Could Daniel Andrews be getting ready to stand down?
By reiterating that the buck stops with him, is Premier Daniel Andrews giving himself a reason to go? That may be the case if the hotel quarantine inquiry ends up slamming the government, writes James Campbell.
James Campbell
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On the shelf in his office behind his desk in 1 Treasury Place, Daniel Andrews keeps the volumes of Robert A. Caro’s biography of Lyndon Johnson. Or at least he used to.
I couldn’t say if that’s where he still keeps them because, as you can imagine, it’s been some years since I was in there.
It is no surprise that Andrews should have read it, as Caro’s unfinished masterpiece — 40 years in the making and still only up to 1964 — is a great favourite of book-reading politicians the world over.
But still it was a strange and revealing biography for our new Premier to be keeping on display within arm’s reach of his desk. Because the picture it paints of the 36th President of the United States is not a pretty one.
On almost every page its subject is lying, scheming and cheating his way from his dirt poor childhood in West Texas to one of the richest men ever to occupy the White House. What makes the book so good, and why it is so loved by the political class, is the way it explains how power actually works: where it lies, how you get it and what you can do with it when you have it.
Johnson’s motto on his way up was “If you do everything, you will win”. What we didn’t know at the time about Daniel Andrews but subsequently learned after it was revealed the ALP had improperly diverted hundreds of thousands of dollars of taxpayer-funded labour into its winning election campaign, is that it might have been his motto, as well.
Since he became leader in 2010, Andrews has beaten everyone who has stood in his way. He returned Labor to office after only one term in the wilderness, then four years later handed his opponents a belting they would in normal circumstances taken at least eight years to recover from. His internal critics haven’t fared much better.
Jane Garrett, the only minister to stand up to him, was forced to resign and is now a harmless parliamentary secretary in the upper house, a place from which she cannot succeed him.
Adem Somyurek, who had succeeded in creating an alliance that threatened to wrest control of the Labor Party, has been expelled and banned for life while the party membership has its rights suspended for years.
Like Johnson, whose first two years in office saw the passage of civil rights legislation and enactment of the massively expensive Great Society social spending, having acquired power, Andrews has been determined not to waste it.
Billions have been spent on transport infrastructure, which the Premier likes to call the Big Build (a feeble appropriation of Boston’s Big Dig). There has also been a raft of socially “progressive” legislation passed, most notably the bill permitting assisted dying.
In June, the month Somyurek fell, Andrews strode the national stage like a colossus with Federal Liberal MPs openly speculating if his next stop would be Canberra. Today it’s his colleagues who are openly speculating about his future — wondering if his next stop is an imminent retirement.
Four weeks ago I said here that one of his ministers had pointed out that in reiterating that the buck stops with him, Andrews was giving himself a reason to go if the quarantine inquiry ends up slamming the government.
The Premier reiterated this again this week, saying repeatedly, that he will be accountable for any mistakes that were made in that debacle.
Viewed objectively, the hotel quarantine inquiry is actually the least of the Victorian government’s problems. The decisions taken back in March can’t be fixed but at least the problem isn’t ongoing.
The more consequential failure was the utter inability of DHHS to track and trace the virus after it had escaped into the community. And nothing we have learned would make one think this problem has been fixed; the best that can be said is that, like Caro’s biography of Johnson, it is a work-in-progress.
But wait there’s more! Remember back in March Andrews and the NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian wanted to shut down the country but were stared down by Scott Morrison? As this week we have seen decisions taken then reversed as unconsidered contingencies are brought to the government’s attention, it has been hard not to shudder at the thought that this is after four months of “planning” from the Victorian government.
Imagine the chaos that would have ensued if Dan and Gladys had got their way in March. And the economic pain is only just beginning. What was already shaping as a nasty recession has now turned into an absolute calamity.
And dozens of people are dying here every week while the rest of the country is going to the pub and the football.
Daniel Andrews may be many things but he is not a fool. A politician as skilled and as calculating as he is will have read the play several moves ahead of his colleagues.
In his heart of hearts he will know there is no getting out from under all this. Some disasters are just too big.
This time, sending ministers no one has heard of to the guillotine just isn’t going to cut it. The potential parallel with the end of Lyndon Johnson’s career will not be lost on him. In 1964 Johnson won the greatest victory anyone has ever won in a presidential election and for the next two years he strode the American political stage like a colossus.
But by 1968 the debacle of the Vietnam War had so divided America that he shocked his contemporaries by suddenly announcing he would not be running.
Don’t be surprised if Dan similarly surprises us in the near future.
James Campbell is a Herald Sun columnist