Patrick Carlyon: Same old Dan returns to his same old tricks

Within minutes of his return, Dan Andrews was back to shifting the media’s tough questions, almost as if he was never gone at all.

Builder Dan clocked on for work yesterday, armed with a hard hat and hi-viz, after 111 days of recuperation and reading books on golf.

His stoop was familiar, as was his patter about jobs.

Premier Dan Andrews was back. Within minutes it seemed as though he had never gone at all.

To the rumble of trucks, and the whirr of hydraulics, Andrews resumed normal transmission with the obligatory “everyone right to go?”.

Over the next hour, his unprecedented absence from office faded into the past tense.

Andrews’ first outing since March promised a taste of any shift in his political approach before and after serious injury. There were no first-day nerves or catching up on professional speed. Every early indicator of Andrews’ manner and style pointed back to the future.

As always, Andrews seemed to know precisely what he would say and what he would not. He answered questions concerning the “vile and wicked” rumours about the nature of his fall on steps in Sorrento on March 9.

He didn’t get upset. He didn’t bristle with righteousness. The message was clear. Dictator or deity, shyster or saint, the Dan Andrews of tomorrow would mirror the Dan Andrews of yesterday.

Premier Daniel Andrews faced a media interrogation. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Andrew Henshaw

Arden Station, in North Melbourne, was the backdrop for his media interrogation. The thinking, typical of election campaigns, was obvious enough — massive project, running on time, employing God knows how many hardworking Victorians.

It was nine degrees, but the sky was the kind of blue that one of Andrews’ predecessors would have praised as “Victorian”.

Andrews left the North Face jacket, and its foreboding symbolism, at home.

The timing of his return — as the latest local outbreak dims, and parts of the country suffer privations once considered uniquely Victorian — seemed fortuitous.

He shifted a question about his government’s ill-fated Belt and Road agreement to an aside about the state of Australia-China relations. He parlayed a question about future lockdowns to the speed of the federal government vaccine rollout. Still, his early morning fall down steps — and those rumours — dominated the hour.

The schoolyard taunts were the hardest aspect, he said. That his kids and family suffered for claims against their father and husband.

For months, Andrews had kept silent about his tumble. Put to him that he might have quelled false stories by responding to them, Andrews was unequivocal.

Don’t engage with fools who make up facts, he argued.

Don’t waste time on the irrelevant.

He projected a kind of conviction that he applied for the hotel quarantine scandal of last year, when he took full responsibility for failings but could not say how they had come about.

Yet dispelling a scandal that is untrue is easier than defending one that cost lives. On Monday, Andrews even dared to draw on the “character” card.

The Premier takes it easy negotiating these steps during his first press event since the fall. Picture: Getty

A minder called “last question”, repeatedly, in vain. Andrews addressed dozens of “last questions”.

Had he seen anyone on that night before his accident? Who paid for his family’s holiday rental? Andrews batted them away, one by one.

Had he posted regular “Hollywood productions” of his recovery, he argued, Victorians might have wondered why he was unable to return to work.

He was candid about his fears before a six-week scan, which could have pointed to surgery and many more months of pain.

Locked in a brace for 18 hours a day, and eager to discard the painkillers, he had since started walking every night and had a personal trainer.

But time out was time out, he argued. He had been no “back-seat driver”, responding to a suggestion that he had been in constant contact with fill-in premier James Merlino.

He dismissed a question about being more collegiate, speaking of his ministerial colleagues as “equals”.

“I won’t be changing the way I work and I won’t be changing the work I do,” he said.

Same Dan, different day.