on Friday morning, away from TV cameras and any confrontation with voters.

And while Andrews has now won, it’s after a swing against Labor, with two thirds of voters giving their first vote to other parties.

So he knows time is running out for a dignified exit that lets him retire as a winner into a well-paid job.

Yet, sure, Andrews’ win shows voters preferred him to the Liberals.

The Liberal Party didn’t have the guts to take on Dan Andrews. Picture: Luis Enrique Ascui

Blame that in part on the Liberals themselves for not daring to fight, a common failing of modern Liberals. They had little vision, no gravitas, no guts, and certainly not Andrews’ bull-headed self-belief that voters often confuse for leadership.

They did not even dare attack Andrews’ big promise – played on high rotation in his ads – for a new SEC to cut power prices in a way supposedly “greedy’ power companies would not.

This is ideological idiocy, so why didn’t Liberal leader Matthew Guy dare say so?

Guy is not a man of convictions but of fear. He was scared that attacking Andrews’ SEC would let Labor paint him as a fossil-fuelled fool and “climate denier”.

Liberal leader Matthew Guy couldn’t match Daniel Andrews, so in the party can?

He was also scared of Labor attacking him as “the cuts Guy” who’d cut spending. So the Liberals spent big instead, forcing Andrews at the end to complain “the cuts Guy” was actually a reckless spender, promising $20 billion more than even Labor.

So who could take the Liberals seriously, especially when their shadow treasurer’s Twitter account followed @whoreofyore, on the history of prostitution, and his Instagram account followed @melbourneboudoirbykaren, showing women posing in lingerie?

Not serious. Not principled. And no gravitas. Yet the Liberals have no obvious alternative leader to offer what Guy could not.

That could tempt Andrews to think he could even go on and win the next election, too, especially now he’s got rid of every rival from Labor’s ranks.

So congratulations to Daniel Andrews. But beware: this could go to his head.

Originally published as Andrew Bolt: Little wonder Daniel Andrews won, when the Liberal Party didn’t even put up a fight