Handing Andrews and McGowan awards for pandemic will ignite ferocious debate

This is a stab in the eye for the Dan Andrews and Mark McGowan haters.

It’s also a defacto gong for the hundreds of thousands of silent voters who rewarded their pandemic policy settings with thumping majorities.

The biggest criticism of these two awards is around the timing and the reasoning.

The former Victorian premier’s record on public health and infrastructure is wide open to debate. It could be a decade or more before many people can rationally discuss the Andrews legacy, which is mixed and hotly contested.

McGowan was the man who delivered a rather odd state lockout that was wildly successful politically, virtually decapitating his opposition at the next election after the pandemic had waned.

Same goes for Andrews, who was re-elected comfortably, building on a long era of success.

Maybe through the prism of politics it’s possible to look at both awards with a sense of understanding rather than the rabid opposition that so often has been saved for these former Labor leaders.

Where Andrews falls down most clearly is his record on the pandemic and the basket case budget he has left behind.

Victoria had the worst outcomes on Covid-19 – especially in 2020 – but it’s the budget legacy that casts the most darkness on Andrews.

Nation-leading debt, hopeless major project cost overruns and a state that remains oh so bitterly divided between the haters and the Labor voters.

Even the opinion polls are sharply split, one suggesting Labor is looking cooked only to be followed by another showing Andrews’ replacement Jacinta Allan doing much better.

Former WA premier Mark McGowan.

For McGowan, who hit 91 per cent popularity at his peak, his pandemic measures looked just as odd to outsiders as Victoria’s playground bans and curfews.

But the upside for WA was it helped fortify its finances by keeping mining going and led to the fewest lockdown days in the country.

There are reasons why McGowan was so popular. The analysis around Andrews is much, much more nuanced.

His strategy of pumping billions and billions into roads, rail, health and education is the key to why people kept voting for him and why they may keep voting for Labor.

At the same time as supersizing the debt, Andrews was giving voters what they wanted; at least the voters he knew would back the ALP.

Labor has now taxed the life out of business, and after his departure has started axing services because the budget is so ridiculously cooked. All of which was completely foreseeable and was forecast by The Australian and anyone with knowledge of political history.

The award bestowed on Andrews will do nothing to change these challenges, nor will it do anything other than throw a tin of kerosene on an already raging fire.