Coronavirus: Winning ugly far from a losing proposition for Daniel Andrews

Illustration: Johannes Leak

Those with corporate knowledge of the Victorian parliament will know there has not been a bigger wrecking ball in opposition in the past 28 years than Daniel Andrews.

As the Baillieu/Napthine governments fell apart between 2010 and 2014, Andrews was ruthless, trashing the parliament and humiliating the ­Coalition.

Some of the parliamentary tactics and behaviour did not pass the taste test and would not have been tolerated had, for example, question time been broadcast as it is in the national parliament.

Fast forward to 2020 and Andrews is failing most of the same benchmarks he set for the ­Coalition and Labor is rapidly looking like it needs a good wash.

Andrews the opposition Labor leader would have had a ball with the predicament of his Chief Health Officer, who will be lucky to keep his job after the hotel quarantine inquiry delivers its report.

The Victorian Premier has lost a health minister and chief bureaucrat and there is subtle but real pressure on his leadership.

Even though Andrews and the CHO have engineered a statistically impressive turnaround in virus numbers, this week has been one of the worst in his premiership.

The hotel quarantine inquiry is backfiring, his CHO is fighting for his reputation and the government has wrongly tried to bolster the horse racing sector when people are struggling to get to funerals or have their children educated on site at school.

It’s not unreasonable for governments to make mistakes in a global pandemic. It is unreasonable, though, to make mistakes on a large scale and then try to pretend everything is all right and call for the caravan to move on.

Some of the criticism is predictably shrill and partisan, but not even Andrews can run away from the worst of Labor’s mistakes.

The failure on hotel quarantine is politically unforgivable; the state of the health department is a national disgrace; and the overreach on some measures to quell the virus has been stunning.

For all the negatives, Andrews is heading towards some potentially helpful blue political sky.

The weekend opening up of Melbourne on the back of promising virus numbers and the looming state budget will be potent political weapons, offset by potentially catastrophic unemployment and business failures.

The latter will provide significant political opportunity for the opposition, which could copy his enthusiasm for winning at all costs. Winning ugly worked for him for the best part of a decade, until he hit the COVID-19 wall.