Dan the gas ban man still has his crazy fans

The greatest irony of Dan Andrews’ ban on new gas appliances is that soon the only things in Victoria to be gaslit will be its citizens. The good news is they love it.

Perhaps the greatest irony of Dan Andrews’ ban on new gas appliances is that soon the only things in Victoria to be gaslit will be its citizens.

The good news is they love it.

In many ways this is testimony to Andrews’ political genius – and that word is no overstatement. Any observer has to marvel at how incredibly effective he has been in getting and keeping both his people and his party completely in his thrall.

My 2GB colleague Chris O’Keefe quipped after Andrews dumped the Commonwealth Games that the bloke could cancel Christmas and Victorians would still give him a parade. I’m not sure this is an exaggeration.

Certainly it’s not hard to imagine Andrews’ troll army flooding social media with declarations that Jesus never existed, religion is the opiate of the masses and Christmas is a capitalist construct.

After all, they do it with every other pronouncement he makes – from Covid restrictions to Games cancellations. Just like the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s 1984, they simply wait for Big Brother to declare what the new reality is and then pound the new information into public consciousness.

Ban-crazed Victorian Premier Dan Andrews. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Luis Enrique Ascui

I had hoped that this was a lengthy but at least temporary aberration during Covid, in which Andrews and his minions overreacted with ideological zeal and then felt they had to maintain an increasingly ludicrous facade at all costs.

His actions in reopening the state in line with Liberal NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet were a hopeful sign. And his similar alignment with Perrottet’s universal preschool plan is an absolute gamechanger which generations will be grateful for.

On the basis of this policy alone I was glad, despite all the unnecessary and often outrageous lockdown pain, that Labor was re-elected in my home state last year. I dared even hope there was an unspoken repentance.

But three actions since then raise concerns about the government’s relationship with reality.

And as always, Dan Andrews is the government and the government is Dan Andrews. Otherwise it’s Wings without Paul McCartney.

The first, obviously, is the cancellation of the 2026 Commonwealth Games, supposedly because the cost had inexplicably blown out from the $2.6 billion in the state budget two months ago to up to $7 billion according to Andrews’ bombshell announcement.

If a NSW premier had done such a thing he’d be lynched by lunchtime, yet Andrews remains untouchable. It is amazing to behold.

The second is his equally sudden and jaw-dropping gas ban, no doubt timed to distract attention from the Commonwealth Games fallout and divert pressure from having to explain those budget numbers.

Again it has worked a doozy and again it is divorced from reality, both in the spin and the substance.

Perhaps the greatest irony of Dan Andrews’ ban on new gas appliances is that soon the only things in Victoria to be gaslit will be its citizens.

Because it was the utterly irrational and politically motivated gas moratoriums in Victoria and NSW that resulted in the Australian electricity grid being overly reliant on far more emissions intensive coal-fired power plants when the war in Ukraine began and renewable energy producers were also caught short by a lack of sunny and windy days.

Were there more gas supply – and more people using gas at home – this reliance on coal-fired electricity would have been less and CO2 emissions would have been lower. Which is the whole point.

Little wonder more pragmatic climate and energy experts see gas as a vital transitional power source that, while not carbon neutral, is far better for the planet than the coal on which we still rely.

But that kind of sensible, practical approach is incomprehensible to the Greens and not dramatic enough to distract from the green and gold, and so sadly Andrews is now singing from the same songsheet as the extremist minor party.

And this brings us to his third departure from reality, which is his apparent embrace of the Greens’ Stalinist notion that a government can simply freeze or cap rental prices without a potentially catastrophic effect on the housing market.

Tellingly, this is in stark contrast to the approach taken by the Labor government in NSW, which is turbocharging housing growth and putting more modest restraints on rent hikes in order not to spook investors out of the market.

But more importantly, and shamefully, it has undermined the federal Labor government’s efforts to pass its vital $10 billion social housing fund – presently held to ransom by the Greens, who want precisely the measures Andrews is considering.

As a result, the Greens are now using Dan Andrews as a weapon against Anthony Albanese by claiming Victoria’s examination of their demands proves they are economically sound.

Socialists have never understood economics but they are at least supposed to understand party loyalty and now Andrews has even breached that covenant.

You have to wonder where it will all stop and yet as long as Andrews endures perhaps it never will. The people of Victoria – including, most treacherously, MPs of the once dominant Victorian Right faction – have slavishly signed up to this Soviet-style mirage.

At best it’s deeply embarrassing, at worst it’s deeply damaging. But given what’s already happened to the state you have to wonder what more damage they could do.