Dan Andrews left politics a year ago, leaving Jacinta Allan a mighty challenge to set Victoria straight

Labor is on the nose, the Liberals are still fighting each other – and don’t even talk about the debt.

Premier of Victoria Jacinta Allan in India. Picture: Supplied, ,

Anthony Koutoufides – the colossus of the Carlton Football Club – wouldn’t be everyone’s choice to rescue the city of Melbourne from its dystopian funk.

Twenty-five years ago, Koutoufides was carving up the AFL midfield in a manner that hadn’t really been seen before. At 191cm and built like the Statue of David, he was the beginning of a new era of athletes dominating the sport’s stoppages; he would later win Dancing with the Stars and take part in Gladiators. Politics anyone?

Anthony Koutoufides, a high-profile candidate in Melbourne’s looming lord mayoral elections next month. Picture: Jake Nowakowski

Somehow he has risen, his backers would argue, like an antipodean Arnold Schwarzenegger, to become a high-profile candidate to contest Melbourne’s looming lord mayoral elections next month.

Although he is kicking into a stiff political breeze as the preference trading discussions peak and he has to battle the Labor establishment-backed incumbent Nick Reece, and Reece’s nemesis, Arron Wood.

Where Koutoufides, 51, becomes interesting is his take and campaigning on the condition of Melbourne’s CBD, which is really the unofficial heartland of Victoria, a state that has never properly recovered from the pandemic lockdowns and their contribution to the ensuing financial mess.

Unlike Sydney, where the harbour draws the eye, Victorians and tourists look inward and inland to the CBD by the Yarra, and for years during Covid it perished, a sorry symbol of disenchantment which hasn’t fully lifted since 2021, even though recent pedestrian activity suggests July patronage was higher than in 2019.

Like so much of the way Victoria is viewed, perception is everything. Koutoufides wants workers back at their desks in the city to help fill the void and shift the image of a weekday, 9-5 city on snooze mode. He has pledged workers free coffee each week and to cut public transport costs on Fridays. “It’s certainly not back to the way it was,’’ he laments. “We just need people (to get) back into the city.”

The looming council elections coincide with next week’s first anniversary of Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan’s leadership.

Allan came to the job as one of the most experienced state ministers in Australia, starting in cabinet in 2002 aged in her 20s. She is seen as more consultative than her predecessor, Dan Andrews, with a less my-way-or-the-highway style, but has faced non-stop headwinds that have slashed Labor’s primary vote.

Her harshest critics see her as an Austin Powers-like Dan Mini-me but she has brought to the job a less combative, possibly even slightly folksy, regional persona.

Allan was definitely captive to the decision-making process of the Andrews era but is now strategically unwinding some of his agenda, if not his legacy. But she has baggage. Allan – more than anyone – helped to execute the much-debated Big Build agenda, was the Commonwealth Games minister and remains an effusive backer of the $34bn Suburban Rail Loop.

The SRL is a project that mystifies many, and is becoming as popular as a pager in Lebanon for anyone who lives outside its planned catchment area, which is a wide loop from southeastern Melbourne all around to Werribee if it ever gets built in full. It would be 60km long and be a fully automated orbital metro line. It would cost hundreds of billions of dollars (yes), although the first stage is ­predicted to be $34bn.

The Allan government is being smashed by the cost-of-living crisis, a largely federal issue tied to the Reserve Bank. But the state government’s fiscal neglect has placed long-term question marks over how infrastructure will be delivered after the current, achingly slow Big Build agenda washes through the system.

With Victoria marching towards net state debt of $190bn by mid-2028 compared with NSW’s $140bn, the major projects agenda is starting to mature but it’s broadly perceived as being hopelessly over budget and late.

The opening of the $14bn metro tunnel system next year will be a test of its political value, a multi-station underground affair that should transform city movement.

The consensus, borne out by the polls, is that Allan has assumed control of Victoria when the Labor wave has crested.

State Labor’s primary vote is crashing in the published polls to the point where Labor is heading towards possible minority government in 2026, or worse for the ALP, the mother of all voter backlashes and a stint on the opposition benches.

At the heart of the matter is that 51-year-old Allan has inherited a smashed budget and a tired political strategy she has largely adopted, other than a few tweaks here and there.

While the Big Build was embraced under Andrews, the cost-of-living crisis has made people question why the budget is red-­lining for a series of major projects that will have, for many, niche ­appeal.

The government is drowning in negative publicity around taxes, its renewable energy agenda, budget blowouts, major project delays, CFMEU corruption, ambulance chaos and, most crucially, perceptions that the health system has been falling apart.

Health was such a political liability for Labor that it recently poured in another $1.5bn, junking austerity measures.

Labor figures are privately deeply anxious about whether or not Allan can resurrect the politics, although the Coalition would need to win 17 seats to win in its own right, the Liberal Party has a PHD in self-harm and no one has been able to explain how Australia’s most socially progressive state will deliver enough right-wing preferences to get whoever is leading His Majesty’s opposition into power in late 2026.

Everywhere, Labor figures are questioning Allan’s capacity to save the government, the criticism being that there has been no line in the sand after Andrews’ departure.

