Surviving the Dandemic: bungling Andrews may yet keep his job

Senior Liberals are worried that Daniel Andrews can now fight his way out of the virus mess his government created.

Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews gives his daily update on the COVID pandemic, known as The Daily Dan. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Andrew Henshaw

For the first time since the second wave really took hold, senior Liberals are becoming anxious that Daniel Andrews can now fight his way out of the coronavirus mess his government has created.

It seems implausible on a lot of levels, but the health messaging has worked for Andrews in ways that nothing much else would.

Andrews is being carried along by the strong backing of middle-aged and older women who have invested heavily, politically and emotionally, in a safe outcome for the community. They got that this week when the coronavirus was effectively contained.

This real support for Andrews from older women is being bolstered by the barracking from the unions, the Labor Party and, to a lesser extent, the public service, including academia.

There are a lot of variables in this Liberal thinking, but the relentless health messaging in the Daily Dan press conferences has given the Victorian Premier the best chance possible of hanging on over time.

It’s an incredible irony. Take away the health response that his government initially bungled, and the Premier’s political attractiveness falls away dramatically.

Andrews’ susceptibility is not in a relentless personal attack against him but in how that attack is framed.

Liberal Party insiders say shouting at Andrews is not working, but what potentially shifts sentiment is political attacks based on evidence. That is, he can’t be smashed on rhetoric or stunts but he can be undermined by criticism that centres on, for ­example, weaknesses in contact tracing or concerns about puncturing the communication walls that are surrounding multicultural communities.

Attacking Andrews for eating doughnuts or having a stiff drink after Victoria breaks the coronavirus’s back is viewed as being cheap, irrelevant and counter-productive, even if the government’s rollercoaster handling of the pandemic has been incredibly frustrating for millions of people.

Seen through the prism of the health response only (forget the politics), Victoria finishes the week in a remarkable position, one of the strongest in the world.

Melbourne has won ugly. Every day that Europe falls further into the COVID-19 hole speaks volumes about why Victoria needed to contain the spread.

And let’s remember the state went into these restrictions with the backing of the Morrison government, although that position was nuanced.

None of this is an endorsement of everything Andrews did or stood for. Far from it. But it is to say that, finally, Melbourne is on the cusp of breaking free of the virus and switched-on Liberals are wondering whether Andrews will use the looming budget as the ­vehicle to widen this message. This will certainly be his ambition.

Victoria’s Chief Health Officer, Brett Sutton, was as strong on Friday as he possibly could be on the notion of whether or not a third wave is likely. It isn’t, he said.

Sutton, whose challenges now are legal and political, has also raised the spectre of the virus being eliminated, something that seems pretty unlikely based on the NSW experience.

It will be harder than it looks for authorities, business owners and the community to keep a lid on the younger cohort, who are already gathering in large enough numbers, drinking in the open and leaving their masks behind.

The old die from the virus but the young spread it in disproportionately large numbers.

The savagery of social media and partisan politics has, on a superficial level, made it difficult to read the community reaction.

Labor and the unions have been the cheer squad that has bolstered Andrews, but much of the barracking is meaningless. The Daily Dan press conferences have been particularly ugly for journalism and the Victorian Coalition.

This is because Andrews, for 120 tortuous days, turned the public against political scrutiny by marketing himself through the health response. Fundamentally, if people were watching the Daily Dan, they were only ever interested in wanting to know how the virus was being dealt with, and most other things were pretty ­irrelevant to their thinking.

This deliberately fashioned a toxic environment for anyone who wanted to reasonably scrutinise the politics or even policy, creating a significant perception that it was either all the way with Labor, or you were on the side of the bad guys.

In normal times this would not have worked, particularly given how hopeless the government’s implementation of hotel quarantine was. Andrews’ messaging also has been strategic, billing the pandemic response as a collective imperative, a joint responsibility. This has had the effect of making the entire community part of the solution, and Andrews actively engineered that role, based as it was on an element of truth.

If it weren’t for the community compliance to the draconian rules imposed by the Andrews government, the virus would be still hopping from house to house.

The November 24 budget will be Andrews’ platform to repair the economic damage his government has caused, although taxpayers will have to pay for it for decades. Expect it be tens of billions of dollars of spending that Victorians can’t really afford.

It will be a document framed to deal with his fundamental political weakness — the economic fallout from the second wave, which will be felt sharpest in Victoria for what are now obvious reasons.

The final factor that is starting to bleed into political calculations is the next federal election, due from late next year onwards. The federal election is already preoccupying both sides of politics, with Anthony Albanese’s Victorian MPs largely filthy with the way the Andrews government cocked up hotel quarantine.

There are real fears that in their first election after the coronavirus second wave, federal Labor will be smacked by voters in Victoria who will then give Andrews the green light in 2022.

This is obviously looking too far down the road and doesn’t factor in a horror show final report from the hotel quarantine inquiry.

It will lob just as Victorians hit top speed in the pre-Christmas binge, as the weather really warms up and crowds prepare for the Boxing Day cricket test.

A short while ago Andrews looked politically cooked. This ­dynamic, according to some smart Liberals, has shifted.