The Victorian ALP should be writing taxpayers another cheque.
After being caught red handed cheating Victorians out of $400,000 in the 2014 Red Shirts scandal, the party repaid the money. But old habits die hard.
Two elections on from that rort, it seems helping yourself to public funds to pay your political bills was still fair game.
This new case relates to Daniel Andrews’ taxpayer-funded political intelligence strategy firm, QDOS Research, which has pocketed more than $2m since 2016 to monitor the views of Victorians for the ex- premier and his government.
Most modern governments employ research firms like QDOS to conduct community attitude surveys, but like so much about the former Andrews government, once you dig a little deeper things start to look a bit sus.
The Australian started writing about QDOS – a firm that boasts about its ability to formulate persuasive language to steer public opinion – in October 2020, as the state was emerging from the world’s longest and hardest lockdown.
Since those first stories, six tranches of documents relating to QDOS have been released to The Australian under FoI which, in summary, reveal:
QDOS played a crucial behind the scenes role in shaping the Andrews response to the pandemic. Large-scale polling was conducted by the firm testing community views about lockdown measures for everything from the 5km limit to the curfew and masks. So it’s clear the government wasn’t just following health advice, as Andrews kept telling us.
DuringIn the midst of the 112-day lockdown, QDOS surveyed Victorians about the premier’s personal performance and told cabinet there was “strong support for Dan Andrews and a broad acknowledgment of the good job he and the government are doing in very difficult circumstances”.
Documents have also shown that it was the Premier’s Private Office that controlled the QDOS program, not the bureaucracy. Senior PPO staff would tune into focus groups.
For several years, the documents reveal, QDOS was conducting online surveys asking the public to score the government’s performance across core services including police, education, hospitals, roads and public transport out of 10 points.
What’s important about this sixth batch of documents, running from June to October 2022, is they show these surveys were being conducted as the government was in the final stages of preparing its election strategy and moving into campaign mode. Waves of surveys were ordered in July, August and October. The election, which Labor easily won, was on November 26.
As late as October, just six weeks before the election, QDOS was briefing cabinet ministers on what Victorians thought of them, confidential emails show. This is where the community attitude surveys start to resemble political strategy research.
In large part because DPC censors redacted hundreds of pages and hid behind “cabinet confidentiality”, it’s difficult to say how much QDOS work was political and how much was the reasonable testing of community sentiment on various issues. Perhaps the answer is for taxpayers to split the difference and only ask for a cheque refunding $1m from the Victorian ALP.
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