Victoria Decides: Dan Andrews’ problem with women

From free tampons to kindergarten, Victoria’s head-kicking street fighter is in wild pursuit of the women’s vote. But it’s the underlying political story that matters here.

Labor campaign launch with Dan Andrews in CranbourneCommunity Theatre. Picture Rebecca Michael.

The Labor machine is red-lining at 9000 revs per minute, wildly ­chasing the women’s vote.

Cash for free tampons in hundreds of public places, cash for women’s health clinics, cash to treat endometriosis, free kinder from next year, 50 government-owned and operated childcare centres, free nursing and midwifery degrees.

The Victorian Premier is no metrosexual but he is throwing everything at every problem or ­opportunity.

“Women’s health issues are not niche issues,” he said this week. “They are core business. They are mainstream, and they have not been served well. We’re going to do something about that.’’

Like a lot of political spin, the lines are framed so tightly it’s hard to argue with the sentiment. But it’s the underlying political story that matters here.

With a week to go of the spendathon otherwise known as the Victorian election, Daniel ­Andrews is doing everything he can to shore up his strengths and try to cauterise his weaknesses amid Coalition optimism of a ­significant anti-Labor shift.

“He’s got a problem with women. They have turned against him,” a senior Labor figure says of the Premier.

“That’s why they are spending the money. If it wasn’t a problem, they’d be looking elsewhere, throwing the time and money at something else.”

With pollsters still expecting a Labor victory of sorts on November 26, ranging from a reduced majority to minority government, the party’s head-kicking street fighter is transparently going after his strengths and weaknesses to avoid what many believe will be a backlash – possibly a big backlash – next weekend.

Almost eight years to the day after ousting the Victorian ­Coalition after just one term and now after one of the world’s most bruising lockdown strategies, ­Andrews is in a race to shore up his legacy, one that may ultimately be decided by the state of the state’s finances as much as his handling of the virus.

In the meantime, his Liberal opponent, Matthew Guy, 48, has told Liberal supporters at his campaign launch that winning from opposition is like climbing the world’s tallest mountain – very few have done it since the 1950s.

“It’s like climbing Mount ­Everest without oxygen,’’ he said. “It’s like doing it in a blizzard, all backwards.”

Opposition leader Matthew Guy. Picture: Mark Stewart

Guy, who now faces an anti-corruption investigation over how his former chief of staff was to be paid and whether there was a breach of electoral laws, is running a strongly local, but also big-spending campaign, which also ­relies on the punt that growing the Victorian economy will substantially help address the booming debt problem.

No one seems to know what happens if the precarious world economy and the fallout over the war in Ukraine combine to cause a long-term hit to growth and ­Australia is further dragged into the mire.

Nor can they put a value on ­Andrews’s huge reform agenda, which includes the first euthanasia framework in Australia, a $100bn-plus infrastructure build, nation-leading mental health and domestic violence reform, greater investment in policies for the LGTBI community, a crackdown on child sex abuse payments to aid victims, plus huge spending ­on health and education and law ­reform.

Labor has presided over Spring Street for 19 of the past 23 years, but at the same time Andrews is ­reviled by his critics for his handling of the pandemic, a series of corruption scandals and now the worst budget in the country.

On the question of his huge spending agenda, Andrews ­repeated this week: “They are not costs, they are investments.”

Election spending can be opaque and hard to measure until the final costings as parties shuffle money around, exaggerate policy impact and spread out policies over many years.

One estimate has the Coalition outspending Labor by three to one, although the opposition is vowing to save billions by shelving a large rail project through middle Melbourne and is only an outside chance of being able to form government.

It’s almost guilt-free spending by the Coalition designed to pull up the conservative vote to make it competitive in 2026. With just 27 lower house Coalition seats after the 2018 poll, it will require a stunning back-from-the-dead shift in the final week for Guy to win. Winning back the 11 seats he lost in 2018 would be only the start.

At the same time, the looming $166bn Victorian debt mountain is becoming a cut-through issue in focus groups for men in small business and the broader private sector, particularly people in the outer suburbs who were hammered by the lockdowns.

A Standard & Poor’s analysis of the Victorian budget, when factoring in the enormous infrastructure spend, suggests the state’s fiscal position is seriously weak at least in part because it had been forced to borrow so heavily because of the pandemic.

“Victoria went through a much longer lockdown period,” explains S&P director of government ­ratings Anthony Walker. This meant that, going forward, the government was borrowing a lot more money than it would normally have needed to.

Gauging voter sentiment in Victoria has been difficult throughout the pandemic, with Labor’s vote holding up remarkably well until the start of this month in the published ­opinion polls.

Newspoll recorded earlier this month a meaningful fall in Labor support that would have pushed the government close to losing its majority, its primary vote down ­almost six percentage points since 2018. These findings were backed up by another survey, this time by RedBridge Group, which came up with similar findings.

This has opened the way for discussion about a potential trend away from government, but the electorate is just so volatile and difficult to read.

At the same time as addressing Andrews’s “women problem”, Labor hardheads have assessed what might happen if the nuclear option occurs and as many as 19 Labor seats fall. Other Labor figures think the losses could be kept to as little as seven or eight seats.

The Weekend Australian has been told that Melbourne’s “Middle East” is becoming less certain in some marginal Labor seats, ­including Box Hill (3.1 per cent) and Ashwood (2 per cent), adding to a stack of other Labor seats that are in the “at risk” column for the government.

Cath Andrews with her children. Picture: Rebecca Michael

The key is the extent to which the vote has (or hasn’t) shifted against Labor over the course of the campaign proper, which has been unkind to Andrews.

The undecideds have fallen in internal seat tracks, with one ­Liberal suggesting, though, that there is still double-digit uncertainty among some Labor voters, many of them women, who don’t want to vote for Andrews – but they can’t convince themselves to vote Liberal. If these undecided traditional Labor voters were to break against the government, then Andrews could be having a tough election night.

A senior ALP figure said: “It could be really bad for Labor but it’s hard to see the Liberal Party winning more than nine or 10 seats. They could also lose a few. So even if Labor loses an absolute truckload of seats, the chances of the Libs winning are remote.

“Plus we have to factor in the Greens and other independents. Three Greens, a few teals and maybe some other seats. There is a lot of scope for big swings.”

No one will be surprised if the primary vote of the major parties is low – in the mid-30s or even lower – making it even harder for the ­Coalition to be able to form government. This is because Labor is likely to be the beneficiary of left-wing preferences from minor parties such as the Greens, bolstering its position.

The Greens on a good day might pick up three extra seats, but the teals have had a markedly lower profile compared with the federal campaign. That’s what happens when you don’t have ­millions of dollars behind your campaign.

The teals’ best hope is to win three or four seats, with a strong possibility that the seat of Kew, which falls in the federal electorate of Kooyong, will be lost to the ­Liberal Party.

Andrews, meanwhile, is pushing on, about to mark 12 years as Labor leader and eight as Premier. For key parts of the campaign, his wife Cath has been with him; you can only imagine how tired the family must be, which becomes a real consideration when politicians ponder their longevity.

Most strategists and observers reckon Andrews has struggled on this campaign, bashed on many days by the two major dailies, The Age and the Herald Sun, at war with 3AW’s Neil Mitchell and showing qualified interest in the ABC as a conduit for his message.

He has largely shunned so-called legacy media and tried to ­funnel his ideas and messaging out on his huge social media network, with the odd appearance on the morning commercial TV programs and via the daily press ­conferences.

Eight years after coming to power, the formula that helped him so dominate the opposition seems tired, maybe even broken. That means brace yourself for a potentially big anti-government swing in a week’s time.