Peta Credlin: Victoria’s state government has abused the democratic process

The Daniel Andrews government has abused proper processes, politicised the public service and is now refusing to co-operate with a probe into their 2014 election win. We deserve better, writes Peta Credlin.

‘We stole the 2014 election”. That’s what former Labor powerbroker Adem Somyurek told me last week in an exclusive Sky News interview, just after he’d won a historic vote in the Victorian parliament to push for Labor’s infamous “red shirts affair” to be investigated by the anti-corruption watchdog.

You don’t often find politicians ready to throw themselves under a bus on a point of principle but that’s what Somyurek did on Wednesday – because it won’t be just Labor’s conduct, or the Premier’s, that gets the going over but also his own.

Calling his former leader, a “Stalinist”, Somyurek said Victorians deserve to know the truth about the systematic, deliberate misuse of taxpayers’ money that helped Daniel Andrews narrowly win the 2014 election. Given the scale of the operation, involving more than 25 Labor MPs, I asked him how plausible it was that Andrews knew nothing about it?

Adem Somyurek said there was no way Daniel Andrews didn’t know about the misuse of funds.

Somyurek didn’t hold back: “There is absolutely no way. His chief of staff, his deputy chief of staff, they all knew about it. So everyone knew about it but him, how does that work?” It doesn’t. I have worked for party leaders for years. Somyurek is right. It just doesn’t work like that.

“That’s why,” Somyurek said, “we need IBAC to get people under oath.”

To date, as this former Andrews government Minister detailed to me, Labor politicians have been told not to co-operate with any investigations into this rort; nor did the police interview them. I can’t fathom members of parliament who make laws deliberately not co-operating with anyone wanting to ensure those laws are properly enforced. But that’s what now passes for democracy in Victoria. It’s not just the million-plus dollars this sorry saga has cost Victorians. As Somyurek said, it’s about the destruction of proper processes, accountability, the politicisation of the public service and the scrapping of cabinet government by the Premier. All of this matters because it helps explain why Victoria suffered more in the pandemic than anywhere else in the country. The botched decision to use private security in hotel quarantine would never have got through a proper cabinet process, Somyurek says, and with that, the loss of 800 lives.

Labor MP Kaushaliya Vaghela, who crossed the floor to vote with Somyurek on his anti-corruption push, went public about her treatment inside the ALP, saying of her relationship with Daniel Andrews that she’s “actually scared of him and I’m scared about what he’s going to do”. For her integrity, she is likely to be expelled from the Labor Party. A brave woman MP, a proud migrant, thrown out of Labor because she dared vote in favour of cleaning up the state? How does it come to that, Victoria, and why are we willing to put up with it?

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Originally published as Peta Credlin: Victoria’s state government has abused the democratic process