Daniel Andrews’ strategy to beat COVID-19 will break the finances and crudely tear the state’s social fabric.
It is quite likely the damage to the national economy will outstrip anything that occurred under the Cain-Kirner Labor governments in the early 1990s, and for that Scott Morrison must privately be filthy.
The net result is that Victoria, for so long an important driver of the national economy, will be blasted back to rust-belt status.
We thought Sunday’s announcement of a curfew, travel restrictions and school closures was bleak, but in a practical, long-term sense the economic response will be substantially worse.
The Andrews strategy has been forced on him because of his government’s own policy ineptitude, with the increasing likelihood that the guts of the second wave was an own goal — that is, letting security guards run the show in hotel quarantine, only to have the virus spread wildly.
It is unfashionable but entirely reasonable to also now question whether there were deep flaws in the way the broader health response was managed. It is clear the health establishment in Victoria has been blindsided by the extent of community transmission and many people just have not listened to the government. This is fundamentally a question of leadership.
Andrews has been front and centre in the selling of the virus response and people have not turned on to his words. Some of the criticism of the Victorian Premier has been savage and excessive. It is clearly not all his fault and there is global evidence to back this up. But the criticism will only intensify.
In the shorter term, the jobs toll will be substantially higher than the 250,000 cuts that will flow during Lockdown 3.0.
The throw-forward question will be whether or not Lockdown 3.0 — stage four restrictions — will actually work. If it doesn’t then Andrews has admitted that there are no other levers to stem the rise in deaths and cases.
“There is no stage five, this has to work,’’ he said.
If it doesn’t work there will be many hundreds of deaths by Christmas.
The political strategy is easy to read and is predicated on the hard lockdown working. If it does, Andrews’s political stocks will rise, but only on the condition that the economic fallout isn’t as severe as many think.
Andrews will be looking for a spike in his ratings by late September, when the community will be digesting the findings of the board of inquiry into hotel management.
There are many who want to forgive Andrews, but that won’t happen when there is double-digit unemployment and a smashed economy. It is hard to see an economic resurgence for many, many years.
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A nuclear bomb has been detonated under the Victorian economy and the fallout will be dreadful.