Campbell: Why this could be the end of Andrews playing Games

The laws of political physics appeared to have been suspended for Daniel Andrews – until a backflip of unprecedented proportions opened the eyes of many who were blind to the government’s incompetence.

Close students of Daniel Andrews’ career had almost given up daring to hope his actions would ever catch up with him. Since 2014, I have been asked so many times, by so many people, in so many different ways, “how does he get away with it?” that several years ago I crystallised them into what I call The Three Rules of Daniel.

They are: (1.) Never give him the benefit of the doubt because (2.) It’s always worse than you think, and (3.) He always wins. The full list of the “its” that Andrews has got away with is a long one.

But they’re worth going through because his career is a cautionary tale for the rest of the country, not only because the way he has governed has become a model for state Labor governments elsewhere, but because the economic consequences of Daniel Andrews will end up being felt outside the state of Victoria.

Dan’s first Great Escape was getting away with his office’s involvement in leaking recordings of former premier Ted Baillieu taken from a journalist’s Dictaphone, a grubby act that could have ended the career of many a state opposition leader.

Then there was his broken promise that tearing up a locked-in road contract would cost Victorians nothing, rather than the billion-plus it ended up costing.

Along the way we had the allegation – denied but not very convincingly – that he joked that a

Liberal MP diagnosed with bowel cancer would “soon be sh---ing in a bag”. And there were many more.

Did the voters care about all this? Not really.

In the first term his Emergency Services Minister resigned over a wages deal with the state’s firefighters she warned would cost hundreds of millions and gut the state’s Country Fire Authority.Guess what? Spending on the fire services in Victoria has exploded and the state’s CFA has 10,000 fewer volunteers than it did when Dan came to office.

Daniel Andrews (left) shakes hands with Governor Alex Chernov as he is sworn in as Victoria's Premier in 2014. Picture: AAP Image/Julian Smith

In 2014, Andrews came to office in a narrow win. Four years later he devastated the opposition in a landslide.

Last year he repeated the dose, actually increasing his majority despite all the trauma for the previous three years.

Even more mind-bogglingly, according to a recent poll taken before this week’s humiliation, Dan’s primary vote is actually six points higher than at last November’s state election!

This was despite a state budget that included the ‘postponement’ of the airport rail link and a tax on parents who send their children to private schools.

Truly, it seemed Victoria under Daniel Andrews had become a political rotten borough in which it didn’t matter how badly Labor governed, it would always win.

And then, last Tuesday, it seems something snapped. As a number of his internal Labor enemies said to me last week, who would have thought it would be the cancellation of a second-rate sporting carnival that finally got Victorians’ attention?

Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews reacts during a press conference the government cancelled the 2026 Commonwealth Games, slated to be held across Victoria. Picture: AAP Image/James Ross

The reasons why this has caught the public’s imagination like nothing else are obvious with hindsight.

Firstly, it is a humiliation both in Australia and overseas.

Secondly, the idea of holding a regional Games while Melbourne’s sporting infrastructure sat idle is so obviously nuts it’s extraordinary it took its cancellation for anyone to notice. Thirdly, there is the fact that it is clearly nobody’s fault but our own.

Finally, the incompetence of its execution is all of a piece with everything else this government does.

As a former Labor minister pointed out on Friday, this is what happens when politics is the foremost consideration of every decision your government takes.

Incidentally he was not talking about the Commonwealth Games, he was talking about Andrews’s insane Suburban Rail Loop from nowhere-to-nowhere which may end up costing $125 billion.He said that when you point out the pointlessness of this white elephant, his supporters can’t come up with a reason why Victoria needs it, they instead reel off a list of seats it helped Labor to win at last year’s state election.

The danger to the rest of Australia from the Andrews Experiment has been that, until last week, it seemed it didn’t matter how badly he governed, the laws of political physics appeared to have been suspended.

If you don’t think the rest of the ALP world hadn’t noticed, consider the fact that this year NSW Labor was caught recycling his announcement and just changing the names.

Let us pray that, after a decade, normal service has finally been resumed.

But as Terry McCrann pointed out this week, the national consequences of the government-caused inflation in Dan’s Big Build will be felt through interest rates going higher and staying higher for longer, even into a recession.