Daniel Andrews isolated from bemused journos

Victorian Premier Dan Andrews. Picture: Valeriu Campan

The media halo around Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews continues to slip amid quarantine bungles that have seen the state’s coronavirus cases spike.

This time, it’s not just about his legendary three-year feud with 3AW’s morning king Neil Mitchell.

Last week, a series of national broadcasters — from Leigh Sales to David Koch — called out “Chairman Dan” for his reticence to come on their shows.

Sales began last week by saying she had regularly asked Andrews for an interview on 7.30 since the start of the lockdown, but he had “declined each time”.

“We’ll keep trying,” she said.

It seems that persistence finally paid off on Wednesday, when Andrews appeared on 7.30. But there was no such luck last week for a cranky Kochie, who lamented that “each day, we keep getting refused” by Andrews.

“We want to get the message out, and we really want to understand what’s going on,” he said.

As Diary noted last month, there seem to be problems between Andrews’s media team and journalists, with reports of sarcastic responses to even innocent media requests and pointed remarks to one reporter about having “another thought bubble”.

Another senior media source told us that dealing with the Andrews camp behind the scenes has been a “nightmare”.

Even former ABC Melbourne morning radio host Jon Faine — said to get on well with Andrews — got in on the act on Sunday, writing in The Age that “we can expect heads to roll” in Andrews’s back office if problems keep “happening”.

Read Nick Tabakoff’s full Media Diary on Monday