Peta Credlin: Time for Victoria to wake up and oust ‘arrogant bully’ Dan Andrews
There is something wrong with Victoria but there’s still time to make things right by punting a Premier who avoids blame and accountability, writes Peta Credlin.
Peta Credlin
Don't miss out on the headlines from Peta Credlin. Followed categories will be added to My News.
Australians would never allow a politician to intimidate them. Or at least, that’s what I always thought. But as a Victorian who returned home after a decade away and has lived through the last three years in Melbourne, I’m now not so sure.
Melbourne became the world’s most locked down city. With curfews that we didn’t even have in wartime. With 5km travel limits inside “rings of steel”. With playgrounds closed. With a pregnant woman arrested by riot police in her own home over a Facebook post. And with police using tear gas and rubber bullets, yes rubber bullets, against fellow citizens.
A decision by the Premier to reject offers of help from the army and instead put dodgy private security guards in charge of hotel quarantine was linked to the deaths of 801 people. There was an inquiry, yet no one could remember who made that fateful decision and, somehow, that’s the end of it.
Nothing is ever the government’s fault in Daniel Andrews’ Victoria.
Even after WorkSafe Victoria, headed up by a former staffer in the Premier’s private office, investigated the 801 deaths, it concluded that no one individual was to blame, just a faceless ‘health department’ instead. The Lawyer X royal commission found a gross miscarriage of justice but no one in authority has been charged, let alone lost their job.
The anti-corruption watchdog, IBAC, found that serious abuse of taxpayer funds was endemic in the Labor Party but, likewise, no one was personally to blame.
And the Premier himself has been questioned in four, maybe five, corruption inquiries, yet it has never been open to the media. Even now, there’s a battle in the courts to stop the release of the latest IBAC report, Operation Daintree, until after the election in a fortnight’s time.
Yet in NSW, Barry O’Farrell lost his job as premier over an undeclared bottle of wine, and Gladys Berejiklian over a dodgy boyfriend.
In Victoria, the Premier and his wife can be in a serious car accident almost killing a 15-year-old boy, yet no one is breath tested. The Premier even drove the car away from the crash site and it was never forensically examined. A decade on, the injured young man has never been interviewed by police. Any wonder he’s now got himself a lawyer and wants justice?
It’s a state where police can arrest Labor staffers for possible corruption but not their MP bosses, who get away with refusing to co-operate with a police investigation even after the Premier said they would. Imagine how quickly you or I would be arrested if we told police we wouldn’t co-operate?
This is a premier who was elected promising to fix the health system yet it’s now in a catastrophic state with a triple-0 call centre that doesn’t work as it should, and ambulances that arrive too late to save Victorians, if they arrive at all.
This is a premier who promised to create 4000 extra intensive-care beds, didn’t, and then denied it was ever said.
Yet somehow, he gets away with it.
Something is wrong in the state of Victoria, yet, if the polls are right, voters seem on track to re-elect the Labor government notwithstanding the risk the Premier could be forced to share power with the Greens to survive.
Why?
That’s the question I try to answer in my Sky documentary this coming Wednesday, The Cult of Daniel Andrews. I talk to senior figures in politics and the media. I talk to some of the state’s most respected lawyers, law enforcement figures and powerful union leaders. Above all, I talk to those Labor people brave enough to speak out against someone who’s notorious for being able to wreck careers on a whim, including a former senior, Andrews government minister.
How she says she was treated by the Premier is shocking.
If this were the Australia I thought I knew, journalists would be less timid, officials would be less pliable, institutions would be less biddable, and individual MPs on both sides of the parliament would be less cowed.
Yet somehow, someone who’d by now have been dismissed as an incompetent control freak, who is brilliant at politics but hopeless at government, is still virtually untouchable.
What does this say about us as Victorians and as Australians more generally?
Is it that we’d prefer a quiet life to a brave one; that we’re more worried about keeping our jobs than defending our principles; that politics is more a business for “yes people” than ever before?
As my documentary shows, there are still a few brave souls prepared to risk the wrath of the most domineering state politician in decades. But is it going to make any difference for this month’s election?
It won’t just be the Andrews government on trial on November 26. The Victorian electorate will be too. Because in a democracy, ultimately people get the government they deserve. I know that the Opposition have only just started to get their act together, that the media doesn’t give state politics the attention it deserves, and that the Premier has managed to avoid inconvenient scrutiny by using taxpayer-funded social media to get his message out.
Still, I reckon Victorians have now seen enough of Andrews to know what he’s like and might finally be concluding that they deserve better than an arrogant bully who’s subverted institutions and escaped accountability.
Farmers, Aussie taxpayers set to COP it
There were two more nasty surprises in the Albanese government’s climate policy last week.
First, the news that Australia will support negotiations on the creation of a “loss and damage fund” at the Conference of the Parties (COP27) in Egypt; and second, that banks might start refusing to lend to farmers and small businesses without the “right” climate plan.
The plan out of COP is for rich countries collectively to pay poorer ones $100bn EVERY YEAR in climate reparations. Since we supposedly created the so-called climate crisis as a consequence of the industrial revolution, we’ve now got to pay Third World countries so that they can attain First World living standards without the fossil-fuel-driven economies needed to
sustain them.
This is the nonsense that the Australian government finds itself subscribing to as the price of having a credible bid to host the 2026 COP, in conjunction with the Pacific Island countries that are using climate change as a means of demanding more money from us – but not from China, even though it’s the world’s biggest emitter by far.
In a Sky News interview with me last week, Nationals leader David Littleproud said that banks “are already asking farmers about their environmental credentials” and are now likely “to restrict the flow of capital to farmers” who might not meet their emissions targets for methane.
The Albanese government has committed to Joe Biden’s 30 per cent cut in methane emissions pledge, even though there’s no way this can be done without drastic reductions in our beef and dairy herds.
In the Netherlands there have already been massive farm protests and a freedom convoy to resist the climate-driven push that will cost some farmers their livelihoods and drive up prices for everyone.
The former Morrison government justified its cave-in on net zero by saying that we had no choice if we wanted access to global finance.
Now, it seems, the same faceless financiers that forced the government to change policy are using their so-called “moral compass” to bully small business.
It’s bad enough that the United Nations is dictating Australian domestic policy but now it’s the banks too?
Watch Peta Credlin on Sky News, weeknights at 6pm
More Coverage
Originally published as Peta Credlin: Time for Victoria to wake up and oust ‘arrogant bully’ Dan Andrews
Credlin: The spill against Pesutto will come early next year
The only reason John Pesutto wasn’t toppled as leader today is because the contemptible cabal of MPs who no longer support him can’t yet decide which of them gets the top job.
Well, at least Hamas gave Albo its vote of confidence
Australians want a change of direction, they want to be able to work hard and get ahead, but most of all, they want hope that our nation’s best days are not behind us, writes Peta Credlin.