Eighteen months into the pandemic, Victorian Labor is starting to wonder whether the grindingly sycophantic support of the pandemic response is becoming a giant political negative among battlers.
Labor hardheads, quietly plotting ways to rejuvenate the Andrews government, are dismissive of the social media noise that for so long has been linked to the government’s pandemic fortunes.
“They are basically anyone who doesn’t suffer from lockdowns,” one Labor figure said of the ideologically blind, loudest supporters.
For this read Labor-leaning professionals, school teachers, public servants, union officials and inner northern wives and husbands. Comfortable – even wealthy – inner-city people who don’t like the Liberal Party and are never going to vote for them.
They have time to watch 90-minute press conferences and then turn on people they disagree with, often attacking the core concerns of the Labor heartland.
Many are women who like Premier Dan Andrews but have no understanding of the concept of job insecurity or lockdown-induced domestic violence and family dysfunction.
They are not the people that Labor – Andrews and Anthony Albanese – needs to hold onto or woo to win the next state and federal elections.
Victorian Labor has lost a lot of skin over the fourth lockdown, with restrictions now bleeding into their fourth week, making a lie of government claims that it would be a short, sharp fix. As the restrictions linger, the government is increasingly concerned about the political impact. There is open discussion about the pushback against the conservative health advice that has been the hallmark of Andrews’ response.
There are so many nuances and contradictions in the environment that Victorian Labor has created, all of which lead back to the political management of the health advice.
The comparisons with NSW are stark. If – and it’s an if – NSW manages to nut its way through another outbreak in Sydney, it will merely add weight to the view that Victoria needs to find a better way out of the pandemic.
It is too much to say that chief health officer Brett Sutton is on the brink of losing his job, but he is definitely under growing internal pressure, with pushback among Labor MPs who know the lockdown anger among working class people. Particularly those with small businesses or casual jobs that are being smashed by the shutdowns.
There is a strong view in government that people are tired of Sutton’s relentlessly negative messaging. There are questions being asked about whether the government would be better off with a new CHO, namely Sutton’s deputy Allen Cheng, who presents a bit like a friendly GP.
The most likely outcome is Sutton will stay as long as he wants the job but there would be few complaints at the highest levels of government if he were to walk.
Again, at the very heart of Andrews’ challenges when he returns to work in a week is how to make the health advice marry with community expectations.
AMA federal president Omar Khorshid underscores the contradiction facing all governments. Australia has done comparatively well only because of the strength of political leadership and the co-operation of the community in following the health advice.
“And our population really has been very compliant,’’ Khorshid says.
It’s not in any way easy to manage, particularly in a country where the virus numbers have been so low but the fear of infection has been so high.
The contrast with Britain, for example, is obvious. While the UK is more advanced on vaccinations, it is still battling new infections in the order of 10,000 a day on the back of a total of nearly 130,000 deaths.
That is why people there are prepared to debate the merits of further or extended restrictions.
It is the reverse scenario in Victoria, where vaccinations are low but infections are, by world standards, incredibly low.
When Andrews returns on June 28, he won’t be able to govern the way he did before his fall. He will have to engineer a new way that recognises Australia is moving towards being vaccinated and the low infection rates belie the need for such punitive shutdown measures.
Think closing down far western Victoria when there is no virus to speak of.
Andrews will need to suspend the relentless fearmongering and replace it with more nuanced, positive messaging that highlights the gains Australia has made but acknowledges the ongoing challenges Covid-19 presents. It won’t be easy.
Tim McColl Jones is a brand and marketing expert who has worked on some of Australia’s biggest campaigns, including for Qantas and Tourism Australia. He cautions that any positioning needs to be realistic.
While it’s important to be optimistic, the virus is unpredictable and there is a real risk there will be a “long tail” to the pandemic.
“I think it’s dangerous to think that an ad campaign or a communication strategy is going to change things on its own,’’ McColl Jones says.
While the #IStandWithDan cohort faces waning political influence, Labor still believes it has an unprecedented capacity to speak directly to its people. When Andrews signalled his imminent return to the Victorian premiership, he chose his preferred platform, Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook, at 8.11pm on June 12.
In the past decade, Andrews has amassed 994,569 Facebook followers, or roughly one in seven Victorians. He has a greater following than the Prime Minister (764,569) and dwarfs his NSW and Queensland counterparts, who combined can’t even reach half of Andrews’ followers on their official pages.
For years this Facebook presence has provided Labor with an unfiltered outlet to sell Andrews’s messages and craft an image of a calm, confident family man on the move.
It’s all been carefully choreographed, just as it was last weekend when he provided the first moving images of himself in months, thanking some of the key people who not only helped him recover but helped him get elected in 2014.
The “ambos” were front and centre in his messaging, so were the nurses and doctors, all people who have benefited from Labor’s political strategy of pumping money into hospitals and providing wage increases.
It’s been a political formula that has worked, but for how long, particularly when these groups have been protected financially against the virus?
It is a fair bet that the majority of the state’s 7 million people are just looking for some light relief, with thousands of heat-seeking Victorians desperate to make their way to Queensland for the winter break, but not knowing whether governments will crush their holiday ambitions.
First-world problems? Sure.
But as federal Tourism Minister Dan Tehan said, there have been a lot of people, particularly in country and regional areas, who have done lockdown heavy lifting when there has been few or no virus cases.
“It is vital that families are allowed to get away,” he said.
What’s needed is some balance. It’s something the #IStandWithDan brigade probably can’t comprehend.
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The #IStandWithDan crew have lost their balance.