Jeff Kennett’s legacy lives on in Victoria
Newspoll suggests ALP’s dominance in Victoria is set to continue.
Daniel Andrews is the Labor Left’s Jeff Kennett.
The Victorian Premier is a state builder and social reformer and, like Kennett, his chief strength is political courage.
Just like Kennett, his chief flaw is his political recklessness.
It is extraordinary that nearly 20 years after Kennett’s Coalition government lost the 1999 election, the Victorian political classes are still in a conversation about the former Liberal leader.
Labor is hounding incumbent Liberal leader Matthew Guy with claims of a Kennett-like agenda to cut services. The claims are a distortion but, decades on, the legacy of the Kennett era resonates.
The profound contradiction is that Labor hardheads are increasingly happy in private to compare Andrews with the state-building zeal that marked Kennett’s premiership. Kennett was on the move; the Labor mantra is that Andrews is delivering. Today’s Newspoll, showing Labor with an election-winning two-party-preferred lead of 54 per cent to 46 per cent, suggests voters are supportive of the Andrews agenda.
The Andrews-Kennett comparison is about the incumbent Premier’s character and political strategy but not necessarily policy.
Andrews is an unashamed creature of the Left, a big spender with his political antennae tuned to Broadmeadows and Brunswick Street, the opposite of Kennett’s pro-business, austerity agenda.
Where Kennett inherited a basket-case budget and economy, Andrews is riding the wave of the population boom and the previous Coalition government’s strong budget, which was cash rich but major projects poor.
Victoria is undergoing an economic renaissance under Andrews, underpinned by its rampaging population, and matched only by the boom times — gold and wool. Today it’s a population boom.
This transformation and energy is underpinning Andrews’s run to the November 24 election, leaving Guy’s Coalition under the pump, damaged by the latest leadership change in Canberra. Many voters, Newspoll suggests, hated that change.
Andrews is not, however, a Spring Street messiah, showing repeated signs of political clumsiness and an obsession with out-greening the Greens, now arguably his chief opponent in this state election. Today’s Newspoll is emphatic but the knife-edge nature of the parliament has meant Labor still has been forced to fight street by street in the marginals to hold on to power.
“The threat of a potentially ugly, but necessarily loose, Labor-Greens alliance still cannot be discounted.”
There are effectively 46 Labor seats, 37 Coalition, three Greens and two independents.
In an 88-seat parliament with 17 ALP seats with margins below 5 per cent, it is still possible for Labor to slip into minority. However, Newspoll suggests this possibility has diminished.
The threat of a potentially ugly, but necessarily loose, Labor-Greens alliance still cannot be discounted.
Labor is sitting on 46 seats in the 88-seat parliament if you assume that Melton, now held by a retiring Labor independent, returns to the ALP.
Because of this, there are several scenarios where Labor could be forced into minority government, reliant on the Greens.
This threat was underpinned during the Greens’ weekend campaign launch, when leader Samantha Ratnam warned: “The Greens have the opportunity to be in balance of power, ushering in the most progressive era of politics Victoria has ever seen.”
With the Greens’ shadow darkening Labor’s campaign and some MPs fearing charges over the so-called Red Shirts affair, Andrews must resort to the financial numbers to tell his story. These numbers show he and Treasurer Tim Pallas have fuelled a V-8 economy. Victoria has 3 per cent of the national land mass and nearly a quarter of the country’s gross domestic product.
The state exports about 25 per cent of all of Australia’s goods. International education is the largest services export. The rust belt, manufacturing-based economy of the early 1990s is maturing. Melbourne is on track to become Australia’s dominant population city during the next term of government. Last year Melbourne added more than 125,000 people, the biggest annual jump in any city in Australia’s history.
Victoria is outstripping NSW on some key measures, but the two states are the nation’s economic powerhouses. In September, it was announced that Victoria’s unemployment rate had dropped to 4.8 per cent, the lowest in seven years, and the politically crucial regional unemployment rate was 4.5 per cent, the lowest in the nation. This is not a tepid state. It is thriving and it is through this prism that the election campaign must be viewed.
The October CommSec State of the States report tells the story of Victoria again on top of the national economic ladder, fuelled by population growth, which in turn is driving construction activity, particularly in homes.
Melbourne’s CBD is alive with cranes. This construction binge seems to be evident on every street corner and the state has the lowest jobless rate in a decade. It leads the nation on CommSec’s economic performance on growth, unemployment and construction.
Victorian economic activity is 26.7 per cent above its normal or decade-average level of output.
Since Labor won office four years ago, the local economy has jumped 10 per cent, worth tens of billions, Pallas said at the recent budget. The budget is strong; a $1.4 billion surplus this financial year and forecast average surpluses of $2.5bn during the next four years.
Andrews is rolling in cash. He mischievously railed against privatisation recently, but it was the sell-off of key state assets, reaping more than $13bn, that has helped shore up his bottom line.
The comparisons with Kennett, arguably Australia’s most successful premier of the modern era, become even more reasonable when you consider the size of Labor’s infrastructure agenda.
On recent estimates, something north of $100bn is being spent by the public and private sectors in Victoria on projects. It is one of the great attempted infrastructure catch-ups since the gold rush.
Andrews has been bold, unafraid to take risks and annoy voters, even in key seats.
