Miracle needed after over-promising, under-­delivering

Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews after giving Victoria’s daily Covid update on Sunday. Picture: NCA NewsWire / David Geraghty

An exhausted, nervous Melbourne on Sunday watched an exhausted, nervous Premier kick the COVID-19 reopening can down Swanston Street.

As Daniel Andrews spoke, Melbourne’s central business district was more like Dubbo on a Sunday morning — the AFL grand final hangover parade of thousands of fragile tourists traded for the new normal of lifeless shops and the lost and homeless gathering in their ones and twos at the bottom end of Elizabeth Street.

The only frenetic activity was in the minds of thousands of shop owners wondering when the city would be resuscitated.

“Changing the goal posts is confidence-shattering for businesses struggling to hold on,” thundered lord mayor Sally Capp.

Jeff Kennett, who rebuilt Melbourne after the last recession, called for traders to break the law and Andrews to resign.

“You are a disgrace. Go, go, go,’’ he urged on Twitter.

Andrews, meanwhile, was in his Spring Street theatrette at 10.30am selling the news no one wanted. Looking so tired he struggled to deliver a coherent, positive message, he had boxed himself in when he needn’t have.

In the previous week, facing political pressure over the hotel quarantine inquiry and Melbourne’s glacial path to reopening, Andrews had over-promised and then on Sunday under-­delivered on the timeline … principally because of fears of a potential wall of COVID-19 that may or may not exist in Melbourne’s north.

As Chief Health Officer Brett Sutton offered unhelpfully: “You can’t control what you have not found.”

For 10 years, Victorians have been drawn to Andrews’s unrelenting confidence and conviction, a sense of political derring-do that saw him throw away more than $1bn in cash on a road he didn’t want but then lead a country on social policy and state building that heralded a $100bn-plus drive of investment.

This well of political confidence evaporated on Sunday as he lamented the threat of the northern suburbs coronavirus outbreak, inventing a new pandemic term: the cautious pause.

“This is not anything other than a cautious pause to wait to get that important information, to get the results of those tests, just to rule out whether there are, whether there is more virus there than we think,” Andrews said.

For all the criticism of Andrews, the Victorian public has afforded him a degree of latitude, perhaps mindful of the spread of the virus overseas and fuelled by the menacing language he has uttered since late March.

But the messaging from Sunday was poor, coming after seven months of Melburnians being locked in their homes, their movement severely curtailed and their earnings limited.

Former health minister Jenny Mikakos didn’t make it any easier for Andrews (or herself) when she accused the government of “paralysis in its decision-making”.

Yet she has a point. The 14-day rolling average of cases for Melbourne has dropped to 4.6 and there are just nine mystery cases.

With NSW managing for months to navigate the complexity of an open economy with a trickle of virus cases, many are wondering whether the crisis of confidence in Victoria’s contact tracing system is terminal.

“Victorians cannot hang on week to week,” said Business Council of Australia chief executive Jennifer Westacott.

“People are at a financial and mental breaking point.”

Andrews’s refusal to open up the economy speaks volumes about where he is at personally and professionally.

Knowing his career will die if a third wave takes off in Victoria, he certainly looked in a state of early onset paralysis, a man whose confidence has been smashed by both fatigue and failure.

Even if the cautiousness may well be jettisoned by Tuesday when all the tests results come in.

As Paul Keating discovered in 1996, voters don’t always thank leaders for fixing big problems, ­especially when they make them.

Andrews will be watching very closely his relationship with the Morrison government, which appears to have virtually collapsed.

His best course of action will be to flick the switch to an open economy within 48 hours. And then pray for an economic and political miracle.