“I would have dug the stick into the ground and dragged it through the dirt. Without doing that work, I think she’s going to struggle,’’ one Labor strategist said.

There is extreme pessimism about what can be done, with Allan refusing to dump the SRL and ­refusing to meaningfully put the brakes on spending.

Labor’s strategy is to pay back the more than $30bn of pandemic debt and let the economy grow to deal with the debt challenge over decades. The debt means that the state has few levers to deal with long-term necessities such as state-owned public housing.

More significantly, Allan has not reimagined the government. When Jeff Kennett whipped out the On the Move number plates marketing Victoria quite brilliantly in the 1990s, it captured the zeitgeist. Steve Bracks and John Brumby threw the brown cardigan over the marketing of Victoria, calling it the Education State, but it seemed to fit the times. International education is Victoria’s largest services export 

Dan Andrews, like a whirling dervish, was his own brand, an electoral phenomenon but divisive and a humungous spender. It seems that a good half of Victoria has dressed in Grampa Simpson clothes and is still waving their fists at the former premier, who engineered most of everything that is happening today.

So what does Allan do to right the ship?

Tim McColl Jones, the former Qantas marketing chief and renowned visitor economy strategist, says the first step is to acknowledge the challenges facing the state and to empathise with how people are feeling. It wouldn’t hurt, he said, for Labor to apologise for the personal dislocation of the pandemic years.

“Simply acknowledging that it has been tough would take the heat out,’’ he said.

McColl Jones says people are wanting to enjoy the city but have faced protracted congestion and delays with major projects without the benefits, which will become apparent only when the trains are running and cars are able to move more freely through Melbourne.

“It still feels like we are light years away from feeling any benefit,’’ he said.

Victorian Chamber of Commerce and Industry chief executive Paul Guerra has one of the more difficult jobs in the state, having to advocate for business but retain open lines of communication with the government.

Guerra says Allan has had an enormous run of tough issues to deal with starting with the Palestinian fallout after October 7, floods, power outages, nurse, police and ambulance pay disputes and another tough budget.

“She’s had a lot to deal with in her first 12 months,’’ he said.

Allan has continued to engage with business but Guerra says that there is a desire for a strong narrative of where Victoria will go under her government, both in words and actions.

He applauded Allan’s decision to go to India on her first overseas trip this week given the vastness of the economy and the growing ties with local communities. The trip also enabled Allan to draw a sharp distinction between herself and Opposition Leader John Pesutto, who spent the week in court facing defamation action from one of his former MPs, Moira Deeming.

As far as soap operas go, it’s a ripper. Secret tapes, text messages, emails and an airing of the Coalition dirty laundry just when the Liberals are claiming they have their RM Williams boots on Labor’s throat.

Former Liberal Party member Moira Deeming. Picture: NewsWire/ David Crosling

All things considered, the Liberal Party has done more than any other entity to enable the Labor dominance in Victoria. Serially divided, with a campaign machine that has struggled to fire on more than a couple of cylinders, its demise, while sharper than most expected, has been ­predictable.

How the Deeming story feeds into the Liberal Party’s future is more straightforward than you might imagine. If Pesutto wins the case, then he can possibly – and only possibly – survive the partyroom angst over the coming weeks and months – ­although it will reinforce community perceptions of a party that has been more interested fighting itself than winning the upper hand politically.

If he loses the case, then he will lose the leadership and the party will have to find someone else, which is not an easy task.

If it pulls the wrong rein on this selection, then the opposition ­likely will hand Labor another term in office.

Neither Pesutto nor Deeming will come out unharmed by the court showdown. In my view, there has been very shallow analysis of both parties to the case, with Pesutto – at least until this month – a perfectly viable leadership candidate and future premier.

But for atmospherics, I can’t help but feel sorry for Deeming, notwithstanding the deficiencies in some of her arguments.

It’s just a poor look for the party to be going to town on itself, particularly lining up against a photogenic woman (yes, it matters) who was in urgent need of help when she first entered the parliament.

The main take-out for me is the sight of Deeming on TV, looking increasingly glum, while Pesutto walks hand in hand into court with his wife, Betty.

John Pesutto arrives at the Federal Court of Victoria with his wife Betty. Picture: NewsWire/ David Crosling

How the hell did it get to this?

Meanwhile, Jacinta Allan has a smashed budget, is at war with the unions, is fighting with Canberra on tertiary education, is trying to reset on health, and Dan Andrews is forever in the news.

The Liberal narrative is that the party has the next election in the bag. Don’t be so sure. Unless it finds a way to get on with itself and focus mercilessly on the government, it looks to me like an entity that wants to lose another election.

I tried desperately to contact a Liberal frontbencher this week to discuss what is an urgent policy issue but got crickets. Chirp, chirp.

No doubt, too busy watching the Deeming-Pesutto show.

This is why Labor is so arrogant in Victoria, and why it is lording over a state that desperately needs a collective dose of antidepressants to deal with the carnage that started in the pandemic in 2020 and is yet to end.

Jacinta is struggling. Dan was divisive. But Labor is not terminal. Yet.