Peta Credlin locked down but never silenced
When Peta Credlin fronted up at a Covid press conference last year, the backlash from colleagues was ferocious.
After months of tuning in to Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews’s hour-long daily Covid-19 press conferences, Peta Credlin says she had finally had enough.
Like millions of Victorians living under a strict 112-day lockdown last year, it was when Credlin – confined to her inner-city Melbourne apartment – found herself yelling at the television as the Premier gave his regular update.
It wasn’t until her husband, former federal Liberal Party director Brian Loughnane, intervened.
“Brian turned to me and said, ‘Stop it, if you’re that fired up about it you’ve got to go and ask questions’,” she says.
She heeded his advice, a move that would subsequently throw her into the spotlight as the woman who was brazen enough to tackle the Premier head on and eventually end the career of his most senior bureaucrat, secretary of the Department of Premier and Cabinet, Chris Eccles.
“Just watching the obfuscation and the ‘I don’t knows’ and the ‘I can’t remembers’ by the ministers in the Coate inquiry including the Premier, told you there was something they had done wrong,” Credlin says. “They couldn’t fess up and there were no straight answers.”
Credlin is joining The Australian as a columnist.
She is a Sky News political contributor and anchor of her own show; she also writes a weekly column in News Corp’s Sunday papers and is a political contributor for Nine Radio.
“It’s been a privilege to be a national News Corp Sunday columnist for six years and to now join The Australian as well, with its stable of thinkers, provocateurs and experts, is about as good as it gets, if you’re like me and believe in the battle of ideas,” she says.
The 50-year-old originates from the small town of Wycheproof in northwest Victoria, and is one of five children.
She graduated from the University of Melbourne with an Arts/Law degree and spent 16 years working at Canberra’s Parliament House, becoming best known for her role as former prime minister Tony Abbott’s chief of staff.
Her hardworking ethos, intelligence and meticulous attention to detail undoubtedly ruffle the feathers of some, including the normally unflappable Victorian Premier.
Credlin spent weeks trawling through thousands of pages of transcripts and evidence submitted to the Coate inquiry into the hotel quarantine debacle that resulted in 768 deaths and 18,000 infections.
Her determination never wavered, she worked around the clock to get to the bottom of who made the decision to put private security guards in charge of hotel quarantine – a move that would eventually plunge Victoria into the longest lockdown in the country.
But her arrival at Andrews’s 99th press conference was one that divided many.
“It wasn’t like I was there with my elbows out in press conference number one, I went to press conference number 99,” Credlin says.
“I got a lot of criticism from journalists but I got a huge amount of support from the public.
“The journalists had 99 days straight to put the Premier under some pressure with the questions I was asking, the loopholes in his answers and discrepancies in what he was telling them.”
Many reporters argued she shouldn’t be there questioning Andrews because she wasn’t a journalist.
The Age’s chief reporter, Chip Le Grand, criticised Credlin on Twitter and said she was “a partisan, political operative. Mr Andrews is within his rights to tell her to bugger off”.
But the criticism didn’t bother Credlin who deemed the Spring St press pack as “one of the worst press galleries in the country”.
“I took the Sky seat at the press conferences, I was entitled to be there,” she says. “Chip carried on like a pork chop, he was really quite nasty on Twitter.
“If you’re going to sit there and call yourselves journalists and be lackeys to the Premier, well you don’t deserve the name.
“If you don’t want to call me a journalist, I don’t care. I write columns, I do a live show every night at 6pm and I do radio, so I don't care what you call me.”
It’s certainly no secret the Liberal Party – at both state and federal level – has been desperate to get Credlin to join the ranks and become an MP, but she doesn’t see herself doing that anytime soon.
“For me it doesn’t feel like an itch I need to scratch because I feel every day now the motivation to go into politics is about the big issues of the day and where our country is headed. I deal with it every night at 6 o’clock,” she says.
“Does that mean I never go into politics? I’m not stupid enough to rule it out, but it’s not something I’m chasing.”
Credlin certainly doesn’t hold back in criticising the troubled Victorian Liberal Party - the opposition holds just 27 of 88 lower-house seats after a disastrous 2018 defeat - blaming in-house bickering for its consistently poor results at the polling booth.
“They’ve got no backbone, they can’t land a punch,” Credlin says. “Politics at a state level in the Liberal Party have been divided and ridden with personal agendas in warring camps for more than 20 years.
“If you look at the last 30 years they have only had one term in parliament and that’s why: they are too busy scrapping among themselves to take on the power of the left in Victoria.”
But she’s doubtful Andrews – who hasn’t been seen publicly since his fall in March – will lead the government to the state election in November 2022, and says his support has wavered from within the Labor ranks.
“Things are not as they seem on the good ship, Daniel Andrews,” she says. “I don’t think he’ll run at the next election, I think he’ll dismount and go off and make money.”
Credlin says many Victorians have been left with a “real lack of hope” after the latest lockdown in her home state and it’s “inevitable” more lockdowns will come.
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