The coronavirus buck stops with Premier Daniel Andrews

Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews has displayed calm under pressure. Picture: NCA NewsWire

It is often said in politics that you should never start a commission of inquiry unless you know what it is likely to discover. The problem is these inquiries have a life of their own and have a reputation for travelling wide of their brief.

The decision by the Victorian government to hold one into the cause of the coronavirus and its spread in Melbourne shows that Premier Daniel Andrews is prepared to accept considerable risk. It is hard to believe that there will not be any findings against him or his government. The capacity to accept blame for anything that has gone seriously wrong is not common among political leaders.

The calm demeanour displayed by Andrews when he is under pressure is a true gift. He is impossible to rattle; every word he utters is considered and hits it mark. I have been in this business for a tick under 50 years and I have never seen anyone as good at this as this unassuming man. If decency were a tradeable commodity, Andrews would be a wealthy man. He is a formidable political force.

He is of a similar stature to Neville Wran, although the two of them are very different individuals. For one so polished in his public performances, no one could say the F-word more often than Wran. This Balmain boy knew how to come out swinging. Wran had a terrible temper that he would occasionally unleash against a hapless minister.

His most hapless, and some would say most hopeless, was prisons minister Bill Haigh. The expletive-loaded serve this bloke received from Wran was spectacular, and more so whenever another villain escaped from Long Bay. When former treasurer and premier Jack Renshaw died, I took the new candidate, a farmer from Gulgong, in to meet the premier.

Wran and I had one of our ferocious arguments about which advertising agency we were going to use in the forthcoming by election. The expletives were flying thick and fast and the candidate declared he wasn’t sure he wished to proceed with his nomination if this was the way politics was conducted. Wran then pushed the charm button as only he could do. The candidate, of course, decided he would bat on. Labor duly lost its last country seat and has battled in the bush ever since.

The hold the Nationals have on those seats has been broken in recent times only by the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers Party, which has managed to snare a couple of lower house seats. The William McKell years when Labor held a majority of country seats are long gone and an impenetrable wall has been built to successfully deny Labor any of those electorates. Labor still struggles to export its brand beyond the large metropolitan areas.

Nationals leader Michael McCormack has faced more challenges than any modern political leader. Barnaby Joyce, once the best retail politician in the country, now carries serious personal baggage that makes a return to the Nationals leadership problematic. Nonetheless the baton is still in his knapsack and his small band of supporters continues to disrupt and leak against McCormack.

In 1999 the Australian Democrats, under the misguided leadership of Meg Lees, voted for a GST and self-immolated overnight. All the work done by the party’s founder, Don Chipp, was undone in a flash by a boneheaded decision guaranteed to infuriate the rank and file. So great was the betrayal that no one who had ever been or had voted Democrat would admit it publicly.

The Greens are led by Adam Bandt, who has failed to make a mark by any measure. Meanwhile the Greens’ former hero, Bob Brown, has been unveiled as a NIMBY since he announced his opposition to a wind farm near his residence.

While the Greens continue to threaten that they will withdraw their preferences from the ALP, there is mounting evidence that their voters will send their preferences to Labor no matter what the Greens recommend.

That severely undermines the Greens’ capacity to bargain with Labor. If the Liberals ever elect a leader who has a green tint about them, then a very interesting competition for preferences would ensue. The difficulty in comprehending how such a thing could occur is in wondering how the Liberals’ business base would react and how the mining industry in particular would respond given its close ties to the Nationals. Neither group, it would seem, would ever wear any form of alliance, or even one-off deal with the Greens. This is why the Greens will always preference Labor. They have nowhere else to go.

The major parties have loyal bases. Their voters follow preferences as allocated. On average the number is 93 per cent following, which is why the use of a tick or a No 1 next to a box on a Senate or Legislative Council ballot is enough. When asked to fill out the entire form, with often 60 candidates or more in the bigger states, the average voter faces a daunting task beyond some of them. These groups of course present Labor’s best hopes.