A mental image arose of the last chopper out of Spring Street this week with the sudden departure of Daniel Michael Andrews.
Why so sudden? Even WA Premier Mark McGowan who rendered the Liberal Party in Western Australia into a micro-party able to caucus in a broom closet, gave the Labor government a week to find a successor. In Dan’s case it was 24 hours.
There were all manner of conspiracies flying around. Was a policy shambles set to emerge? A new scandal? An IBAC finding that once again fell just short of criminality?
A clip emerged of Premier Dan smoking a cheeky durry outside a function. Some speculated that this was proof he was on the way out. Smoking is pretty much the worst thing a politician can do these days. A polly on the make could inject black tar heroin into his or her left eyeball and not face the sort of fury from media and public alike in lighting up a cancer stick.
I can’t recall a state premier openly smoking since NSW Premier John Fahey would chug a beer and a gasper in cabinet meetings in Macquarie Street in the 1990s.
Ultimately, Dan left the building so abruptly because the factional fix was in and those on the right were about to get screwed again. The dominant socialist-left faction within the Andrews government was at it again, trying to square away all the cash and prizes to their own.
As reported in The Australian, the caucus room was an ocean of profanity. Sailors brows furrowed and dock workers recoiled in shock at the colour and frequency of indecent language.
“Daniel exploded in caucus. His rant was second to none. It was f..king this, f..king that,” said one caucus member.
“He basically said to them: ‘You all have the right to aspire to be promoted. You don’t have the right to bring divisions into this room.’ ”
The caucus meeting itself and its processes in installing the new leadership team broke around six party rules by my count but no one cared or was counting.
Once the dust settled and the swearing stopped, the only counting that took place was a quick show of hands where Dan’s fellow S-L traveller, Jacinta Allan, was elected unopposed and Ben Carroll from the right faction was installed as her deputy in a brief return to factional civility.
In her first speech to the media, the newly installed premier drew from Victorian Labor premiers, Steve Bracks and John Brumby as well as Dan as her inspirations. It wasn’t quite Nikita Khruschev in the Great Hall of the Kremlin denouncing Stalin in his Cult of the Personality and its Consequences speech in 1956, but it did seem to be a slight shift away from Dan who, as commentators bereft of thesauruses invariably described as a “polarising figure.”
Allan, whose only job out of politics was a short stint on the cash registers in a Coles supermarket, became an MP at 25 and a minister at 28 - the youngest since Alfred Deakin in 1888.
Has Jacinta Allan been given the hospital handpass á la Joan Kirner in the early 1990s with Dan propelling the footy high into the air? When John Cain Jr sent the Sherrin skyward vaguely in Kirner’s direction, Victoria was in a state of chaos, continual crisis and fiscal disaster with the collapse of the State Bank of Victoria.
Back then the Tram drivers went on strike. Not only did the trammies walk off the job, they drove their trams to Spring Street, parked them and left them there for months, leading to utter mayhem in the CBD. With still more than a year to go before the next state election, Labor politicians and staffers would peer out from the curtains in the parliament and knew in their hearts voters were reaching for the Gunn and Moore Diamonds (a finely balanced piece of willow) and had banged in a couple of roofing nails just to make sure.
Allan finds herself on a better wicket than Kirner. She has more than three years to settle the ship of state.
But there are problems. Big, scary problems. Net debt in Victoria will surge to $166 billion in 2025-26. By comparison, net debt in New South Wales - a similar, almost equivalent figure to that of Victoria in the here and now will be more than $50 billion less by 2025-26.
She is also the Minister for the Commonwealth Games That Weren’t. A title, she will find difficult to shrug off going forward.
But Allan has one big factor in her favour. Her opponents, the Parliamentary Liberal Party of Victoria, are laughably bad and find themselves inevitably described by those same Thesaurus-deficient commentators as “dysfunctional.” Avoid cliches. Try broken, guys.
Premiers, like football coaches, are assessed on their win-loss records. Andrews won three successive elections, increasing his parliamentary majority on each occasion, a feat that has only been equalled in post-WWII Australian politics in my reckoning by Neville Wran and Sir Henry Bolte.
An eight per cent swing across the board is needed to install the Coalition onto the Treasury benches in 2026. That sounds easy if you say it quickly but it’s not. A state council replete with more than its fair share of nutters is reflective of a party that continues to preselect candidates that are regarded as too extreme for the majority of Victorian voters.
Allan finds herself in the top job at the tax phase of the tax and spend cycle. Unpopular decisions will need to be made lest the metaphorical arrival of the tram convoy appear once again in Spring Street.
One suspects that Dan will barely rate a mention in dispatches from a government eager to put some space and time between them and him.
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