Daniel Andrews on the brink of victory

DANIEL Andrews will make history if the Coalition crumbles after just one term.

Victorian Labor leader Daniel Andrews.

AMBITION and focus are characteristics in the young that can often be as hard to detect as they are difficult to teach.

So it was with Victoria’s Labor leader, Daniel Andrews, when he was an arts student at Melbourne’s Monash University, struggling ­between beer and books and the call of his former life in country Victoria.

Andrews found some of his drive as a university student while locked behind a protective cage selling hot dogs to drunks, liars, strippers and fools in the city’s ­district of sin and inebriation.

Each Saturday night, he would remove the front door of his hot dog stand and replace it with an iron cage so that he could survive the 11pm-8am shift next door to The Tunnel nightclub.

In the early 1990s, The Tunnel was the go-to venue in Melbourne’s CBD for everything that is good and bad about being young.

For 18 months, Andrews, now 42, poured tomato sauce, cheese and mustard on the hot dogs, convincing himself that the money was worth the grief.

“I am very deliberate about most things,’’ Andrews tells The Australian, “it was what you did to get by.’’

A little more than 20 years later, the hype has it that Andrews is on the brink of Australian politic­al history, poised to bring down a government after just one term in power.

At worst, the ruckman-sized, slightly stooped, former hot dog salesman is the frontrunner in the November 29 election that he believes could rewrite political ­assumptions.

Andrews and most in the ­Victorian Labor Party believe that the ­Coalition is on the brink of losing, which would be the first time in nearly 60 years that a one-term government had been beaten.

If this happens, Andrews believes the message will resonate federally, and in every state and territory.

“We will have rewritten the rule book — no more automatic second terms,” he says, stressing that he is not assuming victory.

“You can be a one-term government. That is not only important for the change our state needs, but it will change the way government works.

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“It’s going to mean unless you get on with it, unless you’ve got good, strong, real outcomes to point to at the end of the term, well then, you’ll be a one-term government as well.”

Andrews is a creature of Victoria’s Socialist Left faction; he is old-school Labor, a defender of the party’s status quo and a relentless work in progress who began as a junior in the office of federal MP Alan Griffin in the mid-1990s.

Andrews is also a machine man, having risen to assistant secretary of the Victorian Labor Party in 2000 before entering parliament in 2002, then — at 35 — becoming health minister in the Brumby government.

He assumed the Labor leadership after the election defeat of 2010, for what was expected to be no more than a task of ­rebuilding.

But four years later, Denis Napthine is the Coalition’s second premier (Ted Baillieu having resigned last year), its track record is mixed, and Andrews has Labor well ahead in the published polls.

He is generally as measured as he is strategic but is not immune to risks, which is the Andrews conundrum.

He is difficult to define.

Andrews would be the first left-wing Victorian premier since Joan Kirner took the party to its landslide defeat in 1992, and his left-wing politics come heavily dosed with ambition for community-based outcomes.

For that, read level crossings, kindergartens, cops, nurses, teachers. He is a union man, opposing the modernisation push by Labor elder John Faulkner.

“I’ve got a great respect for John and I know him well, but I’ve always been someone to try to ­remember where I’ve come from, where our movement has come from,” Andrews says.

“But that isn’t to say that relationships don’t change and outlooks don’t change.”

The Napthine and Abbott governments have tried desperately to paint Andrews and militant Victorian unions as wreckers of the local economy.

Andrews has not wavered, for a second, in his allegiance to the Left, remaining steadfast in his support for the Construction Forestry Mining and Energy Union state division under its secretary John Setka.

Setka has a thumping police record yet Andrews stood shoulder-to-shoulder with him at the state ALP conference in May. While Liberals are convinced that this is where the Labor leader is most vulnerable, Andrews and many others believe the anti-union rhetoric may play to the Coalition’s base vote but to few beyond it.

Tony Abbott is an ideological opposite of Andrews. The Prime Minister and Victorian Leader share a Catholic upbringing, but that’s about all, although Andrews has respect for the way in which the federal Coalition stormed to power.

Andrews acknowledges that Abbott worked hard and did his job as opposition leader. “(Winning is) a pretty good measurement of whether an opposition leader’s done a good job,’’ he says.

So does he admire Abbott? ­“I don’t know that I’d use the term admiration. He was certainly a very effective leader of his party.”

For four years in opposition, Andrews has read from the Abbott strategy manual, relentlessly hammering the Coalition while at the same time the Coalition has relentlessly undermined itself with a rebel independent, a tepid premier in Baillieu and what seemed like a gaffe a week.

