While Daniel Andrews was rooting out sexism in fairy tales, Victoria’s health team was overlooked
The staggering consequences of the broad-ranging incompetence of the Daniel Andrews government in Victoria demonstrate the hollowness of progressive ideology as the guiding light of government and the false promise of its seductive sentimentalisms and its fraudulent moral earnestness.
The Victorian government’s failures are having grave health, economic and even geo-strategic consequences for the whole of Australia, yet it is led by a politician of singular gifts, highly intelligent, well motivated, extremely capable, especially as a communicator. How can this be so?
The resolution of this paradox goes to the heart of the crisis across much of Western politics. No government in Australia is more dedicatedly progressive than the Andrews government. It is woke in every way, but the woke is broke.
Progressive ideology is proving disastrous for Western governments. Progressive politics is focused on identity politics and performative symbolism, on woke gestures. This proceeds from its underlying analysis that society’s problems are caused by structural racism, sexism, heteronormativity, gender stereotypes, global warming capitalism, worker exploitation, old power structures, old forms of learning and knowing.
Progressive politics demands from its leaders and citizenry a continuous performance of doctrinally orthodox gestures, apologies and credal recitals. Because the policy response is mainly gesture, the proof of good policy is the gesture’s emotional intensity and the status of officials making the gesture. Leadership, in this environment, is about smooth rendition of ideological mantras.
Progressive ideology is intrinsically secretive and intolerant. The only measure for evaluation is the amount of resources devoted to the gesture — how many schools are forced to endure the Safe Schools program etc.
Therefore any normal critical scrutiny is seen as a kind of anti-gesture reactionary manoeuvre to be resisted. Progressives claim to follow the evidence or follow the science, but mostly they’re following the ideology, which is why any suggestion that their gestures are damaging is regarded as wilful sabotage of good policy.
Apart from the fact most of these gestures are ridiculous, they distract from doing mundane things such as making trains run, much less run on time. Thus only in Victoria, as one wag put it, could you get a quarantine hotel security guard who receives detailed training in diversity issues but no training at all on how to use his personal protective equipment.
As my colleague Rachel Baxendale reported early in this saga, at the start of the pandemic Victoria’s public health team consisted of 57 people while Andrews’s private office had 64 people. As The Age first devastatingly reported, as early as May last year the Andrews government was warned that its public health team was grievously under-resourced.
This is where progressive ideology has been so destructive in Western politics. A traditional social democratic government would prioritise its public health capabilities. Victoria is the most left-wing state. The government public health team is surely core business for a centre-left government. But NSW, ruled by the reactionary Liberals, had more than twice the resources devoted to public health that Victoria had. Every other state had greater per capita resources devoted to their public health teams than Victoria.
While the Andrews government has been busy rooting out sexism in fairytales — I kid you not, there was a government initiative over this — trivial things such as the public health team were nowhere.
Peter Varghese, former head of the Office of National Assessments and one of Australia’s most acute policy thinkers, told me in a recent interview that the two most important factors in determining a jurisdiction’s success in dealing with COVID-19 were the quality of the public health system and state capacity generally. Progressive ideology puts a premium on building ideological power through the relentless appointment of politically sympathetic fellow tribe members across all possible institutions, but it pays little attention to getting institutions to do their traditional jobs.
The four key means for fighting the pandemic without vaccines are borders, testing, tracing and isolation. The biggest decisions on borders were taken by the Morrison government. The one bit of borders policy the Andrews government had responsibility for was quarantine hotels. And, as everyone knows, it made the most spectacular possible mess of that.
In any normal circumstances a premier responsible for such a disaster should resign. But that would be bad for Victoria, in part because the quality of the state cabinet is very poor and any replacement would be even less effective. Moreover, it is a paradox of progressive politics that it deifies the government leader. Andrews has responded to the crisis in part through his Fidel Castro-length daily press conferences. In some ways they are admirable. But it is anti-democratic and unhealthy that he is apparently the only person from his government capable of fronting these. No deputy premier, health minister, treasurer etc is considered adequately skilled to take the load even for a single day.
The daily press conferences have been the way progressive politicians have fought back politically against the virus. These press conferences have real and important functions in disseminating key health information. But they also allow leaders whose actual performance in policy delivery is terrible to engage in the one thing they do really well — the performative side of the delivery of public concern and authorised virtue.
As well as failing on the first of the four defences, borders, the Andrews government also failed dismally on the third, contact tracing. So now it is left entirely with the fourth — isolation. And it is imposing the most severe and prolonged isolation imaginable.
Given the level of the outbreaks some kind of lockdown was certainly necessary. I have no serious complaint with the present settings. But the future roadmap is bizarre. The idea that society cannot get back to post lockdown until we have five or fewer infections a day, plus only five infections in total of unknown origin across 14 days, is one of the most severe proposed regimes in the world. The Andrews government has so prodigiously failed at all sophisticated aspects of policy that its only real response is to practice a medieval quarantine on the scale of the Black Death.
And worst of all, it consistently refuses to release information that would enable independent epidemiologists and others, indeed even humble normal citizens, to evaluate its policies properly and maybe even to make some helpful suggestions. All the while it tells us that this or that thing it is doing is “world class”.
When a progressive leader tells you his performance is world class, run and hide.
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