This is best evidenced by the way he is tearing up the middle of Melbourne — right to the clocks at Flinders Street station — to build the $11bn underground metro, creating traffic mayhem in the city.
In politically sensitive suburbs Andrews has opted for a truly ugly sky rail project to ease congestion in key areas. At the same time he has wrecked the views and ambience for thousands of voters who live next to the elevated line.
Andrews has spent close to $10bn fixing dozens of railway crossings to ease congestion and boost capacity and, on the never-never, is proposing a massive northeastern Melbourne road link across large slabs of Melbourne.
On Labor’s dream list is a massive cross-city underground rail network. It looks and feels like Victoria is flying.
Yet Andrews, 46, has a perception problem. It’s an issue he and has inner sanctum have engineered. While those close to him are confident Labor will retain power — and Newspoll supports this view — they know he has picked too many fights internally, distracted by his tactical mistakes.
While the state election will be won on cost of living, population growth and to a lesser extent crime, many mainstream voters have been bewildered by Labor’s strategic internal ineptitude during the past four years. At times the ALP has looked greedy, opportunistic, manipulative and wasteful.
For waste, it is hard to go past forcing taxpayers to fund more than $1bn to stop a Coalition-era road that needs to be built through inner Melbourne, connecting east and southeast Melbourne to the city’s west.
Andrews has lost three ministers through scandal and picked a bizarre fight with the state’s volunteer firefighters to appease the militant left-wing firefighters’ union, only to fall out eventually with its militant leader. Go figure.
Guy is heavily reliant on the “Rorts for Votes” scheme after Ombudsman Deborah Glass found Labor erred in its use of MP entitlements during the 2014 state campaign. She found Labor was wrong to spend $388,000 of taxpayer funding on election campaigning during the 2014 poll.
Twenty-one members of the Andrews government were beneficiaries of the slush fund, the report said, including six sitting ministers, and Andrews is being distracted by the incremental shifts in the story. It could yet harm the government during the campaign if any Labor figures are charged before November 24.
Newspoll suggests voters are fixated neither on Red Shirts nor firefighters but on who can best make their lives easier.
Andrews has two electoral challenges, one from the Coalition, the second from the Greens. The Premier has been waging quite a war to appease Greens voters in six seats, all inside the goat-cheese curtain, populated by cashed-up singles or families of the hard Left.
To that end, Andrews became the first premier in Australia to successfully back euthanasia.
Under pressure over the Northcote by-election, he introduced the much-needed safe injecting room trial in inner-city Richmond. It’s the ultimate each-way bet: in euthanasia, the state kills people; in the safe injecting room, lives are being saved.
Liberal leader Guy, 44, is a smart politician. His campaign launch speech was strong in content and in my view he won the television battle, looking decisive and more convincing. Andrews is not great TV talent.
Standing behind Guy on Sunday were party activists with the less than subtle message: “Jail the gangs.’’ Much of Guy’s bid for election hinges on a clever population-based strategy of regional growth — where the Coalition has underperformed in recent years — including a $19bn fast-train strategy to several regional cities.
The Coalition also has the edge on crime, even if Guy had uncomfortable weeks after the so-called “Lobstergate” affair erupted. It involved Guy having dinner with wealthy market gardener Tony Madafferi and others. Madafferi has been linked by police with organised crime but has never been charged with any offence and denies any wrongdoing. Lobstergate, unless it resurfaces with significant developments, should not harm him during this campaign. What is more worrying for Guy and his Coalition partner is the deeply divided Liberal Party.
State MPs are filthy that the dominant forces in the party, led by state president Michael Kroger, federal MP Michael Sukkar and in the past by young powerbroker Marcus Bastiaan, have so much control. At the core of the angst is concern MPs will lose their preselections. There is nothing like self-interest to drive discontent.
If it weren’t for Friday’s resolution of the stoush between the party and the Coalition’s chief donor, the Cormack Foundation, the election result would have been used by Kroger’s factional enemies as a referendum on his presidency. With $3m being pumped into Guy’s election campaign by Cormack, this will be a harder argument to sustain and the elephant in the room is not at 104 Exhibition Street but in Canberra.
More worrying for Guy is the fallout from the federal nonsense otherwise known as the Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison governments.
Labor is convinced there will be an electoral wipeout in Victoria at the next federal poll. After the by-election in the Sydney seat of Wentworth, this state election will be the first serious test of the Liberal brand.
For many months, Guy has relied on Victoria’s crime rate to smash Labor. The Opposition Leader has asked many reasonable questions, but in a practical sense the crime debate will resonate only in areas where the evidence is clear and uncontested.
Unfortunately for the Coalition, some senior Liberals say the crime issue is likeliest to affect safe Labor seats, with possibly significant anti-government swings in government territory.
This election will be decided by voters picking the party that will look after them most, with the cost of living at its core.
In recent days, the government and opposition have offered deals to voters for lower power prices, cheaper car registration and more paramedics. These policies will resonate and feed into the broader narrative. But given politicians’ stocks have never been lower in the modern era, many voters will struggle to believe what they are being offered. Instead, they will vote along traditional lines and based on their gut feeling.
For 15 of the past 19 years, Victorians have voted Labor in their state parliament.
Newspoll suggests this dominance is likely to continue after November 24.
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