Daniel Andrews’ dive from the biggest victory to total chaos

A year ago, you would have been laughed at in Spring Street if you had suggested Daniel Andrews would not be allowed to depart state politics at a time of his own choosing. Today the situation is utterly transformed, writes James Campbell.

On December 3, Daniel Andrews will have been leader of the Labor Party in Victoria for 10 years. No one, with the exception of John Cain Sr, has had the job for as long.

Less than two years ago, Andrews led his government to one of the biggest election victories in its history. He does not have to face the voters again until November 2022. In between, the electoral boundaries will be redrawn in a way that no one expects to favour the Liberal and National Party.

A year ago, you would have been laughed at in Spring Street if you had suggested Andrews would not be allowed to depart state politics at a time of his own choosing.

At the time, conversations around the Labor leadership were focused almost entirely on whether Andrews and his supporters would be allowed to dictate who replaced him, with observers divided between those who thought they would seek to anoint Transport Minister Jacinta Allan and those who thought Attorney-General Jill Hennessy could replace him.

Today the situation is utterly transformed. In October 2020 the idea Andrews may not have control of the date of his own departure is far from laughable.

What is more, after the weekend, at which the Premier’s own Socialist Left faction decisively rejected the woman he wanted to replace the departed health minister Jenny Mikakos in the Legislative Council, it is clear that if Andrews were to leave in the near future, he would have zero chance of engineering a coronation for his chosen successor.

The paradox is while his leadership has never been so precarious, within the government his power has never been greater: parliament has barely sat this year; normal cabinet has been replaced by an eight-person crisis committee which has assumed the powers of most of the ministry; and the internal mechanisms of the ALP have suspended after the federal intervention in June that Andrews obtained in the wake of the fall of the right-wing powerbroker Adem Somyurek.

Opinions differ inside the government about how novel this situation is. Some would see the evisceration of cabinet government as merely the natural extension of Andrews’s command and control style of leadership which has been on display for a decade.

What is clear is part of the discussions now taking place within the senior ranks of the caucus, is not merely about Andrews’s future but how to engineer a change in the culture of the government so that more people feel they have stake in it.

What is also clear is the decision of the Socialist Left to publicly humiliate their leader over the weekend was a long time coming. The public nature of it was perhaps the most surprising part.

The Socialist Left is in a minority both inside the state caucus and the wider party. Maintaining unity in the face of the Right has been a critical buttress to Andrews’s leadership. That the Right have long felt utterly disenfranchised under Andrews is no secret.

What the weekend showed — to the surprise of many — was clearly there are plenty of people in the SL who feel the same way and they aren’t going to take it anymore.

What has also surprised many is how avoidable this was. Jenny Mikakos has shown nothing but loyalty to Andrews. None of her friends believe for a second she would have put her own interests ahead of the government.

If it had become obvious those interests dictated she go, she would have gone. Almost two weeks after he casually and cruelly destroyed her at the hotel quarantine inquiry, no one can come up with a reason why Andrews did what he did.

Those who have always hated Andrews might have nodded quietly to themselves that this was the Daniel they knew and those for whom it came as a revelation might have looked shocked. What united them was the dawning realisation this might be a leader who is not only isolated from all but a tiny handful of ministers, his private office and senior bureaucrats, but one who might not be entirely himself.

It was one thing to publicly disdain Jane Garrett when she quit rather than back the CFA pay deal, but Jenny Mikakos? Why would he do that? Have the daily Castro-like press conferences started to go to his head?

And while we are at it, whose idea was it to ask parliament to give authorised officers the powers to arbitrarily detain people? Isn’t there anyone around who can warn him when he’s about to make a mistake?

When you ask these questions, the answer you get is the same: “not since Gavin left”. Gavin is Gavin Jennings, who quit parliament just as the pandemic was getting under way. For years outsiders assumed Jennings was the man Andrews used as his all-purpose fixer and was his closest confidant.

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What has become clear to everyone since his departure was their relationship had been toxic for years. If Jennings was involved in fixing internal problems, they were in many cases problems that had been of Andrews’ making against his fixer’s advice. Without Jennings, insiders say, there is no one left of any authority who is capable of saving Andrews from himself.

What is also clear from those who have heard him on the subject is the Premier doesn’t think he needs anyone’s advice anymore.

After a decade in which he has repeatedly rolled the dice and got away with it — from red shirts to the East West Link and the CFA — you can understand why he might think that way.

But it scares his colleagues, particularly the younger ones, many of whom haven’t been in Spring Street long, and who unlike Andrews and his senior ministers, won’t have parliamentary pensions to fall back on.

Which isn’t to say they will move on him. In the absence of polling showing he’s on the nose, it would be hard to make the argument he has to go. But it is no longer out of the question.

JAMES CAMPBELL IS A HERALD SUN COLUMNIST