James Campbell: Premier Daniel Andrews’ headaches starting to mount up
Between the COVID-19 pandemic, the Metro Tunnel budget, the branch-stacking scandal and Victoria’s fire services dramas, things have not been going well for Premier Daniel Andrews, writes James Campbell.
James Campbell
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Suddenly, everywhere you look everything seems to be going wrong for Daniel Andrews.
Thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic the budget is wrecked.
The Metro Tunnel is billions over budget.
Work has almost stopped on the Westgate Tunnel with litigation with Transurban and the builders heading for courts over who is going to pay the extra billions needed to finish it.
Moreover until a solution is found for the contaminated soil problem the tunnel-boring machines will lie idle.
Meanwhile on Spring St, three ministers have quit in sensational circumstances, which while giving the Premier an opportunity to dispense with the irritation of his party’s internal governing procedures, has left its activists with nothing to do except snipe at each other.
Then there’s the unions, who no doubt will have a long list of demands they will expect to be met if they are to be persuaded not to head off to court over the legitimacy of the national executive’s takeover of the Victorian branch.
Their internal demands, that is to say who gets will decide who gets which seat in the state and federal parliaments, need not concern the rest of us.
It’s their industrial demands, that is to say pay deals and other goodies, we should be keeping an eye on.
Then there’s the state’s fire services. If you tuned out from that one in recent years, fair enough.
Recent events suggest however it might be time for everyone to tune back in.
To bring you up to speed, next month sees the creation of Fire Rescue Victoria from a merger of the fully paid-firefighter MFB with the paid-firefighter component of the CFA. This was meant to bring closure after the bitterness of the 2016 dispute that saw the resignations of Emergency Services Minister Jane Garrett and the senior management of the CFA as well as the dismissal of its board.
From next week Victoria is to have FRV plus a “volunteer only” rump CFA, an arrangement deemed necessary as it had become obvious the days of peaceful coexistence between paid and unpaid firefighters were gone forever.
But with days to go until the two come on line, it’s deja vu all over again with the sudden and unexpected departure of the CFA’s chief fire officer and CEO Steve Warrington.
This exit has come as great shock as the general view in fire-world is that in “Warro” the government had finally found a man who would do as they wanted.
But even he appears to have baulked at the terms on which FRV staff are to be seconded to the CFA.
The volunteers were already up in arms because the CFA won’t be given any choice over who FRV sends them and they fact they will be FRV uniforms when they arrive.
Warrington apparently decided to leave when it was made clear that these seconded staff would be answerable to FRV rather than him.
The upshot is that after years of pain the government is again facing an uprising from the state’s volunteer firefighters with the inboxes of regional Labor MPs filling up with messages of dissatisfaction.
Then there’s coronavirus. Of course by the standards of most of the world Victoria has been spectacularly successful in controlling the spread of the virus.
Unfortunately we don’t compare ourselves with the rest of the world, we compare ourselves with Sydney and they are doing much better than we are.
Are the Premier and his government to blame? No one can say for sure. We might just have been unlucky.
What we can say is that contrary to what we were told at the time, the Cedar Meats outbreak was not handled perfectly.
We can also see the management of the security guards at the quarantine hotels as left much to be desired.
Nor was it a good idea to have a bet each way on the Black Lives Matter march as Andrews seemed to do — winking at the sentiment behind it and allowing it to go ahead while at the same time telling people it would be better if they didn’t go.
You can’t be posing one minute as Captain Coronavirus, manly defender of the elderly and at risk, but then wimp it at the first sign of trouble without people starting to wonder about you.
The silly games the Premier played around the National Cabinet process, making out he was tougher than everyone else, looked clever when the Ruby Princess fiasco had NSW on track to be the COVID capital of Australia.
They’re not looking so clever now we are the laggards.
His little joke about why anyone would want to go to South Australia isn’t quite the side-splitter it was last week either, since the answer now is “to go to the pub with a big group of mates”.
I might be getting ahead of myself but in the 5½ years Andrews has been premier he has looked many things to his detractors — tough, arrogant and pig-headed for a start — but until now he has always looked competent.
Whatever you think about him, you had to acknowledge he knew what he was doing.
It is hard looking back over the last couple of weeks not to wonder if that is still the case.
What it is more, none of the problems facing Andrews and his government look like being solved any time soon.
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James Campbell is a Herald Sun columnist