Andrews agenda keeps Libs out in the cold in Victoria
As he enters his 10th year as Victorian Labor leader, Daniel Andrews has overseen one of the great political transformations.
It is the great cultural divide of Australian politics. The gulf between Victorian progressivism and Queensland conservatism, a strategic political conundrum that tripped Bill Shorten and has deeply troubled the past three Liberal prime ministers.
READ MORE: Religious freedom may help gay conversion: Daniel Andrews
The question of how to navigate the politics of a Labor-dominated, city-centric Victorian community whose economy is built on education, food, tourism and high-end manufacturing, and at the same time catering for mainstream conservatism in states such as Queensland.
Scott Morrison has Queensland covered but is no fan of social policy velvet revolutions.
While there is no suggestion the Prime Minister is about to jump into bed politically with Dan Andrews there are clear signs he has decided there is no point being wedged by a Victorian Labor Premier seen to get things done.
In return, Andrews and Morrison, both facing their own significant economic headwinds, have formed an unlikely political connection built on respect and mutual interest.
Similar, perhaps, to Paul Keating and Jeff Kennett in the 1990s.
“I think he’s a good bloke,’’ the Victorian Premier says of Morrison during an interview with The Weekend Australian to mark the fifth anniversary of the Andrews government next Friday.
“I can have a chat with him, I can talk with him, be frank. People want us to work together.’’
In many ways, Andrews has been a hidden story in national politics, as voters cast their tired eyes towards the Canberra circus that has delivered five prime ministers since Kevin Rudd’s troubled ascension.
While Andrews soon enters his 10th year as Victorian Labor leader, he has overseen one of the great political transformations in something of a crash-or-crash-through social reform and infrastructure agenda that on some measures dwarfs the benchmark Kennett government.
He has emerged, at 47, as Labor’s most influential governing politician in the country.
The voters know Andrews, being the only state or federal leader elected by Victorians since 2007 who has served a full term.
The extent of the social policy reform, not all of it popular or seamlessly executed, is as radical as anything seen in an Australian state since Don Dunstan ruled South Australia in the late 1960s and 70s.
This is not Morrison’s political territory and he will be quietly happy that Andrews has staked it out, given the latter is the most left-wing Victorian premier of the modern era.
At the same time, Andrews has delivered an infrastructure agenda that has been unmatched for decades, vastly overshadowing in numerical terms the Kennett government.
The numbers are stark but must be read in the context of the different budget landscapes of the time. Adjusted for inflation, Andrews has already announced nearly $90bn worth of new capital works projects, compared with Kennett’s $19bn.
Evidence of the building boom is everywhere; at 6.30am most weekdays the city’s trains are jammed with thousands of high-vis-vest-clad workers swarming into the Victorian capital, lunch boxes in their hands. The city skyline is dancing with cranes.
Yet it is the almost messianic zeal Andrews has adopted on social policy that has captivated the political and chattering classes, seen, as it was initially, as a foil for the growing threat of the Greens.
This supercharged progressivism is also influencing governments around Australia on seminal issues such as how to die and how to recognise First Australians.
The Andrews era social policy reform is exhaustive and includes voluntary euthanasia, treaty, a ban on gay conversion therapy, medicinal cannabis, an inner-city safe-injection drug facility, a dramatic and ongoing attempt to address gender imbalances in the judiciary and on boards, a ban on plastic bags, a mental health royal commission, growing financial support for the LGBTI community and aggressive support for the Safe Schools anti-bullying campaign.
Andrews was reared a Catholic, but no modern leader in Australia has been more politically antagonistic to a church hierarchy crippled by the sex abuse scandal, coming after Labor took abortion out of the Crimes Act in 2008.
Andrews’s policy zeal is not without its critics — external and internal — with euthanasia one of the most significant social reforms, changing forever the way end of life is treated in Victoria and now probably other states.
His progressive agenda has been delivered in a party that organisationally is dominated by the Right, but within cabinet the Left is seen to be large and in charge, save for Treasurer Tim Pallas, who is grappling with a deteriorating budget and looming major project costs blowouts.
The Andrews social agenda has been unfurled in the shadow of a state-fuelled infrastructure boom that has included a new $11bn city underground train system, a nearly $10bn level crossing removal project and plans for a cross-city underground rail loop that could cost as much as $100bn.
“On the social side of things, I think there are some things that are wrong and they need to be righted and we need to lead the nation,’’ Andrews explains.
“That’s when Victoria is at its best.’’
So is Victoria as relentlessly “woke” as some of its interstate critics would suggest?
While conservative MPs — federal and state — have attempted at times to create a simple narrative in Victoria on issues such as African street crime, the sound bites don’t always work.
As Liberal Party elder Tony Nutt noted in this week’s review of last year’s disastrous state election result, voters are looking for outcomes and not political slogans.
