The Victorian election is not just a referendum on Daniel Andrews and his government. It’s also a test of us as citizens: what is the standard we are prepared to walk by, and therefore implicitly accept in our democracy?
Are Australians now so keen to be kept safe that we don’t care how many ethical boundaries are crossed? And are we now so cynical about politicians that we don’t mind the bastardry and the intimidation, as long as it doesn’t personally affect us?
Are we, as voters, prepared to tolerate a government that, as respected former Victoria Police chief commissioner Kel Glare told me in my latest documentary, The Cult of Daniel Andrews, which aired on Sky News last night, is the “most corrupt” he’s seen in 80 years? And that Melbourne talkback radio supremo Neil Mitchell described as the “worst government” he’s seen in 50 years?
What struck me most putting together this documentary was the number of good and decent Labor people who reached out to me and said “this man must go”.
The bravest of them all was a former Andrews government minister who reached out to me wanting to speak up about her treatment by the Premier. “What he will do,” said the ex-minister, “is mark somebody out who has disagreed with him … and he will step in, throw the first punch … and then stand back. And that’s the signal for everyone else to come in and finish the job. He says he’s a champion for women … but he treats women appallingly behind closed doors. And if you’re down, he’ll kick you to keep you down.” The treatment of other ALP women such as Jane Garrett, Jenny Mikakos, Fiona Richardson and Kaushaliya Vaghela demonstrates that my whistleblower’s treatment was no isolated occurrence.
There is no doubt that Andrews is the most domineering premier Australia has seen in decades. Not only has he been premier for eight years, Labor leader for 12 and a frontbencher for 16, but – due to the pandemic, and Scott Morrison’s foolhardy creation of the so-called national cabinet that gave Andrews almost equal billing with the prime minister – he has become the best-known premier since Queensland’s Joh Bjelke-Petersen and maybe even NSW’s Jack Lang.
As virtual health dictator for the duration of the pandemic, Andrews turned Melbourne into the world’s most locked-down city. With curfews that we didn’t even have in wartime. With 5km travel limits inside “rings of steel”. With playgrounds closed. Loved ones dying alone and buried without family in attendance. With a pregnant woman arrested by riot police in her own home over a Facebook post. And with police using tear gas and rubber bullets against fellow citizens.
The Premier’s decision to reject help from the army and instead to put dodgy private security guards in charge of hotel quarantine was linked to the deaths of 801 people. There was an inquiry, costing $15m, including $8m on ministers’ legal fees, yet no one could remember who made that fateful decision; and somehow, that’s the end of it.
But that’s par for the course in Victoria where nothing is ever the government’s fault. When WorkSafe Victoria, headed up by a former Labor staffer, investigated the 801 deaths under the state’s powerful industrial manslaughter laws, it concluded that no one individual was to blame, just a faceless Victorian Health Department instead. The Lawyer X royal commission found a gross miscarriage of justice but no one in authority has been charged, let alone lost their job.
Only months ago, the anti-corruption watchdog, the Independent Broad-based Anti-corruption Commission, found that serious abuse of taxpayer funds was endemic in Victorian Labor, but likewise no one was personally to blame, certainly not the Premier, even though he’d run the party for the past dozen years. And the Premier himself has been questioned in four, maybe five, corruption inquiries, yet – unlike the questioning of his factional opponents on the ALP Right – it’s never been open to the media.
Even now, there’s a battle in the courts to stop the release of IBAC’s draft report, Operation Daintree, until after the election; as there has been to prevent the release of almost every critical report, including one from the ombudsman into the notorious “red shirts” affair. It’s a state where police can arrest Labor staffers for possible corruption but not their MP bosses, who suffer no consequences for refusing to co-operate with a police investigation even after the Premier said they would, and even after one of his former ministers said that Andrews was up to his neck in the rort. In what other universe could a citizen simply refuse to co-operate with a police investigation and the matter just goes away?
Only in Victoria, where Labor seems to have a special relationship with the police, with a former Andrews staffer now an assistant commissioner, could the future premier and his wife be involved in a serious car accident, almost killing a 15-year-old boy, yet no one be breath-tested? Or that Andrews could drive the car away from the crash site and it never be forensically examined. A decade on, the injured young man has never been interviewed by police. Any wonder he’s now got himself a lawyer and wants justice?
Only in Victoria could the Premier spend $1m from taxpayers to promote himself on social media and bypass, for the most part, journalists’ questions and scrutiny.
This is a Premier who was elected promising to fix the health system, yet it’s now catastrophic with a triple-0 call centre that doesn’t work as it should, and ambulances that arrive too late to save Victorians, if they arrive at all. A Premier who promised to create 4000 extra intensive care beds, never did, and then denied it was ever said. Yet somehow, he gets away with it.
A Premier who promised not to introduce heroin injecting rooms, yet did so; and has now reportedly asked a former police commissioner reporting on the introduction of more of them to revise his report – presumably because its lacks the “right” recommendations – and refuses to release any of it before the election.
“Whatever it takes” was the encapsulation of political ruthlessness associated with former Labor Right hard man Graham Richardson, but it’s the hard Left’s Andrews who has managed to create the Australian version of a “party state”, with the ALP, the bureaucracy, the police and perhaps even the judiciary all trying to conform their will to that of the leader.
Still, despite the commentariat’s confidence that Andrews is unassailable, with Labor’s primary vote, at least, falling sharply, my sense is that the Premier is the biggest drag on his government’s vote and the ground is shifting underneath him, fast. The margin is big but not impossible. So on Saturday week, we will discover just how accurate is the truism of politics that “oppositions don’t win elections, governments lose them”. Because if ever a government deserved to lose, it’s this one.
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The reason the Daniel Andrews government is a national story is because Victorian Labor has become the template for Labor governments everywhere. And the reason the imminent Victorian election matters to all of us is because the most inept and ethically challenged government this country has seen is seeking electoral vindication.