Peta Credlin: It’s time to vote out Dan Andrews’ government
Covid uncovered Daniel Andrews as a control-freak, who dispensed with cabinet, parliament and his own Labor caucus to revel in being a virtual dictator.
Opinion
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It’s a case study in how a politician rules with fear and intimidation inside his party and outside it. It’s a case study in how a dominant premier has put loyal political operatives into nearly every arm of government and created a “party state” capable of trampling the rights Australians had long taken for granted.
And it’s a case study in how good and brave Labor people are now prepared to call him out in the hope that Victorian voters think carefully about the choice they will make on Saturday as they decide who will lead their state for the next four years.
In my Sky News documentary that aired this week, The Cult of Daniel Andrews, a respected former police commissioner says that the Andrews Labor government of Victoria is the “most corrupt” he’s ever seen; the king of Melbourne radio says it’s the “worst” he’s ever seen; and a former state Labor minister says that Andrews specialises in the politics of payback.
As a Victorian, born and bred, I never thought I’d see SWAT police use rubber bullets and tear gas against peaceful protesters anywhere in Australia, let alone before the Melbourne Shrine of Remembrance. I never thought Australians would allow themselves to be intimidated by their government.
But it will be hard to avoid that conclusion if Victoria votes next Saturday to reward the Premier for the worst two years in their lives.
If nothing else, the pandemic was a brutal reminder of the continuing importance of state governments.
It wasn’t the Prime Minister who ordered businesses to shut, who closed schools, who confined people to their homes or immediate neighbourhoods, and who unleashed riot police on citizens unhappy about restrictions on freedom never before seen, even in wartime.
It was the state premiers who collectively inflicted two miserable lost years upon us; and invariably they get far less scrutiny than the PM and federal ministers because of small media pools usually in thrall to the PR machines of state leaders.
Snap lockdowns that turned normal life on its head and deprived people of the most basic freedoms, like visiting sick and dying relatives, happened everywhere during the pandemic.
But nowhere were they longer and crueller than in Victoria.
At every point Daniel Andrews justified his cruelty on the basis of “health advice” or “police advice” but it turns out, as my documentary shows, that there was often no such thing. Instead, there was a control-freak premier, who’d effectively dispensed with cabinet, parliament and his own Labor caucus to revel in being a virtual dictator.
And who, as we learnt last week, has used rotten voting practices in Victoria’s upper house to perpetuate emergency provisions that the legal profession almost universally slammed.
If there is one plea I would make to all voters in Victoria who care about democracy, whether they vote Labor, Liberal, Greens or any other way, it is to vote BELOW the line on the ballot for the Legislative Council.
Only about 8 per cent of us do, but if you don’t you will get the parliament that “preference whisperers” like Glenn Druery has connived and manipulated to create — the same upper house that gave Andrews a free hand in the pandemic.
But it’s not just the Premier’s power-hungry behaviour during the pandemic that’s on trial in this election. It’s the sustained ineptitude of a government that’s brilliant at rat-cunning politics but hopeless at the routine administration needed to make things work.
And the complete shamelessness of a government that blames failure on everyone and everything but itself.
It’s bizarre that a judicial inquiry costing $15 million (including $8 million on ministers’ legal fees) was unable to discover who had made the crucial decision to entrust hotel quarantine in Melbourne to dodgy private security operators (and not the police and army like everywhere else), leading to the deaths of 801 Victorians when the virus escaped.
It’s shameful, but probably not surprising, that WorkSafe Victoria, headed by a former Labor staffer and now chaired by a former Labor minister, concluded that no one person was responsible for what, had it happened in the private sector, could well have been industrial manslaughter on a massive scale.
Ditto that Victoria Police, where an Andrews staffer is now an assistant commissioner, would arrest Labor staffers in a fraud investigation but then just shrug their shoulders when Labor MPs refused to co-operate, despite the Premier telling the public they would.
Or that VicPol would fail to breathalyse the now-Premier’s wife after his car hit and almost killed a cyclist and would allow the now-Premier to drive the damaged car away before any evidence was gathered.
Or that the Premier could be involved in at least four investigations by the anti-corruption commission, with court injunctions now in place to stop the media from letting you know about a pending IBAC report before the election.
If you think the Andrews government is arrogant now, just think how arrogant it could become if elected for another four years.
Pandemic pain aside, watch my documentary, if you haven’t already, to see how a Premier obsessed with secrecy, mates and control, is ruining Victoria.
Head to the Sky News Australia page on YouTube.
MH17 SHOULD HAVE BEEN WORLD’S WAKE-UP CALL TO STAND UP TO PUTIN
I can vividly remember waking up on the morning of July 18, 2014, feeling triumphant about the repeal of the carbon tax the previous evening, only to be confronted by the overnight atrocity of a Russian missile downing a civilian airliner with 38 Australians murdered.
It was perhaps the most dramatic day in my 16 years working in Parliament House, because not only had innocent Australians been shot out of the sky, but our country was suddenly drawn into an earlier phase of Vladimir Putin’s war crimes in Eastern Europe.
As then PM Tony Abbott told a shocked parliament that morning: “This looks less like an accident than a crime.”
He went on: “The bullying of small countries by big ones, the trampling of justice and decency in the pursuit of national aggrandisement, and reckless indifference to human life, should have no place in our world”.
I hope it’s some comfort to still-grieving families that a Dutch court has now confirmed what was apparent almost immediately: that their loved ones were among the early victims of a dictator’s mad drive to restore “greater Russia” by snuffing out a free and independent Ukraine.
While it was four mid-level Russian operatives who were formally on trial, the real defendant was Putin himself.
Only the Russian leader could have authorised a missile battery to be made available to Russia’s proxies inside another country.
His excuses for this atrocity — that it was really the Ukrainians who’d done it to embarrass Russia and that the Ukrainian government was run by fascists — were eerily similar to the bizarre pretexts he has given for the latest invasion, and demonstrate that none of Russia’s neighbours will be safe while Putin remains in charge.
Tony Abbott was criticised by the usual suspects in the media for speaking tough to Putin, but time has proven him right. I can only wonder what might have been prevented in Ukraine if other world leaders had helped Australia, at the time, to stand up to the Russian dictator.
The families of our MH17 dead will never get justice while Putin remains in power.
The best thing that the Albanese government can do for them now is provide even more military assistance for the Ukrainians to win their country back.
Only then might the Russian people come to understand that this catastrophe is all their leader’s fault.
Watch Peta on Credlin on Sky News, Weeknights at 6pm
Originally published as Peta Credlin: It’s time to vote out Dan Andrews’ government
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