While there was (and still is in parts) an issue with ethnic gang crime, the panicked Liberal narrative didn’t match the lived experience of voters.
Nutt wrote: “The focus on African gangs became a distraction for some key voters who saw it as a political tactic rather than an authentic problem to be solved by initiatives that would help make their neighbourhoods safer.’’
Victorian progressivism is not easily defined. It is built on scores of different factors that stretch back to the Eureka Stockade rebellion and the continued numerical dominance, in a national context, of the labour movement.
The state’s land mass is uniquely small among the mainland states (3 per cent), there are no current day, large-scale mining resources to focus on and even the regional populations are heavily concentrated in fewer than a dozen small or middle-sized cities.
International education, Australia’s third biggest export industry, dominates Melbourne’s central business district in a way that hasn’t happened anywhere else in the country, due in part to the proximity of two major universities and satellite campuses of other institutions. International education has been Victoria’s largest services export industry for more than a decade, generating nearly $12bn in income last year.
The influence of Victorian rural voters has diminished since the 1950s wool boom because of the drift to larger towns and cities, and the Melbourne property price surge has driven mostly left-leaning working-class voters out of the inner suburbs, creating a twin effect: first, bolstering the progressive vote in the inner city, but at the same time sharply shifting demographics in once safe inner Liberal seats such as Higgins.
Morrison may become an effective campaigning no-go in Higgins because of his position on key issues.
Then there are the cultural factors that feed into the progressive perception, including the thriving CBD bar, food, art and literature culture that is fuelled at least in part by a four-seasons-in-one-day climate more suited to indoor activities for large parts of the year.
Trades Hall Council secretary Luke Hilakari has been a driving force behind Labor’s ground campaign in Victoria, which has been hugely successful for Andrews.
Like others, he compares Melbourne with Boston and New York and Queensland with the US south, reinforcing how he lives in the only state where union membership is on the rise.
“The Liberals are not a movement,’’ he says. “We’ve got the people to talk to people to change votes.’’
The Liberal Party performed admirably under Morrison in Victoria in May, having stared at potential oblivion in the wake of Malcolm Turnbull’s removal. Turnbull’s politics worked in key parts of inner-city Melbourne where Morrison’s didn’t.
Morrison, however, worked in key middle-ring and outer-suburban Melbourne seats where Turnbull didn’t, reinforcing the complexities of the electoral landscape. It is false to suggest the state is uniformly progressive.
Rather, there is a mix of ideological creeds and voter patterns based often on personal financial circumstances, education and culture.
Then acting Victorian Liberal state director Simon Frost faced a herculean task helping the federal party pull together a campaign where it managed a net loss of just two seats, having feared the losses would have been much higher after the leadership turmoil.
Yet this still has the federal Liberals with just 12 seats in Victoria out of 38, with three Nationals.
You have to go back to 1996, John Howard’s first election win, for the Liberals to have a majority of federal seats in Victoria.
Indeed, it is decades since the Liberal Party could genuinely lay claim to Victoria being the jewel in its crown.
In a state sense, the dynamic is parlous, having been in office just four years of the past 20.
Jeff Kennett had a highly effective but tumultuous seven years in power.
Since 1982, the Liberal Party has held office in Spring Street for only 11 years, its power and authority diminished by fighting over the spoils of opposition.
The Andrews government holds 55 seats in the 88-seat parliament but few Liberals hold realistic hopes of winning the 2022 election. Labor, many contend, has cornered the market.
But for a blip in 2010 that ended the Bracks-Brumby era, Labor’s Victorian head office has forgotten how to lose when running state campaigns.
Underpinning the challenges for conservatism, Josh Frydenberg will tell the Victorian Liberal State Council on Saturday that the party needs to develop a ground campaign in Melbourne’s growth areas to bolster the party’s performance at this year’s federal election.
“Now we need to build on that result and develop a winning strategy going forward that is implemented over multiple election cycles,’’ the federal Treasurer will argue.
“It must involve effective grassroots campaigns in the growth corridors in the north and west, and winning seats where we had big swings at the last election but which were off a relatively low base. It will take time but the gains are there to be made.’’
At the same time, Labor strategists are conscious that Andrews’s progressive push doesn’t work in every electorate. While they believe the Andrews government has cornered the blue-collar tradie market, they do not believe the progressive agenda works for this cohort, or is even of much interest.
“Jobs work, the social stuff isn’t a core concern for a lot of people,’’ an MP said.
Labor believes a secret to its long-term success is cornering a significant slice of the working-class ethnic vote.
Where there were swings against Labor in last year’s state election, they occurred in areas such as Melton, in Melbourne’s outer northwest, where commuters struggle with the pain of traffic congestion amid the city’s super-sized population. Melbourne is on track to be Australia’s biggest city in the next decade.
