Teflon Dan Andrews stick it to his enemies
As federal and state elections loom, the popularity of the divisive but enduringly successful Labor Premier appears as strong as ever.
It’s 10.19am on Thursday and scores of anti-Dan Andrews, anti-vaccination protesters are congregating on the steps of the Victorian parliament building – dog tired but still firing verbal blanks at the Victorian Premier.
The Spring Street crowd looks one part Nimbin, one part Coober Pedy and a tiny bit bikie gang.
The steps are messy, the aroma slightly off. Every couple of minutes there is an encouraging beep-beep from a passing car but mostly it’s just activism boredom, days after tens of thousands marched against the Andrews government in Melbourne.
Margaret Fullard, who normally works part time in finance, accounts and traffic management, laments the blokeishness that crept into the crowd on Wednesday night and the fact her anti-vaccine stance has split her family and killed her work prospects.
“I’m unemployed because of the pandemic. My dad said no vax, no visit,” she says, before adding with conviction: “There are patents out there to use the vax as a tracking device.”
As Fullard speaks, the enduringly – his critics would argue bewilderingly – successful Andrews is deep inside the parliament.
The Victorian Premier, closely protected after waves of death threats, is workshopping his lines for a press conference on the easing of restrictions. It was brought forward to try to drown out debate over the deep uncertainty about his pandemic legislation, which was stalled by former Labor powerbroker Adem Somyurek.
The death threats, the use of fake gallows by a small number of protesting extremists and the repeated comparisons of Victoria to Nazism is wearing thin across the political divide, exhausted as the MPs – state and federal – are after nearly two years of fighting the pandemic.
It’s a messy day of contradictions for Andrews, who has been the lightning rod for national conservative discontent. Labor badly misjudged Somyurek ahead of his decision to return to the state parliament to vote against the planned pandemic legislation, which is designed to replace Victoria’s current state-of-emergency laws, watering down the influence of chief health officer Brett Sutton.
Victoria’s former chief crown prosecutor, Gavin Silbert QC, speaks for many in the law when he says the handling of the pandemic bill – which is still in the balance – has lacked a commitment to accountability.
“It is just arrogant,” Silbert says of the government’s strategy.
“The best way of putting this is that such powers should never be in the hands of executive government but should always be in the hands of the legislative government – ie, parliament.”
Critics of the Andrews government’s first attempt to overhaul the pandemic laws include dozens of members of the Victorian Bar and the Ombudsman.
Victoria’s exit from virtually all of its virus restrictions this week prompted celebrations in the business community and provoked a competitive NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet to bite: “I’m not going to get compared to Victoria when they’ve had more days in lockdown than probably anywhere else in the world. What we’ve done in NSW is get the balance right.”
Despite the perceptions of political disarray over the Victorian pandemic legislation, overseeing the world’s longest lockdowns, a budget in trauma and a potentially dangerous ideological split between the extreme ends of the political divide, Andrews remains stronger than ever.
So much so that if an election were held this week, Victorian Labor would have been returned with a similar thumping majority as it achieved in 2018, according to the latest Newspoll.
Things are so bleak for the state Coalition that if the vote broke the wrong way, it could even lose several seats, with eight of its most marginal sitting at less than 1 per cent.
“It’s just depressing,” a senior federal Liberal MP laments.
For Scott Morrison there is potential trouble in the Newspoll numbers, with one informed theory saying the state Coalition’s brand is being poisoned by Canberra – although there have been plenty of own goals by Matthew Guy’s Liberals, including the recent drink-driving disaster by former frontbencher Tim Smith.
Federally, the party held only 12 of the 38 seats in Victoria at the last election, topped up by three Nationals, and, party strategists concede, the Prime Minister’s mainstream conservatism does not appeal in Victoria in the way that Malcolm Turnbull’s progressive Liberal politics might once have.
Andrews, about to mark his 11th anniversary as Victorian Labor leader and seventh as premier, is as much as anyone responsible for Labor’s domination on a state and federal level in Victoria, carefully carving out a political market built on a huge infrastructure build, overt campaigning towards public servants and the unions, and a widely successful pitch to the youth vote that, according to Newspoll, is underpinning his electoral success.
Never mind that the state’s nearly seven million people are still recovering from the effects of the crippling lockdowns. All six of them.
On the Victorian state of mind, Andrews reckoned this week: “My assessment of the mood is that people … yes they have been through a lot and there is healing to be done, there is pain to acknowledge … but I think people are looking forward.”
As far as Newspoll is concerned, Andrews would be more than happy to stay just where he is politically as he hurtles towards his third election win on November 26 next year. If this happens, it will further entrench Victoria as the Labor state where it is rarely beaten – in power for 23 of 27 years if it wins next year, as seems likely.
Newspoll highlights the extent to which the views about Andrews and his government are Balkanised, with an overwhelming majority of 80 per cent of Coalition voters suggesting it’s time for another government to be given a go and the same number of Labor voters keen for the ALP to be re-elected again.
The issue is that the Coalition’s primary vote is languishing on 36 per cent and Labor is at 44 per cent, handing it a giant 58 per cent two-party-preferred majority.
These observations about Andrews don’t seek to paint over the mistakes during the pandemic or the growing challenges facing Labor’s strongest state.
