James Campbell: Luck now running out for Daniel Andrews
Daniel Andrews has had a charmed run as Premier, thanks to a roaring economy that has enabled him to get away with profligate spending. But his luck may have just run out, writes James Campbell.
James Campbell
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The state budget is drowning in red ink.
Major projects are billions over budget and years behind schedule.
Public sector pay is motoring along nicely while everyone else is either unemployed, on reduced hours or worrying about being laid off.
And even before it became clear the virus had got away from us in Melbourne, the economists were telling us Victoria is going to be belted harder in this recession than any other part of Australia.
For those of us who are old enough to remember it is starting to feel like 1990 has come again.
And while — just as in the last years of John Cain’s premiership — some of the things that have gone wrong were beyond Daniel Andrews’s control, his government’s incompetence has made a bad situation worse.
Andrews, who celebrated his birthday on Monday, has had a charmed run, first as opposition leader, then as Premier — thanks to incompetent opponents and a roaring economy that has enabled him to get away with profligate spending.
But with coronavirus his luck has run out, as it did for Cain in Paul Keating’s recession we had to have.
Listening to him rambling on Monday about “the inclement weather” and boasting of the “3000 meals and 500 hampers (that) have been distributed to residents” imprisoned in their public housing towers, it was hard not to think of Cain at his press conferences explaining the collapse of the Victorian Economic Development Corporation or the closure of the Pyramid Building Society or perhaps why, after a month, the trams were still welded into the tracks all the way down Bourke St.
It is a look we have not seen on the face of a Victorian Premier for 30 years — the look of a man who has lost control of events and knows it.
All his old tricks seem to be deserting him.
Evasiveness, which in happier times has been his good friend and ally, suddenly made him sound petulant.
Whose idea had been to close the border with NSW?
“I had a conversation with the Prime Minister, I had conversations with Gladys — all three of us agreed this was the right step to take.”
But whose idea?
“Well, I’m not going to get into silly games about who was the first person to mention the word ‘border’.”
Asked if he would resign if his judicial review found serious failings by his government, he affected not to understand the question.
He’s going to need an answer before this is over.