How long can Victorians stick to Teflon Daniel Andrews?

Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews. Picture: Andrew Henshaw

It’s the greatest paradox in Australia: how and why does the worst premier, with the worst record, have the best ratings? OK, polling for West Australian quasi-secessionist Mark McGowan may be marginally in front of Victoria’s Daniel Andrews. But almost from the moment Andrews assumed office, his domination of Victorian politics has been in almost inverse proportion to his actual success at running the state.

Take the pandemic. Melbourne is inching closer to the dubious record of the world’s most locked down city, with nearly eight months of virtual house arrest so far. Victoria also has suffered the bulk of Australia’s Covid deaths, due in part to the rejection of police and military resources to manage hotel quarantine and the use instead of dodgy private security operators. Almost unbelievably, a judicial inquiry found that no one actually had made this decision, with ministers and officials, from the Premier down, claiming they “didn’t know” or “couldn’t remember”.

For weeks until just recently, Andrews mocked his NSW counterpart for not locking down harder and sooner in the face of the Delta variant. Yet despite his more stringent lockdown, this outbreak has spread more quickly in Victoria than in NSW. On Monday, which was day 46 of its current outbreak, Victoria had clocked up a cumulative 8000 Covid cases, as opposed to 1700 at the same stage for NSW. That is essentially because the Victorian health system is worse than NSW at testing, tracing and vaccinating, despite Andrews having been in charge, as health minister or Premier, for 11 of the past 15 years.

Even the Victorian road map released last Sunday offers little hope, with lockdowns to continue for weeks because of fears intensive care units won’t be able to cope. Andrews issued a press release in April last year announcing a “$1.3bn injection to quickly establish 4000 ICU beds”, but the extra beds never materialised and no one can explain adequately where the money has gone.

In NSW, from the middle of next month, fully jabbed people will be able to have visitors at their homes, go freely to work, socialise inside restaurants, pubs and clubs, and travel anywhere in the state.

Victoria will be later getting to 70 per cent vaccination but, when it does, even the fully jabbed won’t be able to host visitors, still will be required to work from home, can’t dine inside a restaurant or drink inside a pub, and will be restricted to within 25km of their home.

But here’s the mystery: despite more deaths, longer lockdowns and less freedoms, 63 per cent of Victorians, according to this week’s Newspoll, say Andrews has handled the pandemic “very well” or “fairly well”, while NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian rates just 56 per cent. Only 35 per cent say Andrews has handled the pandemic “fairly badly” or “very badly” compared with 41 per cent for Berejiklian, even though her state has suffered less from Covid and the policies to deal with it.

And on the question of whether voters are satisfied with their premier overall, Andrews has a net 29 per cent satisfaction rating compared with just 16 per cent for Berejiklian, even though he has had to accept that her policy of living with the virus was the right one and that his dream of Covid zero was futile and inhumane.

So how does Andrews get away with treating Victorians in a way that would sink any other leader? It’s not as if, pandemic aside, he has run a good government, is it?

On his watch, state government debt has exploded from $22bn (or 6 per cent of gross state product) to a forecast $156bn (or 27 per cent of GSP) by 2025. Public sector employment has increased by 16 per cent from 277,000 in mid-2015 to 322,000 five years later. He began his time in office cancelling the much-needed East-West link (at a cost of $1bn in compensation payments to not build a road), yet the replacement project is years behind schedule and billions over budget.

Victoria has the most politically correct educational system in the country, including the “safe schools” program, which is gender fluidity propaganda masquerading as anti-bullying. It was the first state to legalise doctor-assisted suicide, it allows people to change their gender annually on their birth certificate and it even has tried to run its own leftist foreign policy, signing up to Beijing’s Belt and Road “debt-trap diplomacy” giving Chinese firms the inside running on Victorian construction projects as revealed in secret documents this week.

A large part of the Andrews success story has been his ruthless domination of the news cycle, brought about via a taxpayer-funded machine the like we have never seen before in Australian politics. Indeed, much of what happens routinely in Victoria would breach entitlement rules in Canberra. There’s his bloated media unit, including a special social media team that helps feed the #IStandWithDan network, inside a private office of 87 (compared with the Prime Minister’s private office of 51).

There’s the near tripling in size of the Department of Premier and Cabinet; the politicisation of the public service with the Premier’s current department chief a former communications strategy adviser; WorkSafe Victoria headed up by another former Labor staffer (who seems to be sitting on potential industrial manslaughter charges against ministers over hotel quarantine failures); and yet another former Labor apparatchik is now an assistant commissioner of Victoria Police.

There has been no attempt to clean up the police despite the Lawyer X royal commission revealing an “anything goes” culture and the double standard policing of Black Lives Matter and anti-lockdown protests. Nor have there been moves to depoliticise the judiciary despite the High Court’s seven-nil demolition of the case against Cardinal George Pell. It seems taxpayer money can be diverted to political polling or to support “red shirts” political staff, yet the Premier remains Teflon Dan.

Much of the Andrews machine’s success comes from daily message discipline and a historical decline in the media scrutiny of state politics. Despite Victoria’s appalling pandemic record, the nightly news programs churn out the Premier’s lines, and those lines are honed by focus groups and data analytics, helped along by a $2m taxpayer-funded contract with a Labor-connected pollster.

By using the power of the state, the Premier is cemented in office because along with generous union funding, including hundreds of thousands in CFMEU donations, the Liberal opposition struggles to cut through, even where the leader is visible. In an object lesson to Liberals, Andrews has been single-minded in pursuing a hard-left agenda that becomes a template deployed by Labor governments interstate, down to the legislative drafting.

Eventually, people realise the emperor has no clothes. That ultimately is what felled Kevin Rudd; so many Labor insiders knew what he was like behind closed doors but were so desperate to defeat John Howard they were prepared to pay the price, until one day they weren’t, and Rudd was removed.

How far away from Andrews’ end are we in Victoria? It is still too early to tell. But in a democracy, “we the people” ultimately get the government we deserve. There’s no use complaining about an ineffective opposition, a tame media or a politicised bureaucracy if that’s what voters consistently accept. If Victorians want a better government, then everyone with a stake in the future has got to do something about it.