Daniel Andrews was the hard man of Covid but the pandemic was a blight on his premiership
More people have died from Covid in Victoria than any other state. However well-intentioned, history will not be kind to Daniel Andrews.
He was the hard man of Covid, advocating harsher and longer lockdowns than any other premier in the country.
To his supporters, Dan Andrews was saving lives and – at the height of the pandemic – anyone who dared to publicly question his lockdown-first policies were dismissed as reckless or even derided as granny-killers.
To others he presided over a Kafkaesque period in Australia’s second largest city, locking it down for longer than anywhere else in the western world creating scars that are still visible today.
Andrews is departing politics with these competing versions of his management of the pandemic alive in the minds of vot
ers.
No-one doubts that Andrews was trying to do the right thing in his management of the pandemic and no premier had a clear road map of how to deal with this once-in-a-lifetime issue.
But history will not be kind to Andrews when it comes to his management of the pandemic. When Victoria needed a leader with nuance, to balance the competing needs of health, education, jobs and family during the pandemic, it got a single-minded authoritarian-style premier whose only recourse was to lockdown the city.
The lockdowns which Andrews imposed also lacked any nuance or balance. Children’s playgrounds were locked away, curfews imposed, visitors banned from homes, people could not travel more than 5kms from home. Police patrolled the streets checking people’s coffee cups to see if they contained alcohol.
Andrews will be seen as having made several key misjudgements during the pandemic. The first was not to take responsibility for the 2020 hotel quarantine bungle that killed 768 mostly elderly people. For the families of those who died, no clear explanation has ever been given over who in the Andrews government was responsible.
The second mistake was that Andrews’ all but ceded his broader responsibilities as leader to the dictates of the state’s chief health officer Brett Sutton, whose ultraconservative advice defaulted always towards locking down the city even for a handful of cases.
This led to a lack of balance about the pros and cons of lockdowns. Andrews did not consider adequately the broader cost of lockdowns on mental health, especially those of teenagers. He shuttered schools without debate despite solid evidence that they were not hotbeds of Covid. He let small businesses wither on the vine. Under his leadership Melbourne’s CBD came to resemble a ghost town. When lockdowns were finally lifted Melbourne had the slowest recovery of any major city.
For 262 days, the people of Melbourne were locked away. It was a record which made headlines around the world yet Andrews did not broker any debate about setting such an extreme record. Why was it that the rest of the world did not see the need to lockdown their cities as long as the Victorian premier? This basic question was not asked either by his government or by his supporters.
Andrews’ caution extended until the very end. He was only forced to edge away from his hard line stance because he saw NSW taking a more liberal approach to reopening. During Melbourne’s sixth and final lockdown, as vaccination rates were fast rising, Andrews effectively lost control as people began to openly flout his Covid regulations.
Only then did Andrews truly abandon the zero-Covid mantra which had underpinned his leadership of the pandemic. And yet, all this pain ultimately delivered no advantage for the people of Melbourne. More people have died from Covid in Victoria than any other state, including its larger neighbour NSW. By any measurement, the pandemic was a blight on Dan Andrews’ record as premier.
