Daniel Andrews brought low in pursuit of a coronavirus whale

Illustration: Eric Lobbecke

Shakespeare’s Henry IV laments: “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.” Political leadership is a grave and onerous business even in good times. When a catastrophe strikes, as with the pandemic out of control in Victoria, the burden is of awesome, even superhuman weight. It is incumbent on the rest of us to look on with respect and fearful circumspection.

Premier Daniel Andrews has addressed the public daily for most of this year. He has appeared confident, speaking with calm clarity and seeming openness, but also striking an apt tone of modesty and empathy. This was just the type of strong leader needed in the unfolding crisis. Then, at midday on September 6, things changed.

A new Andrews appeared, harried and less coherent, the message complex and confused, apart from its dominant theme — that a severe lockdown would continue almost indefinitely. One could sense the public, which had been hoping for a significant easing of restrictions, reeling at this. In the following days, Andrews become bleaker as he seemed to retreat into stubborn, defensiveness, with the media tearing apart his roadmap for the future, detail by detail, assumption by assumption, until the rationale was in shreds.

Turning-point days in history such as September 6, if indeed this one retains that status, usually result from a build-up of preceding events. Here was no exception. A public inquiry into the hotel quarantine debacle that had unleashed the new wave of infection on the state, was exposing state government incompetence. It revealed a shambolic contact tracing system with primitive recording methods, slow reporting of test results and erratic or non-existent tracing of the contacts of those who had tested virus positive. This might have been partly excusable when daily new infection numbers were above 500, but not as the norm.

In May Andrews had boasted comically that his trackers were “among the best in the world”. His Treasurer upped the ante: “World-leading tracking.” A premier who seemed strong when upfront in media presentation, a master of public relations, was weak or cavalier offstage where it mattered.

Daniel Andrews shows the strain during his September 6 press conference. Picture: AFP

The Victorian Department of Health and Human Services was dysfunctional. Of course, ministers inherit their bureaucracies. It needs a minister with singular purpose, vision and will — a Jeff Kennett — to effect reforms that will require the replacement of several upper executive tiers and restructuring. Problems with the DHHS were obvious in March, yet the government sat on its hands.

Health Minister Jenny Mikakos symptomises the unfitness of the Andrews government. Given the gravity of a quarantine situation that led to the greatest failure of governance in Australia since at least World War II, she should have been visiting hotels morning, noon and night to check that security and hygiene protocols were observed. The situation demanded vigilant and meticulous, even obsessive leadership.

She should have ensured months ago that Victoria’s Chief Health Officer Brett Sutton had authority over her senior bureaucrats — he still doesn’t. She should have been Hercules cleaning the Augean stables of her department. Rather, she appeared tearfully in public to say sorry. And she has kept her job.

Victorian Health Minister Jenny Mikakos. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Daniel Pockett

An unwritten social contract binds a society to its government, one based on trust. A government that loses trust loses its one vital currency, legitimacy — especially in a time of emergency. Once that is lost, the likeliest scenario is spiralling discontent and, with today’s extreme lockdown, escalating noncompliance.

Victorians have been respectful of their government and obedient to its demands. But on September 6 the wind swung around. The government found itself on a steep decline with its legitimacy wobbling. Some early polls remained positive, but the Premier will need extraordinary acumen to retain authority.

Scott Morrison has turned against Andrews, his former ally. Brendan Murphy, formerly the nation’s chief medical officer and now secretary of the federal Department of Health, is criticising the Victorian performance, as is federal Health Minister Greg Hunt. Epidemiologists are doubting the reasoning behind Victoria’s roadmap out of lockdown. The Andrews curfew is questioned by the state’s Chief Health Officer and Victoria Police.

The mathematical models the Premier claimed as his principal guides are, in even the best scenarios, notoriously unreliable; John Kenneth Galbraith quipped that economic forecasting had been created to give astrology a good name. The builders of the chosen models are themselves questioning the way they have been used. Yet these speculations are underwriting a planned lockdown over months, with a timetable of such Byzantine obscurity as could be devised only by a committee of insular bureaucrats.

We know lots of people are trying to access this website at the moment – it’s struggling a bit.

In the meantime, here are the roadmaps for regional Victoria and metro Melbourne. pic.twitter.com/2NU3mUdEG4

— Dan Andrews (@DanielAndrewsMP) September 6, 2020

The roadmap fails the pub test: only absolutely necessary and reasonable restrictions should be applied. And why was a hotspot strategy — much softer on people and economy — not chosen? The head of biotechnology company CSL judges the restrictions far too severe given infection numbers.

Andrews looks more and more like a solitary figure on a spotlit stage, surrounded in the shadows by subservience, somehow believing he can take on the pandemic monster single-handedly but registering failure after failure, to which he responds with inflexible indifference as his state becomes the laughing-stock of the nation, condemned to a woeful short to midterm economic future.

Under pressure ... Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Daniel Pockett

Is there some subconscious, mythical identification with Captain Ahab, who devoted his entire adult life to a self-obsessed pursuit of the white monster of the deep, Moby-Dick? The ferocious giant whale had, on one encounter, reaped away Ahab’s leg like a mown blade of grass. Moby-Dick is of uncommon size and malignity; to chase him has become an act of superhuman impiety, and it destroys Ahab.

The Andrews impiety seems similarly monomaniac, with the perverse twist that the more exhausted and rattled his own personal state, the more he seems driven to inflict ever more severe punishment on his victim, the Victorian public.

Just before the end, Ahab reflects on the life he has led: “the desolation of solitude it has been, the masoned walled-town of a Captain’s exclusiveness, which admits but small entrance to any sympathy from the green country without — oh, weariness, heaviness!”

Yet this is not the time for recrimination. Whoever the captain, and whatever his methods, the only thing that matters is practical, steering Victoria out of its pandemic mess.

John Carroll is professor emeritus of sociology at La Trobe University.