Victorians hostage to Daniel Andrews’ politics of fear

Illustration: Johannes Leak

The only thing more concerning than the reign of Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews is the possibility that many Victorians no longer recognise what is within the normal range of leadership.

It won’t help that Andrews has been nominated for a leadership award by a group presumably seeking attention. That demented decision is an insult to the wellbeing of Victorians.

Maybe some sharp observations from left-wing journalist John Pilger will help more Victorians see what people outside the state can identify: they are being manipulated by a man who no longer deserves to lead a party, let alone a state.

“... Covid scaremongering allows Dan Andrews, the verbose politician who runs the state of Victoria, to lock down millions and demand ridiculous wartime powers,” Pilger tweeted. “This is how autocracies are made.”

Lucky Australia has no pandemic. This doesn't deter the provincial tinpots who run the states. Media-addicted windbag Dan Andrews, whose govt in Victoria slashed public health, has locked down Melbourne yet again. Tennis players in the Aust Open are exempt as 'essential workers'.

— John Pilger (@johnpilger) February 12, 2021

“Australia has almost no community transmission or none,” says Prof. Peter Collignon. But Covid scaremongering allows Dan Andrews, the verbose politician who runs the state of Victoria, to lock down millions and demand ridiculous wartime powers. This is how autocracies are made.

— John Pilger (@johnpilger) February 13, 2021

While political opponents will enjoy Pilger’s description of Andrews as a “provincial tin pot”, a bigger issue needs to be laid out in plain sight. Andrews has become the premier purveyor of fear in Australia. While other premiers have tried to mimic him, in particular Steven Marshall in South Australia, Mark McGowan in Western Australia and Annastacia Palaszczuk in Queensland, they are the B-grade pantywaists of Australian politics who lack confidence in their ability to manage risk sensibly.

Andrews also is incapable of managing risk sensibly. But he is different from his peers, too. To use one of his phrases, the Victorian Premier has set the gold standard in the politics of fear.

Using his excessively loquacious press conferences, Andrews has conditioned a large enough part of the Victorian electorate to be so fearful of COVID-19 that they seem grateful for his extreme measures, despite evidence that his incom­petence caused outbreaks and led to more than 800 unnecessary deaths. Each time the Andrews government is exposed as being responsible for hotel quarantine breaches, substandard contact tracing, obfuscating the truth and blame shifting, Andrews manages to convince Victorians that only he can lead the state out of this debacle. This peculiar form of political grooming is a textbook case of how to use the politics of fear to hide manifest incompetence during a crisis.

It relies on five key ingredients: unswerving arrogance, instilling fear, authoritarian and frequent restrictions to cover up mistakes, determined obfuscation, and co-opting people to support the indefensible by constantly praising them even while causing them unnecessary damage.

The Victorian Premier’s arrogance is not the run-of-the-mill variety common in politics. Consider his extraordinary boast on February 9 that his hotel quarantine system was “leading” the rest of the country.

It was, said Andrews, the “gold standard” of safety. Forty-eight hours later, that boast morphed into what this newspaper dubbed the “gold standard lockdown” of 6.3 million Victorians as a tool to deal with more breaches of hotel quarantine under his watch.

Behind the dark humour is a darker story of how a purveyor of fear uses political language to cloak incompetence. While Machiavelli advised rulers to govern by being feared, not loved, that won’t wash in a democracy. Instead, Andrews has cleverly inculcated in the community a sense that they might be responsible for killing people by spreading the virus by, for example, playing a round of golf, when in fact mismanagement by his government has been largely responsible for virus outbreaks and the highest death toll in the country.

Unlike any other leader, by conditioning the community with fear, Andrews has been able to use disproportionate lockdowns, lunatic night-time curfews and heavy-handed policing to fix his own mistakes.

Last Friday when Andrews plunged the entire state into another disproportionate lockdown, he finessed his politics of fear. The new COVID-19 strain travelled at “light speed”, he said. It was “moving at a velocity that has not been seen anywhere in our country over the course of these last 12 months”, he said. It was “something very different” to what the country dealt with last year, he said. In other words, be afraid, cower inside your home, blame a man with a nebuliser, punish Australians trying to get home from overseas, while Andrews scurries to fix his government’s repeated mismanagement.

The politics of fear makes no room for facts that allay fears. While someone infected with the original Wuhan strain is likely to pass the virus to 11 per cent of their close contacts, a person with the UK variant will pass the virus on to 14.7 per cent of their close contacts, according to Public Health England. And as health editor Natasha Robinson explained in this newspaper, Victoria’s small case numbers should have been managed by testing, rigorous contact tracing and, at worst, localised proportionate suppression strategies such as those in NSW.

Another side to Andrews’ creepy style of political grooming is his fondness for telling Victorians how proud he is of them, over and over and over again. More than any other premier, Andrews assumes the role of carer-in-chief even when it is clear that his disproportionate lockdowns will cause untold damage to businesses, to people’s physical and mental wellbeing, and worst of all, to children. On that score, one day in the future when the impact of frequent snap lockdowns on vulnerable children and teenagers is studied, will Victorian health bureaucrats feel proud of their advice during COVID?

Taking responsibility is a sign of humility. When a chief executive makes a big mistake, and even a small one, they are routinely hounded from office within a few weeks. A footy chief can be removed with enough scorching publicity. As former Victorian premier Jeff Kennett remarked a few days ago, NSW premier Barry O’Farrell resigned after forgetting to declare a bottle of Grange.

Why then is Andrews still standing? The Victorian media is partly to blame, only recently scathing about the sheer incompetence and obfuscation of Andrews and his government. The ALP in Victoria has been a toothless, useless party, too frightened to remove a leader responsible for untold damage to their state. The Liberal opposition has been ineffective and Scott Morrison has been intimidated into acquiescence with Andrews.

These elements, together with the Victorian Premier’s knack for the politics of fear, raise the prospect of a deeper tragedy: Victorians may lose sight of what to expect from a decent leader.