James Campbell: Premier fast running out of fall guys to get rid of
The casual way Daniel Andrews severs ties with those he feels have let him down is one of the reasons why he is increasingly becoming an isolated figure inside the caucus, writes James Campbell.
James Campbell
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The slow depletion of Daniel Andrews’s political capital continues.
On the same day he effectively junked his road map out of lockdown, he was forced to junk the secretary of the Department of Premier and Cabinet.
Chris Eccles has been the Premier’s enforcer inside this government since it was elected in 2014.
His exit in such a humiliating way so quickly after the destruction of the ministerial career of former health minister Jenny Mikakos has inevitably got everyone in Spring Street again speculating about how long Andrews can survive.
Eccles’s exit, the Premier explained, was “appropriate” — the same word he used to describe Mikakos’s exit.
At least Eccles merited a phone call. More than a fortnight after Mikakos left, the Premier still hasn’t spoken to her.
The casual way Andrews severs ties with those he feels have let him down is one of the reasons why, while there might be plenty of people on Twitter who want to stand with him, inside the caucus he is an increasingly isolated figure.
Of the right-wing ministers of substance in the cabinet only Treasurer Tim Pallas and Police and Emergency Services Minister Lisa Neville could still be described as rusted on, according to most observers, while his brutal treatment of Mikakos appears to have drained the last of whatever personal affection many of his own Socialist Left faction had for him.
And with federal Labor MPs growing increasingly worried about their prospects in Victoria at the next election, which must be held before the state government goes to the polls, Andrews has never been in as precarious a position.
The immediate effect of the revelations from Eccles’s suddenly available phone records will be to increase the pressure on Jennifer Coate to recall Andrews, Eccles and Mikakos to the hotel quarantine inquiry.
For weeks the line from inside the inquiry was that there was no need to demand the records. This turned out to be wrong. It’s debatable who looks worse: Eccles, for his failure to check his records, or Coate, for failing to ask for them.
Eccles’s statement does not explain how it was that he only came to look at them now. He needs to come back to explain himself.
Mikakos on the other hand would clearly love to come back to clear some things up.
Her submission to the inquiry has encouraged it to call Andrews a liar by advising it that his evidence needs to be treated with caution.
She too needs to come back to explain herself.
She also needs to come back to expand on why she thinks the decision to reject the ADF cannot be separated from the decision to use private security rather than police in the hotels.
While she’s there, she can also tell us more about why she thought bureaucrats would be too scared to question ministers.
Eccles’s strange oversight is curious in that it intersects with the memory loss of former chief commissioner of police, Graham Ashton, who can’t remember who told him VicPol was off the hook for hotel quarantine.
Then there’s the extraordinary mental state of Emergency Management Commissioner Andrew Crisp.
He initially forgot a whole meeting with Neville. In a parliamentary inquiry he remembered briefing her about hotel quarantine, then six weeks later remembered that he hadn’t after all.
Taken alone, each of these memory losses is unremarkable. As a case of collective amnesia, it paints a disturbing picture.
And it is hard not to agree with the Opposition Leader that all roads now lead to the Premier.
What becomes clearer by the day is that an inquiry that began into the hotel quarantine debacle is now morphing into an inquiry into the way he has been running Victoria.