Step aside Sir Joh, Dictator Dan is the new master of Aussie populism

Daniel Andrews and Sir Joh Bjelke Petersen.

So Lord Lockdown is gone and a distinct fraction of Melburnians couldn’t be happier. Daniel Andrews was the most formidable Victorian premier in living memory, a man of blood and iron and of press conferences that seemed to come ex cathedra like papal pronouncements. He ruled Victoria like a tsar or a dictator, and closed down Melbourne for 262 interminable and insufferable days.

But was he ever truly a man of the left?

It took time and frustration for me to realise that while Andrews presented as a man of the left, he saw his own ideology as a blank sheet on which he could stamp his own predominance and ambition as leader.

Over time he became one of those weird populist figures on Australia’s political landscape, like a Joh Bjelke-Petersen, whose national image was of a man who could simply do as he wished. There is no denying the breathtaking degree of dominion he asserted over us Victorians. Remember that shameful moment – boggling in a politician of the left or right – when Andrews’ government had people, often poor, uncomprehending Muslim people, locked in their flats with no food, with no help for their crying babies.

What kind of political leader – socialist or social democrat or otherwise – allows this to happen? Remember how in this paper’s pages Gideon Haigh and Henry Ergas, two very different commentators, spoke with one voice: it was ever thus, they said, when the rich and powerful sacrifice the poor and needy.

I was pleased when Andrews was elected all those years ago. What a triumph to get the Liberals out after one term. And who with any sympathy for the Labor cause – which includes a high proportion of journalists like me – could object to the purging of level crossings or (until the penny dropped) the Belt and Road Initiative; why not take Chinese money if it was there for the taking?

I was surprised when an old editor described Andrews to me as a deeply ideological autocrat. I doubted whether we truly were in the grip of a leader so driven by ideological absolutism. But during the pandemic years, I came to realise the leftism of Andrews was a million miles from the flexibility of, say, a Tanya Plibersek or a Penny Wong.

It was intrinsically related to the cult of personality he so brilliantly developed and the fact he seemed answerable to nobody. An iron dictatorial pose is not something I would have ever imagined coming from the comrades in Victoria. How much of all of this was about the pandemic, and how much was it about Andrews building his own untouchable supremacy?

It soon became apparent there was politics in all of Andrews’ protective measures. He scared a good number of people – including some upper middle class people who were not in the habit of voting Labor – out of fear for their families’ lives. But none of this was Dan’s worry: a little bit of pain and inconvenience for people who at the end of the day just didn’t count enough.

He made himself immune to the repercussions and the responsibilities. Remember the hotel quarantine scandal as a consequence of which hundreds of vulnerable, mainly elderly people died? There was an inquiry but the buck stopped with the sacked health minister, Jenny Mikakos. Responsibility was never for a second taken by the mighty man who ruled Victoria with that rod of iron that was always – just a bit incredibly – reserved for someone other than the premier.

Daniel Andrews

Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen

Everyone came to comprehend this premier’s style, his tone of authority, which was such an effortless cloak for his instinctive authoritarianism. He would call any number of press conferences – 100 or so over those two disjointed years – and he would talk steady but he wouldn’t even look at his medical lieutenant, Brett Sutton, if he had displeased him.

Yes, Sutton himself was instinctively inclined to lockdowns, but it was Andrews who used him as the cover for his attraction to the letter of the law. And how brilliantly, with blunt paternalism, he would announce that, no, with the pubs shut, you were not allowed to sock back the beers with a congregation of your mates.

Andrews knew you wanted to wind your way around him and he was there to stop you.

As it happens, he was a man of the left but that is no explanation of the personal magnetism with which he bent the second-biggest city in the country to his will.

Andrews’ personal imperium was so great that he would refuse to be interviewed by Neil Mitchell, refused to talk to the ABC. He pushed to legalise euthanasia and the rest of the country have followed him like so many lambs. When George Pell was acquitted by the unanimous bench of the High Court, Andrews did a shout-out to victims, which made it very clear what he thought of that legal decision (without saying so).

His political skills are massive and his powers of communication are majestic. Would he be a great wartime leader? Well, you’d want to be sure it was a just war.

Brett Sutton wins the Victorian of the Year Award. Picture: Jake Nowakowski

Right at the moment the Albanese government is planning a tame inquiry into Covid in which Andrews will not be required to appear. The other night on Q+A with Patricia Karvelas the palpably left-liberal audience was asked whether there should be a royal commission into the handling of Covid. More than 70 per cent voted yes.

The Caesar from Mulgrave has never missed a trick in his life. He’s going before his legacy catches up with him. Victoria’s debt is stupendous and the Commonwealth Games debacle was just that.

But the main thing is the city that saw itself shut down, the elderly not tended, the kids under house arrest, the way life turned on a strongman’s whim. Perhaps Lord Lockdown has every reason to spit the dummy and run.

Peter Craven is a cultural critic.