Dan Andrews' leadership is buckling under its own weight

Daniel Andrews insists he is not going anywhere. At yet another of his marathon media conferences on Tuesday he advised a reporter he would not cut and run, declaring, “I’m not someone who runs from difficult things or hard work.”

Just a recap. He has overseen the massive, deadly policy cock-up of the hotel quarantine program, although he would not use those descriptors. That tragic failure prompted a stubborn, resilient second wave of coronavirus infections that has led to extra months of lockdown, with still no clear path towards a reopening of Melbourne.

The Premier, Daniel Andrews during a coronavirus update.Credit: Justin McManus

His government lost its health minister Jenny Mikakos, who walked out in disgust at the Premier’s public attempt to put her in the frame for the quarantine mess. On Sunday night, he lost his department head Chris Eccles, who took a swipe at Andrews on the way out. Eccles insisted he had not made the fateful decision to hire private security firms for quarantine hotels.

Crisis is an overused word these days; in most cases, “problem” will do. But it is an apt characterisation for the condition of the Andrews government. The Premier is, predictably, having none of that. He says he intends to stay around so that he can accept the Coate inquiry’s findings into the quarantine mess and then take “decisive action” to ensure the mistakes never happen again.

Will he get his wish, or will his distinctive form of leadership, marked increasingly by its focus on him and his office, collapse under its own weight?

Defiance is a standard-issue stance for political leaders. It can be seen as an expression of strength but can also be viewed as a form of delusion.

What some will see as the Premier’s resolute stance during uniquely troubling times – and there is still a solid core of supporters for him in the community and in his government – others will see as manifest arrogance. The latter will want to know how, given that the government has long been seen as the Daniel Andrews show, the man who presided over the mistakes and then didn’t know how they came about can be relied upon to fix them.

The whole thing has taken on a soap opera quality, informed in part by Andrews’ daily press conferences.

As the government has progressed since it was first elected in 2014, its operations have focused increasingly on Andrews and his office. It was natural, once the pandemic descended on Australia, that the Premier would decide he should establish a crisis council of cabinet made up of him and seven ministers – an outfit with fewer roadblocks to decision-making than his cabinet.

Even ministers sympathetic to him have noted how much he has at times struggled with the deferential and inclusive processes inherent with the regular cabinet, which has 23 members. As he suggested during his Tuesday press conference, he sees himself and his government as always being about taking action.

This is why the hotel quarantine fiasco and its aftermath sit so oddly with the story of the government. By the time Jennifer Coate releases her findings several weeks from now, the saga of who knew what and when within the government, the bureaucracy, and agencies will have dragged on for more than four months.

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It was clear in June that a catastrophe had occurred. The Premier could have back then commissioned a retired department head of high standing to conduct a three-week investigation into what went wrong, made the findings public, taken whatever action he needed to take, and put it behind him.

Instead, the whole thing has taken on a soap opera quality, informed in part by Andrews’ daily press conferences, which he has established as some sort of endurance and accountability test. They worked well for quite a while but the cumulative effect has been more than 150 hours of Andrews talking. That is too many words from one politician.

The sheer volume of verbiage has meant that what he has been saying has become less effective with time. On the accountability front, there has been cognitive dissonance. A premier saying day after day he doesn’t know how his own government works – that he needs someone else to tell him how it came to make a dreadful decision about hotel quarantine – undermines his authority and credibility.

This raises questions about how much the public will want to listen to his guidance or explanations as the state moves slowly out of the current lockdown – whenever that happens. There is rising frustration about the current restrictions and a sense that another policy failure is taking place as the daily infection numbers remain stuck in the double digits.

November is edging ever closer and with it the Coate inquiry’s findings, plus their political fallout. Christmas is not far away. The Premier and the government are runing out of time to produce some good news for Victorians in 2020 – something to suggest the health and economic problems created for them by the government’s failures are in the past.

The Premier is in the fight of his life and many government MPs are nervous, although whether they would take that final step to move on him right now is doubtful. The last time a Victorian government won re-election after switching premiers was almost 50 years ago, under Dick Hamer in 1973 following Henry Bolte’s retirement the previous year.

Since then, four mid-term leadership handovers have taken place – Hamer to Lindsay Thompson, John Cain to Joan Kirner, Steve Bracks to John Brumby, Ted Baillieu to Denis Napthine – and all have resulted in defeat at the next election. There’s some comfort there for Andrews. But as the past few weeks have shown, no one should believe they’re not expendable.