While it is an easy bet to say progressivism is an interest focused on the inner city, state Labor believes it also has benefited significantly from demographic changes forced by the housing price boom, which has sent many traditional voters into areas such as the so-called sandbelt suburbs, southeast of the city, around Port Phillip Bay. These have included many teachers, nurses and clerical workers, whom Labor campaigners have targeted in recent years.
Meanwhile, Labor is courting the younger professional progressive classes, which are almost always university-educated, often socially minded but also being pushed into middle-ring seats where sub-$1m houses can be found.
“In many ways, these are Dan’s people, they are onside with everything he does,’’ a Labor figure says.
“The tradie class is a different question. They give the Premier a leave pass so long as they are sitting on a job.’’
The Victorian Liberal talent pool is unambiguously skewed towards Canberra, the brightest political talent pointing their ambitions north up the Hume Freeway. The Victorian federal Coalition MPs are understandably bullish about their careers, given the May election result.
One senior Liberal says, however, that there is a sense of despair about the state of the Victorian party, even though it has banked more than $30m from the sale of the former 104 Exhibition Street headquarters and, ostensibly, it has the $70m Cormack Foundation cash. He says that because of the starkly different political territory in Melbourne, Morrison campaigned well in seats such as La Trobe and Deakin but fell flat in “woke inner seats’’.
“It’s just something we have to live with,’’ he says.
Underpinning the Liberal challenges in inner Melbourne, the once heartland seat of Higgins is looking dire, its margin whittled down to just 3.8 per cent amid a progressive influx that often barracks for climate change action, rejects the Coalition boatpeople narrative and was strongly for gay marriage.
Despite the Andrews government dominating the landscape in Victoria and helping hold up Labor federally, it still faces the inevitable political challenges.
While Andrews today is a highly confident, can-do Premier, there has always been the sense around him of being one step from a career-defining setback.
Perhaps in part that is because of his willingness to take big risks, a character trait that he shares with Kennett.
Andrews draws advice from people as diverse as trucking magnate Lindsay Fox and veteran developer Max Beck, and he is close to several key left-wing cabinet colleagues including Gavin Jennings and Jill Hennessy.
However, he also listens closely, in a Howard-like manner, to his wife, Catherine, and, to an extent, his three children, aged 12 to 17.
And the advice?
“Get on with it, basically. Get on with it.’’
This get-on-with-it agenda has worked so far but there also are real signs that the budget is stressed, providing significant opportunities for state Liberal leader Michael O’Brien.
The government announced last week that the September quarter accounts had shown an $800m deficit but Andrews is confident the mid-year budget update due early next month will still forecast a surplus for 2019-20.
There have been rumours for months that the budget is shot after $5.2bn worth of stamp duty writedowns in May and a seemingly cavalier binge on staff.
The Auditor-General also found the public sector workforce jumped from 217,000 in June 2014 to 263,000 in June this year, up 21.2 per cent, lifting the wages bill from $19bn in 2013-14 to $26.6bn.
“There was a real sense of crisis around the budget when it was being pulled together,’’ one minister tells The Weekend Australian.
Pallas has privately lamented the size of the property revenue writedowns and has been stridently working to cut spending but the government believes there has been a recent stabilisation of the housing market in terms of volume and value.
Andrews has talked to Morrison about the need for stimulus and to a certain extent the Prime Minister seems to have listened.
“I think the key point here is, given how strong the Victorian economy is, it’s absolutely in the federal government’s interests, and particularly the federal Treasurer’s interests, to have a strong working relationship with the fastest-growing and I think best-performing economy in the nation,’’ he says.
For the five years in office, Andrews has found his government grappling with a series of parochial crises that have cost him ministers, a total restructuring of the fire services, the exposure of Labor rorting of electoral allowances for campaigning and even a minister using his limousine to ferry his dog across the state.
So far, none of that has resonated at the ballot box.
It is inevitable after nearly a decade in the Labor leadership that his colleagues are speculating about his future.
So will the man who more than anyone has defined Victoria as the capital of progressive politics in Australia seek to reinforce that legacy by contesting the next election? “Absolutely. I indicated that I would serve a full term. It’s not an easy job but I kind of had a sense of that before I got,’’ he says.
Equally, it’s easy to get a sense that if, for whatever reason, Andrews were to leave the job, it wouldn’t be a devastating personal moment.
“If you have an opportunity to govern with a pretty strong majority, then you have to go hard and that’s exactly what we’ve done, so that was from day one,’’ he adds.
“And, indeed, before we won it didn’t come as a great surprise to the senior people in the cabinet that we weren’t going to die wondering.’’
Dan Andrews. Go hard. Or go home.
To join the conversation, please log in. Don't have an account? Register
Join the conversation, you are commenting as Logout