Coronavirus: Everything is about Daniel Andrews right now

Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews in Melbourne on Tuesday. Picture: David Crosling

It’s Victoria, Victoria, Victoria, all Victoria and Daniel Andrews.

The COVID-19 pandemic, crucial health and economic decisions for all state, territory and federal governments, the parliamentary debate in Canberra and the political pre­occupations of Scott Morrison and Anthony Albanese are all about the national impact of Australia’s worst outbreak of coronavirus.

Josh Frydenberg and Greg Hunt and their Labor Treasury and health counterparts, Jim Chalmers and Chris Bowen, are locked into the Victorian political and administrative struggles of COVID-19.

Bill Shorten, as a former Labor leader grumpily locked down in Melbourne, has seen fit to take a small swipe at Dan the Man who had “everyone freaking out” over the proposed year-long extension of emergency powers in Victoria.

Even scheming Nationals MPs seeking to unsettle their leader and Deputy Prime Minister Michael McCormack have used the unrealistic border controls, forced on farmers and ­regional towns because of the “Dandemic”, as fuel.

Steadfastly refusing to criticise the Victorian Labor Premier in any way, the federal Labor Opposition Leader sought in parliament on Tuesday to turn the national angst about Andrews back against the Prime Minister and the federal Coalition but only drew even more blame and odium to Andrews.

Albanese’s chief hope is an unrelenting attack against Morrison over the mishandling of aged-care homes in Victoria and the more than 300 deaths of elderly patients. Labor pins the deaths — along with gruesome individual cases of neglect — on Morrison because of the commonwealth’s responsibility for funding and regulating aged care in Australia.

Seeking to shift Morrison into the light of public shame and blame over Victorian aged-care deaths and divert attention from Andrews with questions and claims about four atrociously managed aged centres in parliament, Albanese took a calculated risk that the public would wholly blame Morrison for the failure.

The strategy, with Victorian MPs making luminescent appearances like Banquo’s ghost seeking revenge, served only to put Victoria and Andrews centre stage at a time when the Premier was facing a widespread backlash against his demand for another 12 months of emergency powers.

Labor’s examples were shocking and graphic — ants in wounds, sad deaths, family grief — and the Coalition responses were factual and ultimately aimed at not just Andrews but also Albanese’s refusal to even look askance at the man who was the most powerful Labor leader in Australia just a few months ago.

Morrison, Hunt and Frydenberg apologised, sympathised and conceded the shocking health circumstances Victorians faced.

Yet as Labor continued to seek to blame the commonwealth, the government’s argument moved from a broad defence that we were doing well on an inter­national scale on aged-care deaths and providing historically high levels of financial support for jobs and the economy, to a sharper focus on Victoria.

Like Shorten, Frydenberg and Hunt are Melburnians feeling the heat of lock down and neither held back in pointing the finger at the failure of Andrews’s quarantine security as being the source of the “second wave” of COVID in Victoria.

Frydenberg even put the number of jobless in Victoria as a result of the new infections as the equivalent “of four MCG crowds on Grand Final Day” with a hint that Melbourne was losing that as well because of the “Victorian wave”.

While maintaining his refusal to personally criticise Andrews as a national cabinet colleague, Morrison did not hesitate to claim that the tragic deaths in aged care would not have happened if there had not been a new wave of community transmission started by unacceptable failures of quarantine and tracing and testing of coronavirus infections.

Andrews and Victoria. That’s what it is all about right now.