“I think a servant of the enemy would look fairer and feel fouler” – Frodo Baggins in Lord of the Rings, on first meeting Strider, later revealed as the good king, Aragorn.
COVID-19 has accelerated the dominance of a type of political leader uniquely evolved to look the part, but who delivers consistently terrible results – in Frodo Baggins’s terms, who looks fair but delivers foul.
In Australia, the pre-eminent case is Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews, whose purely political skills are unmatched among premiers, but whose government has delivered continuously shocking results in the pandemic, and generally. This is not to question Andrews’s motives or work ethic. He is plainly doing his best. But he and his political culture have failed.
The two great international examples of this particular complex of failures – ideologically progressive politicians with supreme presentational skills but hopeless at actual government – are New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, and Scotland’s First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon.
New York and New Jersey are the worst-performing states in the US regarding COVID, just as Victoria is the worst-performing state in Australia. New York has had just fewer than 33,000 deaths with a death rate per million of almost 1700, more than twice Britain’s. A large part is directly attributable to Cuomo’s decisions, especially insisting aged-care facilities take people without testing for COVID. There were many other mistakes. Cuomo was slow to act, slow to build his state’s medical capacity.
Where he shone, once the crisis got going, was in his daily briefings. Often making grand moral statements – “we all got this wrong” – he never actually took political responsibility for anything. He used woke language, spoke with warmth, compassion and seeming directness. His performances were full of that art which conceals an art. The generally progressive US media, always more interested in the theatrical, performative aspect of politics than the substance of government, lavished praise on him. Cuomo became nationally popular even though he presided over spectacularly bad policies. Beyond COVID, he has done a terrible job, with, for example, New York’s murder rate skyrocketing.
The worst element in the whole UK COVID crisis has been the outbreaks in aged-care homes. Scotland has done worse on this than the rest of the UK. Sturgeon was slow to react to the pandemic, slow to acquire PPE. But she held almost daily press briefings and spoke earnestly. She rejoiced, she admitted, that focusing on COVID freed her from party politics. This sort of leader always wants to pitch themselves above politics, to make the normal business of politics illegitimate. Sturgeon, the most left-wing national party leader in Britain, has soared in the polls while many Brits are highly critical of Boris Johnson’s management of COVID. Beyond the virus, she runs an appallingly incompetent administration.
Andrews fits the Cuomo/Sturgeon paradigm of the woke, earnest, ideologically perfect left liberal leader who cannot make the trains run, much less run on time, but who gains the plaudits of the dominant PC parts of the media, who projects a reassuring image while avoiding real scrutiny. Victoria has this crisis because of his government’s staggering incompetence. At the same time Andrews has avoided effective scrutiny and accountability by more or less abolishing democracy in Victoria.
The list of failures by the government includes (but is not exhausted by): catastrophic failure to manage quarantine hotels; an anaemic, poor contact tracing until this latest crisis; resisting federal help when the Victorian arms of the bureaucracy plainly couldn’t do the job; not issuing any fines at the Black Lives Matter demonstration, thus tacitly endorsing a huge event that broke social distancing restrictions and undermined the message; not naming Cedar Meats and thus not getting all its casual contacts to test; and even today, an opaque, slow approach to releasing data that would allow proper scrutiny of the government’s performance.
Further, under Andrews, all the mechanisms of democratic accountability have virtually disappeared. Labor has been in office in Melbourne for 18 of the past 21 years. It has permeated the bureaucracy and state agencies with ideological fellow travellers and political mates. It is the most ideologically left government in Australia; from Safe Schools to refusing to allow any gas exploration (recently, and belatedly, reversed) to refusing to say it respected the High Court decision to acquit Cardinal George Pell. It is great at discerning the oppression of the hetero-normative, patriarchal, global warming social order. It is not so good at running schools.
Victoria has become a dysfunctional one-party state with a mostly compliant local media. Certainly the Andrews government and the ABC share a world view. In this context, democratic accountability and the contestability of all policy are critical ingredients to competent government. Obeying the law can never be contested. Arguing about what the law should be is always legitimate.
But Andrews has connived in the virtual abolition of the mechanisms of democracy in Victoria. He contrived federal intervention into the Victorian ALP so it cannot function as a political party until 2023. He is thus free even of the shackles of his own party. His insistence that parliament should not sit is unambiguously a disgrace. The Chief Health Officer recommended against parliament sitting but that is because the government did not define it as an essential function. If you can rig up a commercial abattoir to operate safely, surely you can do the same for the state parliament. There has never been a more arrogant episode of disdain for normal democracy than the Victorian Health Minister’s decision not to answer any questions on the virus this week in the Legislative Council, sitting only because the Coalition and crossbenchers insisted.
Andrews has constantly used the inquiry headed by a former judge to avoid answering a single question on the quarantine hotels disaster. Yet that ex-judge pointed out on Wednesday her inquiry is not a court of law and there is no bar to anybody talking about the matters to come before it. Now this inquiry is delayed so Andrews can treat voters with complete contempt on the hotels. What right do we have to know anything?
Parliamentary and institutional democracy is not a bourgeois self-indulgence. It is essential to good government. It’s missing in Victoria. As a result, Andrews presents well but delivers uniformly terrible government.
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