It’s time for Daniel Andrews to own up, and to go

Daniel Andrews quite simply has to go and go now, if accountability in governance is to have even the slightest meaning in 2020.

Daniel Andrews, Victoria’s CEO, has “blown up” an entire state. Picture: NCA NewsWire/Daniel Pockett

Daniel Andrews quite simply has to go and go now, if accountability in governance is to have even the slightest meaning in 2020.

Just look at, compare and contrast with what’s happened at Rio Tinto. Rio’s CEO Jean-Sebastien Jacques has gone for subordinates blowing up a cave — certainly, and I make no attempt to downplay or denigrate the significance, what was a critical indigenous heritage site.

Andrews, Victoria’s CEO, has “blown up” an entire state; and there can be no doubt that it was he, the very personal pronoun, that did the “blowing up” rather than subordinates, as he has made abundantly clear on many, many occasions.

He was at it again this week, defending — and as usual, deflecting, to deliberately deceive, in relation to — Victoria’s curfew.

“I don’t remember,” he claimed over who actually recommended the curfew, but it didn’t matter because it was ultimately his decision; just like every decision is his decision.

Yes, it’s exactly the sort of thing that would quickly slip your mind. Why would you remember who proposed the single most extreme restriction imposed by government on the freedoms and liberties of Victorians: mandatory house arrest for Victorians for 22 hours out of the 24, every day, for months, including the infamous nine-hour curfew?

To say that he “couldn’t remember” in itself condemned him as totally unfit not to just to continue as Victorian premier, but to ever have been premier.

As of Friday night, there had been 710 deaths, and counting, from the virus in Victoria; just 87 in the rest of Australia. Victoria now accounts for 89 per cent of all the deaths; the percentage will rise above 90 per cent. As we know from Andrews’s own Chief Health Officer Brett Sutton almost every single death from Victoria’s second wave — itself, virtually all of that 710 number — came from the Victorian government’s criminal negligence in relation to the hotels quarantine.

Now, yes, it was as I noted last week, the federal Morrison government’s criminal neglect that then let the virus into aged care.

But that neither excuses the original negligence of the state government, nor alters the responsibility for the policy course chosen by it — by Andrews personally — to limit the spread of the virus by closing down the state economy and imprisoning Victorians in their homes.

Further, the fact that it’s been “only” 710 deaths — and almost entirely from the single most vulnerable population you could “choose” to unleash the virus among — does not limit the culpability of the, to stress again in his own words, the Andrews government. Indeed, it does raise the issue of, and proves in the most devastatingly conclusive fashion the utter failure of, policy across Australia: that the costs — not just financial but in health and wellbeing terms as well — have far, far outweighed the benefits of the mandatory lockdown approach.

The lockdowns did zero to protect the vulnerable in Victorian aged care; if we had protected the vulnerable, the lockdowns would so self-evidently have been shown to be the massive and destructive over-reaction they were.

Andrews has taken all this, and taken it personally into his own hands, to a new peak of catastrophic stupidity.

It’s as if he set out quite deliberately to be the anti-Premier of Victoria — an active, targeted, menace to the wellbeing of all 6.5 million Victorians, quite apart from the virus itself, while doing serious harm to the other 18 million-plus Australians as well.

His policy response, his so-called “roadmap” for Victoria — more, a continuing prison sentence for the 6.5 million Victorians — unveiled last Sunday was a stunning exercise in both self-condemnation and utter lack of self-awareness.

It was beyond all reason that such a self-condemnation was not accompanied by his resignation as premier. Beyond all reason, but not beyond explanation: the lack of self-awareness.

There’s a simple either/or.

Either the most savage and extended lockdown of a population and its economy in the entire world this year was necessary; that the devastation was unavoidable — and, to repeat, we are not just talking money but real, significant and widespread non-financial harm to people?

If so, the Victorian government, and that means Andrews as its functioning personification, stands condemned for the greatest public policy failure in modern Australian history; the need to destroy a state economy and damage millions of its citizens to rectify its earlier failure.

Or the savage lockdown was not necessary; that the devastation imposed was itself the greatest public policy failure in modern Australian history. Devastation that has been and will continue to be, well, devastating for Victorians, but also seriously damaging to the rest of Australia.

In the June quarter, as we know, the national economy shrank by an unprecedented 7 per cent. In the September quarter it was heading for a spring back of perhaps 4-5 per cent. That is, before Victoria and its notorious anti-Premier.

Josh Frydenberg revealed Treasury estimated that Victoria’s — solitary — lockdowns 2.0 (stage three) and 3.0 (state four) would cost the national economy $10bn to $12bn. But that was before the anti-Premier’s “roadmap” and its continuing throt­tling of Victoria and Victorians.

The earlier estimate was sufficient to lop 2.5 percentage points off the national September quarter GDP; the anti-Premier’s reality will ensure the cost will top three percentage points.

I can disclose that the “official family” — Treasury and the Reserve Bank — see national GDP growth in the September quarter around zero, give or take the odd decimal point either side.

They might be a tad pessimistic; it’s more likely to be in the 1-2 per cent range.

But nevertheless, that is what one premier has done to the nation; what he has done to his own state is even more catastrophic. And he wants to keep doing it, through the December quarter and into 2021.

His self-belief of his indispensability is beyond delusional; yet another reason why he is unfit to continue as premier.

Go and go now.