‘Teflon Dan’ no longer after Games debacle

It seems that Dan Andrews is no longer “Teflon Dan,” the premier who escapes every controversy with barely a bruise. For days now the Commonwealth Games fiasco has seen the veteran Premier almost universally panned for a self-made crisis which has embarrassed Victoria internationally and has betrayed Andrews’ cavalier disregard for public accountability and transparency.

And now the first snap poll since he walked away from 2026 Commonwealth Games, by pollster Roy Morgan, has found support for Victorian Labor fell to 53 per cent (down 8.5 percentage points since late May) compared with the Coalition on 47 per cent (up 8.5 percentage points) on a two-party preferred basis.

This is not nearly enough to threaten the Premier’s leadership or Labor’s dominance over the weak state Liberal opposition. But it does suggest that the eight year love affair that Andrews has enjoyed with the majority of Victorians is fading.

Debt has skyrocketed under Andrews’ leadership, sitting at a projected net figure of $171 billion - easily the highest of any state.

The problem for the Premier is that he cannot escape two highly damaging conclusions about his behaviour in suddenly withdrawing from the 2026 games. The first is that he deliberately deceived and blindsided the Commonwealth Games Federation about any cost blowouts and about the fact that he was considering abandoning his commitment to hold the games. His government knew for months that the budget had blown out badly and yet he kept this information from the CGF, not giving the games authority a chance to discuss possible solutions to cut costs. This was another example of the excessive secrecy and lack of transparency that has sadly become a hallmark of the Andrews government.

The second inescapable conclusion is that the Premier and his government were guilty of mismanagement on an industrial scale in getting the cost estimates of the games so woefully wrong that they felt compelled to pull the plug on the whole event after just 15 months.

And then there is the allegation from Commonwealth Games Australia CEO Craig Phillips that Andrews is guilty of a ‘gross exaggeration’ of the cost blowout of the games, presumably to help him justify the politics of withdrawing as the host state. Andrews will not answer this allegation because he has so far refused to explain how his government came to the conclusion that the games would now cost up to $7 billion or release any documents that might support such a claim.

It is a bad place for a premier to be and the problem for Andrews is that it comes on top of a raft of other controversies which, taken together, look set to tarnish a legacy which in the eyes of the Labor faithful had once seemed assured.

The state’s budget watchdog has now warned the cost of Andrews’ rail project could blowout from an estimated $125 billion to more than $200 billion.

The biggest millstone around Andrews’ neck is the price Victorians are now paying for the gross mismanagement of the state’s economy. The best Victorian premiers – such as Jeff Kennett for the Liberals and Steve Bracks and John Brumby for Labor – followed the simple formula of being socially progressive while being economically and fiscally conservative.

By contrast, Andrews has spent money like a drunken sailor during his eight and a half years in power, often on dubious and delayed infrastructure projects which are mostly running behind schedule and over budget. Since 2018 net debt under Andrews has exploded from $22 billion to a projected $171 billion, easily the highest of any state.

Even so, Andrews is still pursuing his own expensive vanity rail project – the so-called suburban rail loop – a project which bypassed the public service and which was never subjected to a rigorous cost-benefit analysis. The state’s budget watchdog has now warned the cost of this project could blowout from an estimated $125 billion to more than $200 billion.

Victorians are already paying for this economic mismanagement with the recent state budget slugging business and property investors – including mum and dad landlords – and many others with a raft of new taxes, further enshrining Victoria as the country’s highest taxing state.

Andrews’ has also managed to escape full accountability for his own party’s rotten culture after the state’s corruption watchdog described ‘a catalogue of unethical and inappropriate’ within the Labor Party.

And he has refused to explain why his government commissioned taxpayer funded political and social polling about the Premier’s performance during the pandemic lockdowns – a move which gave the appearance of a premier making pandemic lockdown decisions based on polling rather than health.

Then there was the Premier’s overreach during the pandemic, when he subjected Victorians to the longest lockdowns outside of China. Despite these harsh lockdowns – the impact of which can still be seen today in children’s mental health and education – Victoria had by some distance the worst record of any state in handling Covid with the highest number of deaths.

The Commonwealth Games controversy, on top of these other issues, makes it more likely that Andrews will choose to walk away from politics halfway through his term once he has served for ten years, rather than face voters again.

But even when Andrews goes, his influence will still be felt because he has appointed a raft of former Labor ministers into senior jobs around the state. His likely successor, Vice Premier Jacinta Allan, is the minister responsible for the main follies of the Premier – the now-defunct Commonwealth Games and the Suburban rail loop. Her likely accession will hardly mark a decisive break from the Premier’s agenda. Despite its increasingly tawdry record, the Andrews government remains blessed by the fact that the state’s Liberal Party is a basket case.

But Andrews’s autocratic style is wearing thin on voters and the Commonwealth Games debacle is another blow to his legacy.