Victoria? I’ve done my time, warden

Daniel Andrews speaks to the media during a press conference in 2020.

Like the late, great Barry Humphries, I have always been a Victorian nationalist. I was born in Victoria, like my father, grandfather and great-grandfather before me.

My great-great-grandfather had the civilised good taste to get off the boat from Galway into Victoria. I was brought up in Glen Waverley, finished school in Toorak and went to university in Parkville. Look upon my pedigree, O ye mighty, and despair.

I was inducted into the faith early. My father took us children to the Separation Tree in the Royal Botanical Gardens, where the proclamation sundering Victoria from NSW was read. He told us this was the golden moment in the whole of human history, when we Victorians were freed from the slithering yoke of Sydney.

I was an early, eccentric opponent of Australia Day being marked on January 26 because, as marking the foundation of NSW, it should be a universal day of mourning.

My patriotism has survived 12 years in sun-stroked Perth and 14 years in thong-shod Sydney. I have never been tempted to abandon Victoria, and especially Melbourne: the Athens of the Australian Federation. Until now.

Watching from the ancient fastness of the Rum Corps in Sydney, I am not as sure of Victoria as I once was. It seems to have developed a nasty soul.

I first put my finger on it during Covid, when Victoria became a semi-voluntary virus gulag. It was not the incarceration of the entire population that got to me. It was the condescending, self-righteous oratory of the political and bureaucratic prison guards. Anyone even questioning universal incarceration was vilified into silence.

Don’t get me wrong. Argument has always been the best thing about Victoria. Acquiescence is not our zeitgeist. The old joke was that if two people saw a cloud in Melbourne they would argue whether it was smoke or weather. In Sydney, they would both agree it was time to go to the beach early.

Barry Humphries in Melbourne, 2000.

Argument made Victoria great. We were the well-manured hotbed of ideas in Australia precisely because we disagreed over culture, politics, sport and gardening. Debate was in our higher nature, or so we thought.

But Covid was unnerving. There was to be only one side to this argument. We should all be locked up for our own mortification. Any dissent would be punished with an awful viral death or, better still, social annihilation.

The most bizarre instance of this suicide of diversity was the “I stand with Dan movement”. As the leftist chief warden of Victoria, Premier Daniel Andrews was beyond criticism.

It got to the stage when the ABC’s Virginia Trioli could seriously ask then opposition leader Michael O’Brien why he would not congratulate the Premier. Disgrace. Shame. Resign.

Admittedly, this idealistic conformity has been emerging from the mere mirk of democracy for some time. Victoria has flaunted a certain self-satisfied, disdainful progressivism for decades.

At 65, I still marvel that Victoria was ever referred to as “the jewel in the Liberal crown”. During the Kennett government, in 1992, I asked one of his chief advisers. “Mate”, he said, “this place went left years ago.”

So Covid adulation for an authoritarian progressive government was merely a super-spreader event in an established disease. Victoria has long been attracted to politically correct mass suicide. Like soft-socialist lemmings. An outstanding instance was the Cain-Kirner Labor government, from 1983 to 1992. That government bankrupted Victoria and made mincemeat of its labour market.

Virginia Trioli at Melbourne Town Hall

The collapse of the Victorian Economic Development Corporation and the Pyramid Building Society gutted industry confidence and citizens savings.

But even as the government sank with all hands, Victorians watched with a pale wistfulness. They tolerated Jeff Kennett while he resuscitated the economy, but voted him out as soon as his mission was accomplished. All sins of Labor were forgiven, and normal progressive transmission resumed. Conservatism was just non-U.

It was all so prophetic of the Andrews government. Despite a crazed Covid response that included curfews, Victorians are happy. Constant allegations of corruption and mismanagement do not faze them. Even the cancellation of cynically promised Commonwealth Games draws only a polite yawn. Andrews is re-elected with the certainty of a Romanian communist government.

Cardinal George Pell was undermined by a hostile Victorian government. Picture: AFP.

Now, the ultimate economic collapse of Victoria into a wallow of debt and business collapse is as predictable as a boring broadcast by Phillip Adams. Victorians presumably know this, but apparently do not care. The wages of self-conscious progressivism are eternal self-righteousness.

There are other, deeply troubling examples. One is the persecution of Cardinal George Pell. He was a friend of mine, but I write this as a constitutional, legal and government observer.

On the way to, and after, a ludicrously unjust conviction, Pell was constantly undermined by a hostile Victorian government and a partisan Victorian Police, then crushed by an inept Victorian judiciary. It took the Canberra-based High Court to unanimously crush the manifestly unjust conviction.

Jeff Kennett in 1996

The remarkable thing is that a large number of Victorians continue to regard him as guilty, more or less overtly on the basis that he was a “polarising” or “reactionary” figure. His real crime was his clash with Victorian sociopolitical wallpaper.

Frighteningly, many in the Victorian legal profession – long a bastion of the state’s papier mâché progressivism – agree. The common argument is that the Catholic Church did terrible things, Pell was at the top of the church, so it is better that one man should suffer for the people. You can only hope none of these legal quislings becomes a judge, either in a court or at a poultry show.

I hate admitting these things about my state, but this confession was prompted by an appalling realisation. I admitted to myself that, at least during Covid, I was much happier to be in NSW than Victoria.

There are many things I still love about my home state. I actually like cold weather. I rejoice in a culture that places gardening above merchant banking. I adore the Carlton Football Club, Daylesford and Flinders Street station. But its political psychology frightens me. I can recognise malignant narcissism when I see it.

Emeritus Professor Greg Craven is a constitutional lawyer.