Andrews’s rock-solid support for Setka’s CFMEU was one of two strategic gambles he faced, triggered in large part by internal Labor demands.

Former premier John Cain’s leadership never fully recovered from the Builders Labourers Federation deregistration in the mid- 1980s and the CFMEU is the BLF’s love child.

Before Steve Bracks took over and went on to defeat Jeff Kennett in 1999, the CFMEU had gone a long way towards ­killing the leadership of Labor’s John Brumby.

The gamble of backing Setka was highlighted at the weekend when Andrews refused to distance himself from the CFMEU, despite the Royal Commission into Trade Union Governance and Corruption being told that Setka should be charged with blackmail.

Combine Andrews’s CFMEU solidarity and his promise, if he wins office, to tear up the contract for the eastern end of the $17 billion East West Link road tunnel project, and it’s clear the Labor leader has forged some powerful enemies.

Perhaps Andrews’s biggest challenge has been his image, a view underlined by his tepid leadership ratings in today’s Newspoll.

Most days during the election campaign, Andrews is joined by his wife, Catherine, who is something of an athlete and a mother of three.

Andrews has dropped 10kg in weight over the past year. He’s taken to wearing jeans for many announcements, boots and softer-coloured clothing.

Andrews has exposed his father Bob to public attention as the Andrews patriarch fights off cancer.

In a similar way, Bob’s stud cattle property in northeast Victoria has been used for party advertising, with Daniel Andrews having grown up at Wangaratta, a regional centre known, for better or worse, as “Wang’’.

The Labor campaign is looking slick and personalised, although he denies he is being dictated to by image-makers.

Of his casual campaign clothing, Andrews says: “People should think, maybe I want to wear this and that I told people that is what I want to wear. Maybe that’s the way it went.’’

On this, he may have a point, for Andrews is being accused of unilaterally deciding to tear up the East West Link contracts and of coming up with the idea of introducing himself to voters as Dan Andrews and not Daniel Andrews. This has confused some.

During a walk-through of a train factory in suburban Melbourne last Wednesday, Andrews introduced himself as Daniel to one worker, while the Labor ads have him as Dan.

As Andrews slugs it out in the marginals, several of his colleagues are battling with the rising tide of the Greens in four inner-city seats.

Andrews loathes the Greens, and sections of the Socialist Left have been slow to deal with the challenge.

Given that there is still the chance of a hung or minority parliament, Andrews’s views on the minor party count.

“I will not lead a Labor-Green government and I’ve been very clear on that,’’ he says.

“Even my harshest critic would have to concede that I have been absolutely consistent about that.

“No deal will be offered and no deal will be entered into.’’

Yet, if Labor wins, there will be an almost immediate transition to left politics in Victoria, killing off such conservative policies as the trial to return mountain cattlemen to the high country.

The Labor leader’s father may breed cattle, but he wants to do nothing to assist the return of ­grazing to the high country, even if the grazing is in environmentally compromised landscape.

“As the son of a beef farmer, let me tell you I know the difference between a pristine Alpine national park and beef farm,” Andrews says.

He has not visited the trial site, which is a weed-infested playground for four-wheel-drive vehicles and campers.

The extent to which Labor is transforming the way it campaigns is only just starting to become clear.

The Australian revealed last week that two US Democratic Party advisers were helping Labor’s grassroots campaign, fuelled­ by hundreds of volunteers doing work that traditionally would have been done by paid party operatives, MPs and staff.

The message is a local one. Labor’s focus is on kerbs and gutters, resolving the problems on the ground, campaigning as the Democrats did on grassroots issues. It’s a gamble that could transform political campaigning in Australia.

Andrews has little interest in talking about reforming the federation, fixing the inequities of the GST or such lofty matters.

It is, unquestionably, all about winning the votes that matter in the key marginal seats, with the current parliament made up of 44 Coalition MPs, 43 Labor and a lower-house independent.

“I get a sense that people want a really determined focus on the ­basics and the things that matter in a very local sense,’’ Andrews ­explains.

“And that’s stuff that’s close to home. So it’s jobs and then it’s schools and hospitals, better public transport, local roads, the level-crossing stuff. Very tangible, very local, very practical.’’

It’s almost as if Andrews has gone from selling hot dogs in the city to political sausages to the people of Victoria.

In Andrews’s mind, it’s not that the big picture doesn’t matter. It just won’t win him office.