In no particular order, Victoria has a poor budget position, its public sector wages bill is ballooning, four ministers recently have been forced to quit because of an anti-corruption probe, the behaviour of the state’s largest land manager – Parks Victoria – is worthy of an independent inquiry, the state’s major projects agenda is bleeding with cost overruns and heavy delays, and the police force and parts of the judiciary are accused by the right of being politicised.
Then there is the question of the Victorian ALP being placed under control of the national executive over branch stacking, the Red Shirts affair where public money was abused to help get Andrews elected in 2014, and the anti-corruption commission inquiry into one part of the Victorian Right, formerly led by Somyurek.
Much of the criticism nationally is driven by the way Andrews used draconian measures to control the community, particularly last year, when Melbourne was shuttered for a staggering 112 days.
At the same time, the pandemic has created an increasingly divided community that has been effectively isolated on and off since early last year, leaving its people swimming in its own gene pool because of restrictions on movement, including a curfew that came with no justification.
It means one suburb often doesn’t know what the next is thinking, making political judgments without hard data such as Newspoll fraught.
There are fears in the private sector that NSW will emerge from its long-term lockdown stronger than Victoria, in large part because of the combined hit in Victoria of the restrictions last year and this year.
Assistant Treasurer Michael Sukkar, a proud Victorian, warns that unless the Andrews government wakes to the looming budget and economic challenges, the Victorian economy could lose out sharply to NSW.
Sukkar says Andrews should be looking urgently at taxation reform, particularly around housing, where imposts, he says, should be reduced or abolished. He also warns that Victoria’s record on lockdowns threatens to harm its reputation compared with NSW.
On global business investment, he says: “They will do it there (NSW) because there is a greater sense they are on the open path irrespective of what happens. A lot of it is really around the signalling.”
Victorian Auditor-General Andrew Greaves this week predicted gross Victorian debt to be just under $180bn by 2024, or nearly 210 per cent of the government’s operating revenue.
Victoria’s budget deficit was $14.6bn in June. S&P Global downgraded Victoria’s credit rating by two notches to AA, from AAA, a year ago. S&P director of government ratings Anthony Walker told Inquirer the size of the budget deficit was the largest the company had seen and that the large public spending on infrastructure would drag on the state’s finances for a long time.
“We see the recovery in NSW quicker than Victoria,’’ he said.
If Andrews is running such a ragged agenda, which his critics argue, why is his government still so popular?
Even optimistic Labor hardheads had been expecting to see, at some point, the vote soften. And not just in Newspoll, but in other surveys as well.
The answer is buried, at least in part, in some of the Newspoll numbers, which show that the government is streets ahead with voters aged 18 to 34, a cohort that is more likely to embrace issues such as climate change reform and Andrews’ aggressive social agenda, which has included the first assisted suicide laws and greater focus on gender equity and gay rights.
More than half of all young voters say they believe Andrews got most things right during the pandemic, with 42 per cent of women overall thinking the same.
This may have a lot to do with Andrews having become the first clickbait premier, across every key platform including Facebook (he has more than a million followers), Twitter, Instagram and even TikTok.
Most people who have spent time watching politics have been waiting for Andrews’ numbers to come off the boil. But Newspoll shows that, allowing for margin of error, nothing has changed in Victoria since the 2018 election rout.
Paul Strangio, associate professor of politics at Monash University, believes quite sensibly that the effects of the pandemic are still being assessed by voters.
“There’s the question of when will the pandemic wash out of the political discussion,” he says. “We seem to be in a strange moment where we are still anticipating the return to normal.”
While the pandemic had reinforced Labor’s dominance, he has detected concerns that it may be becoming a “crash-through government”, with its handling of the pandemic legislation symptomatic of potential political weakness.
“It seems to illustrate that,” Strangio says.
The criticisms of Andrews are rarely based on his inaction; rather that he goes too hard. No china shop is sacrosanct.
At the centre of the Andrews strategy is focusing on the people who vote for him rather than obsessing with the haters – of which there seem to be many. However, there is a strong chance that much of the noise is irrelevant to his government.
The immediate political battleground will be the federal election and how Victoria’s handling of the pandemic feeds into the fight for the now 39 federal seats after the last redistribution.
In many ways, Morrison is as underestimated by the left as Andrews is by the right.
The Prime Minister this week declared it was time for governments to step back out of people’s lives while also advocating for more freedoms for unvaccinated Australians; this intervention angered Andrews. But it is clever politics from Morrison because it appeals to a small but potentially significant percentage of people who don’t want to be vaccinated or are so outraged by the Victorian restrictions that they are prepared to march in large numbers over the pandemic response.
Andrews, not one to miss out on a political opportunity, on Friday accused Morrison of “forgetting” to order the vaccine.
“It is a bit rich from the Prime Minister from Sydney – and, all too often, for Sydney – to be lecturing people about freedom,” he told Nine’s Today program.
“Who forgot to order the vaccine? It wasn’t state premiers. I do not need to be lectured by Scott Morrison about these issues. When Victorians stick together, we can achieve anything.”
Voters have had plenty of time to show their anger at Andrews, particularly over last year’s lockdown. So far it hasn’t surfaced.
It would require a stunning turnaround to defeat Andrews at the polls in a year. A big swing is still possible. But as Newspoll shows, there are no real signs of this happening this year.
If world record-breaking lockdowns with at times absurd curbs on movement don’t fire up the electorate, what will?
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