Coronavirus: Regaining trust is only way for Daniel Andrews to hold onto his job

Daniel Andrews is entering the most critical phase of his leadership.

Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews. Picture: Ian Currie

Daniel Andrews next week enters the defining period of his 10-year leadership.

His only chance of retaining his job over the medium term is if he is able to rebuild trust with a stranded community living in a crippled economy that his government created.

The Victorian Premier’s ­appearance at the hotel quarantine inquiry and the looming final report will not help the task. Nor will the mood of an ­increasingly dispirited and tense Melbourne community.

His saving grace being that his anti-democratic campaign to cut the virus numbers is working.

Despite all the mistakes and the government’s at-times scandalous indifference to commonsense, the coronavirus numbers are dramatically lower and for the first time in months there is cause for guarded optimism.

This outcome is worthy of a glass-half-full response.

But the government is privately deeply concerned about whether its health department has the ability and capacity to deal with the health impacts of meaningfully reopening the Victorian economy.

This is the driving force behind the anaemic reopening timetable.

Andrews has billed the looser restrictions in regional Victoria as the test case for opening up Melbourne. But this is not really so.

The first meaningful test is the current cluster of dozens of people in Melbourne’s southeastern suburbs.

If the Department of Health and Human Services has managed to contain that spread, which ­Andrews claims is the case, then it will be the first real evidence that the government has the capacity to deal with outbreaks on a meaningful scale.

It is one thing to have a cluster in a regional area, quite another to deal with an outbreak in a highly mobile community where re-tracing steps can be fraught, especially in occupations like taxi driving.

Andrews’ messaging is pretty clear; he will ignore the demands to reopen the Victorian economy early and hold the line until the numbers are at what he believes is a reasonable level to withstand outbreaks.

This means that until well into the back end of the year, Melbourne will be in lockdown of some form as the rest of the country starts roaring into spring and summer while Victorians watch the AFL grand final and racing carnival on television.

The effect of the Victorian shutdown has been catastrophic, leading to large-scale economic and social disruption.

Labor cannot hide from its failure to run an appropriate hotel quarantine system as evidenced by the inquiry into the scandal.

The Premier will appear before the inquiry midweek and it’s quite possible his career will be decided by the outcome of the final report.

More broadly, he needs to take account for the government’s overall performance managing the pandemic, which has been deeply mixed and driven by a zealous indifference to civil liberties and the private sector.

Andrews is an ends-justify-the-means politician.

But no one can tell us where the finishing line actually is.