The great Daniel Andrews golfing hoo-hah: a case of inter-course envy?

Early last century, a corpulent member of the Upper Murray bunyip aristocracy was easing himself into his evening glass of single malt at the Albury gentlemen’s club when his eye fell upon a fellow ordering a whisky for himself.

Daniel Andrews playing golf during his days as opposition leader.Credit: Justin McManus

“The hell d’you think you’re doing?” cried the outraged beef grazier. “This is the Members’ Bar. Members only.”

“Yes, indeed,” agreed the newly arrived fellow, taking a satisfying sip.

“But you’re the damned butcher from down the street,” expostulated the crimson-faced grandee. “You can’t be a member.”

“Well, I am,” said the butcher.

The grazier, who must have been absent when the club’s blackballs were being handed around, clambered to his feet and made for the door.

“The day they let trade into this club is the day I resign,” he thundered.

“What’s the problem?” chuckled the butcher. “You serve your beef hot; I serve it cold.”

The story has done the rounds for more than a century as a sort of morality play, an allegory concerning the absurdity of class divides and the preposterousness of those who believe membership of a club gives them the standing to push others around.

Perhaps it is apocryphal, though the names of both gentlemen are still whispered around the border district along with the appalled observation that the establishment club member, a grown man, had acted like a child.

Indeed, children, as anyone who has spent time in a playground knows, take evil pleasure in seeking to exclude others from their little cliques. Feeling too insecure to ostracise a victim alone, they gang up, drawing strength and approval from each other.

“You can’t play with us,” they sing, earning the admonition of sensible parents, day-carers and teachers.

Which brings to mind what is alleged to be happening among golf club members on the Mornington Peninsula.

They are, if you are to believe what our CBD columnist naughtily calls “Melbourne’s US-owned tabloid”, immersed in a major collective snoot at the prospect of former premier Daniel Andrews seeking membership of the Portsea Golf Club, or any other of the 19 clubs on the peninsula.

Steve Price, the regularly angry former radio broadcaster and latterly panellist on TV’s The Project, turned the alleged rumble into a wonderfully amusing stink when he appeared on the US-owned Sky News Australia to announce that if Andrews were to become a member of the Portsea club, he would tear up his own membership.

Mark Allen, a former golf professional and 3AW personality (3AW and this masthead are owned by Nine, a publicly listed Australian company) kicked things along with the revelation that the alleged turmoil was all the talk of the Sorrento pub on a Friday night.

Price and Allen declared it was because Andrews had imposed, among his state’s strict COVID-19 restrictions during the long pandemic, a golfing ban on the Mornington Peninsula.

The ban hadn’t been so tough at the courses across the bay on the Bellarine. The Mornington Peninsula was classified as part of locked-down metropolitan Melbourne, while the Bellarine was merrily regional.

A lingering case of inter-course envy, then.

“It was the only place in the world really, wasn’t it, where you weren’t allowed to play golf. Everywhere else in the world you could play golf,” Allen said of the Mornington Peninsula clubs.

Not quite.

England, Wales, Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic, the vast Ontario province of Canada, several states in the United States, plus Australia’s Northern Territory all ordered golf clubs to close for extended periods during the pandemic.

Even Germany closed its courses for two months.

Scotland, home of the ancient game, initially shuttered golfing before the then-first minister Nicola Sturgeon decided to break from the rest of Britain and allow the game to continue with restrictions.

A simpler explanation of the Mornington Peninsula hoo-hah might be that those kicking up a fuss just don’t like Daniel Andrews, and/or never had a kindergarten teacher advising them about grown-up behaviour.

Andrews’ success in politics as Labor premier for more than nine years while the Victorian Liberal Party retreated into a rump of warring factions must prick like a burr under the saddle of the peninsula’s well-heeled conservatives, of whom there are clearly many.

Why, the federal electorate of Flinders, which covers the entire southern leg of the peninsula, is the only safe Liberal seat in the entire state of Victoria. The current Member, Zoe McKenzie, was the only new MP in all of Australia to increase the margin of a Liberal-held seat at the 2022 federal election.

Left-wing Andrews clearly required a comeuppance from the peninsula.

Nothing new there.

Remember the wild conspiracy theories that followed the then premier to hospital after he slipped on steps in 2021 at a Mornington Peninsula holiday home? The US-owned tabloid was still interrogating the steps in 2022. Nothing was revealed.

Now it turns out, on the word of the Portsea Golf Club’s president himself, Andrews hasn’t actually applied to join the club.

Awkward.

And really, why would Andrews bother? He has been for years a member of the world-class Kingston Heath Club in Melbourne’s sandbelt.

Portsea and other peninsula clubs ought, perhaps, to stand by for a letter in the style of that other Marxist, Groucho: “I don’t want to belong to any club that would accept me as one of its members.”

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