Time to stop giving Australia’s top honours to populist politicians

Former Labor premiers Mark McGowan and Daniel Andrews. Picture: AAP

Daniel Andrews and Mark McGowan – who led quasi-police states during the pandemic, ingratiated themselves to Chinese officials and left behind weaker governments – have received top honours for caring more about politics than substance.

In another example of how out of touch elite institutions are, four of the six Australians who received the top King’s Birthday honours list gong are politicians or politically aligned.

Anthony Albanese, who conveniently excluded the governments led by Andrews and McGowan from his mickey mouse Covid inquiry, predictably swung in behind his Labor comrades on Monday and defended politicians being lauded with ­honours.

Andrews and McGowan, alongside former Queensland premier Annastacia Palaszczuk, oversaw the nation’s most draconian and extreme Covid-19 restrictions, lockdowns and border bans.

The Andrews government ordered the world’s longest lockdowns, which crippled the Victorian economy and heaped pressure on families, healthcare workers and business owners.

It also made fatal decisions linked with mass breakouts in aged-care homes and waves of Covid infections and deaths.

Andrews, whose decision to scrap the 2026 Commonwealth Games cost Victorians almost $600m, led massive blowouts and delays on major infrastructure projects. He left behind Australia’s worst-performing budget gripped with eye-watering debt and record levels of government spending. In the past 15 years, the number of Victorian government employees has jumped by 60 per cent, double the pace of population growth.

McGowan, who like Andrews was a populist and delivered electoral success for the ALP in Western Australia, relished his high-profile parochial battles with billionaire Queensland mining magnate Clive Palmer and ­imposed hard borders under a false Covid-zero pretence.

The former premiers, considered by security hawks as “sinophiles”, were eager to promote their relationships with high-ranking members of Xi Jinping’s Chinese Communist Party.

At the height of Scott Morrison’s breakdown in diplomatic, trade and security ties with Beijing, McGowan and Andrews maintained their states’ relationships with China. Given the importance of China to WA’s resources, McGowan’s strategy played to economic strength with little regard for wider geostrategic concerns about Xi’s aggression and foreign interference in the Indo-Pacific region.

Asked whether politicians should be honoured, Albanese said “the processes are … independent, at arm’s length from government”.

“Both Daniel Andrews and Mark McGowan were very successful to their respective states.”

The reasons for Andrews and McGowan being awarded the Companion of the Order of Australia consisted of 22 and 21-word paragraphs.

Andrews was bestowed with an AC “for eminent service to the people and parliament of Victoria, to public health, to policy and regulatory reform, and to infrastructure development”.

McGowan’s gong was “for eminent service to the people and parliament of Western Australia, to public health and education, and to international trade ­relations”.

Andrews and McGowan are two of the biggest political animals to have emerged in recent years. Between them, the pair were state MPs for almost 48 years.

Andrews’s honours biography shows he joined the Australian Labor Party in 1993, worked as Victorian branch assistant secretary in the early 2000s before entering politics at age 30.

McGowan’s biography shows he joined the ALP in 1984 and served as City of Rockingham councillor and deputy mayor aged 27-29 while still in the Royal Australian Navy from 1989-96, before entering state parliament at 29.

The decision to hand Andrews and McGowan gongs for “eminent service to public health” so soon after the Covid pandemic will leave many Australians scratching their heads.

Australia’s top honours should not be awarded to career politicians simply for doing their jobs.

Paul Keating and Kevin Rudd adopted this position.

While Rudd eventually accepted an AC in 2019 after deciding he had made contributions beyond politics, Keating is the only contemporary prime minister to reject the honour.

Morrison, who quit politics in February, did not feature in Monday’s honours list.

Keating’s long-held belief that honours should be reserved for unrecognised achievers is the right position that the majority of Australians would endorse.