Daniel Andrews puts IBAC through spin cycle

Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Sarah Matray

“There’s an issue here. No one’s downplaying that,” Daniel Andrews declared midway through his more than hour-long press conference on Wednesday.

It was all many journalists present could do not to burst out laughing.

This was a bloke who had just spent half an hour repeatedly describing what the anti-corruption commission deemed ‘‘evidence of misconduct and improper influence’’ among his senior staff, ministers and public servants as an “educational report” that “made no findings against anyone”.

No “downplaying” to see here!

Even by the Victorian Premier’s standards, Wednesday’s press conference was a master class in epic spin.

The Independent Broad-based Anti-corruption Commission’s Operation Daintree offers a rare and at times galling insight into how Mr Andrews manages to exert maximum control while evading culpability.

If the evidence of the Premier to the corruption watchdog is to be taken at face value, neither he nor his ministers ever asked their staff to do the wrong thing.

If they did, an episode of mass amnesia seems to have left them unable to remember doing so. And regardless, they didn’t need to. The staff knew what their bosses wanted and made it happen.

Several public servants expressed doubts about the propriety of awarding $1.2m to the Labor-­affiliated Health Workers Union without any competitive tender process but ultimately they too were sufficiently “pliable” – to use IBAC’s word – to go along with the scheme.

Former health minister Jenny Mikakos, in her evidence, offered this devastating assessment of how politics is made in the world of Dan Andrews: “Ms Mikakos described the current government as ‘very centralised with the PPO (Premier’s Private Office) having its tentacles everywhere’,’’ the IBAC report stated.

‘‘She referred to the constant tension between ministerial offices and the PPO. She described her handover meeting with Ms Hennessy as being principally ­focused on how interventionist the PPO and Premier had been in the health portfolio.

Health Workers Union secretary Diana Asmar.

“She described the PPO as the ‘gateway for any announcement’ and gave the example of her proposed announcement of the re­development of the Frankston Hospital as a public-private partnership. Ms Asmar (HWU secretary) was said to be unhappy with it being a PPP and as a result, the PPO was not prepared to have Ms Mikakos make the announcement if it would attract a hostile reaction from Ms Asmar.’’

And those tentacles have multiplied – from what the report cites as “seven to eight” policy advisers under Steve Bracks 20 years ago, to “70 to 80” in Andrews’ office now, of a total of 286 (on 2021 figures) across all ministerial offices, all of whom ultimately report to the Premier.

According to Mikakos, who quit politics in September 2020 after finding herself at odds with Andrews over her department’s level of responsibility for hotel quarantine failures that led to the state’s deadly second Covid wave, there was “constant tension” between ministerial offices and the PPO.

Former Victorian health minister Jenny Mikakos, leeft, and Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews. Pictures: Getty Images

It is worth noting that the dynamic between the Andrews government and Asmar has changed dramatically since 2018, for ­reasons that have nothing to do with Operation Daintree. Back then, the government needed to keep the HWU happy, amid the ascendancy of a powerful factional grouping linked to then Labor powerbroker Adem Somyurek.

It was of course in the aftermath of the 2018 election that Andrews welcomed Somyurek back into his ministry after he had been forced to resign in 2015 amid bullying accusations.

Adem Somyurek. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Ian Currie

In mid-2020, branch-stacking allegations against factions aligned with Somyurek, which ultimately formed the basis for IBAC’s Operation Watts, saw him expelled from the ALP, resulting in a significant factional shift within the Victorian party.

Somyurek’s factional demise concentrated power in the hands of Andrews’ Socialist Left as well as Right factions affiliated with Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles, the SDA and TWU, at the expense of Somyurek’s “Mods”, Bill Shorten’s AWU and smaller unions including the HWU.

In his evidence to IBAC, Andrews claimed the HWU’s influence on “the political fortunes of [his] government was minuscule”.

That may be true, but only because of the factional realignment.

As IBAC found, Mikakos’s perception that the PPO “would move heaven and earth to keep the union movement happy” appears to have been borne out by Asmar’s September 2020 letter to Andrews calling for the then health minister to resign over the Frankston Hospital plans.

“While the inflammatory tone of the letter and language used in it could be regarded as ‘sabre-­rattling’, it also points to the power and influence Ms Asmar felt she wielded over the Victorian Labor government,” IBAC found.

Another key issue the report raises is Hennessy’s resignation.

When she quit as attorney-general in December 2020 citing “family reasons”, the move came as a shock to many within Labor who regarded her as a future premier. It is now clear that at the point at which she decided to step down as chief law officer of the state, Hennessy was being investigated over allegations of “serious corrupt conduct”.

Finally, IBAC’s condemnation of the “pliability of DHHS in delivering what it understood the minister wanted, in breach of its ethical obligations” comes as Victorian Ombudsman Deborah Glass continues her probe into politicis­ation of Victoria’s public service.