Inside story how the team behind Daniel Andrews achieved victory

“BE yourself’’ was the message given to Daniel Andrews by his image men.

STATE ELECTION 2014 - Andrews

DANIEL Andrews made political history in more ways than one. The first leader in 60 years to topple a Victorian government after a single term, he is also the first premier-elect to make his acceptance speech wearing jeans.

They weren’t just any jeans, mind you. The fabric was suitably ambiguous, the look dressy enough so that had the premier-elect been confronted by a bouncer enforcing a no-denim policy, he could have talked himself past the velvet rope. Teamed with a well-cut blazer, check shirt, rectangle-rimmed Giorgio Armani glasses and ubiquitous RM Williams boots, he was the very model of a modern political professional.

At the Mulgrave Country Club, a middle-suburban temple of chicken parmas and pokies, they couldn’t get enough of Andrews. Impatiently, they hooted and hollered through Liberal Premier Denis Napthine’s concession speech. They bellowed for federal Labor leader Bill Shorten, tonight cast as the warm-up act. Then they ushered in their new Labor hero. “We want Dan, we want Dan,’’ they chorused, faces flushed from sun and beer, as Andrews parted the red T-shirt sea.

Among the faces in the Mulgrave room were parliamentary colleagues who will be forever indebted to Andrews, the leader who spared them a fate they were all resigned to in November 2010: at least eight long years on the opposition benches. With two thumbs upturned in restrained triumph, he grinned back at them, stunned at his own success. Jill Hennessy, a Labor state MP and a 20-year friend of Andrews told The Australian the only other time she had seen him look so happy was his wedding day.

If you believe the savage Liberal Party advertising campaign rolled out during this Victorian election, you’ll know Andrews as the parliamentary stooge of the CFMEU, a militant construction union synonymous with thuggery and intimidation. Forget the Armani glasses; his is the black-and-white face in a hard hat, with Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s archetypal union villain John Setka whispering industrial mischief in his ear. In the final, desperate days of a losing campaign, Foreign Minister Julie Bishop walked the streets of an uber-marginal Melbourne seat denouncing Andrews as a “CFMEU hack.’’

What the results of Saturday’s election showed, particularly the state-wide swing against the Coalition parties in safe and marginal seats alike, is that most voters either ignored the ads or simply didn’t buy the message.

Federal MP Andrew Giles, a former convener of the socialist left faction that houses the CFMEU, says the Liberal Party pitch was aimed at Liberal Party activists rather than swinging voters. Although Andrews is a member of the socialist left and thus factionally aligned with the CFMEU, the notion of this 42-year-old career political operative and obsessive weekend golfer being in league with the lawless fringes of the union movement is faintly ridiculous to anyone who meets Andrews, much less knows him well.

“If I was to go through Daniel’s key qualities he is an incredibly intelligent guy, he is an incredibly hardworking guy and he takes public life extraordinarily seriously,’’ Giles says. “Daniel’s finest quality is his decency.’’

To illustrate this, Giles recalls the long nights he spent talking with Andrews when Gavin Jennings, then a minister in the Brumby government, was hospitalised after a serious heart attack. Jennings was a friend of Andrews and, at the time, Giles’s boss. “He put everything to one side to show his support for a friend and a colleague,’’ Giles says. In the Andrews government, Jennings is expected to serve as health minister.

Victoria’s next deputy premier, James Merlino, is also not surprised the Coalition scare campaign fell flat. “I always knew that once people got more of a look at Daniel that he would resonate. He is incredibly smart but he is just a normal guy. He grew up in the country, he is a suburban dad, he is one of us.’’

Labor’s success in the Victorian election was built in no small part on enabling more voters to see this side of Andrews.

Having risen through the party from the ranks of Young Labor as an accomplished backroom strategist and organiser, Andrews’s natural place is not in front of a TV camera. He was known in the early years of his parliamentary career for being thin-skinned. He suffered from smartest-guy-in-the-room syndrome, when the temptation is to bludgeon people with argument rather than listen to a counter view.

What Darren Moss saw in Andrews when he first met him, in the wake of Labor’s shock 2010 election loss, bore no resemblance to the figure he had seen on TV or Youtube clips. As a principal creative of the Moss Group advertising agency, Moss has helped sell everything from socks to sports shoes to airlines, but never worked in political advertising. His early advice to Andrews was simple: be yourself.

“That guy you are now seeing is not a construct, that is the real thing,’’ Moss says. “Our advice was maybe don’t put the politician mode on, be yourself. When you sit down and chat with him he is very warm and reasonable, articulate, caring and genuine. The advice was what you are doing now, just do that in front of the camera.’’

The Andrews makeover has been extensive. He has gone on a diet and lost his parliamentary paunch, ditched the ill-fitting suits that accentuated the stoop in his shoulders, done away with ties for all but the most formal occasions and popped the top button of his business shirts. The result isn’t a Queer Eye for the Straight Guy transformation but a public coming-out of a more authentic Andrews. “People are really sick of fake politicians,’’ Moss says. “The strategy really was, let’s show the genuine Daniel.’’

Part of this involved introducing Victorians to Dan Andrews. Moss says that it was during an advertising shoot, in which Andrews was featuring alongside his wife and three children, that Cath Andrews kept calling her husband Dan. Moss liked the warm familiarity of it. The script for the ad was quickly changed.

Jill Hennessy says she has known the real Andrews since the pair met at Monash University. With the ALP party in full swing at the Mulgrave Country Club, she plants a joyous kiss on the cheeks of Andrew’s parents, Bob and Jan, who have both featured in Labor’s campaign. “Four years ago no one had great optimism that we were going to win back government,’’ she says. “Anyone that knows him or personally engages with him understands how warm and intelligent and smart he is. Part of the success of the last four years has been revealing that to the Victorian community.’’

IN the late hours of Saturday night, as the ALP party starts to wind down, Merlino sits at the back of the room, savouring the moment. Merlino was a senior minister in Victoria’s previous Labor government. In the immediate aftermath of the 2010 election loss, he assumed a long time in opposition beckoned. That assumption changed soon after Andrews took over the leadership from the retiring John Brumby.

“I have always had great confidence in Daniel,’’ he says. “It takes a lot of guts and inner resolve to take on the leadership of a party when you lose after a long period in government, but I quickly realised that under his leadership, a chance of victory in 2014 was real. I saw in Daniel a chance to win.’’

Andrews takes an early leave from the club and Merlino will soon follow. Victoria’s government-in-waiting is impatient to get to work and mindful of the double-edged lesson from this election: whatever you intend to achieve in politics, you’d best get on with it in your first term.

“This will be a bit of a seismic shift in politics in this country,’’ Merlino says. “You can lose in one term; it is a message to us as an incoming government and to governments right across the country.’’

For his first day back at work yesterday, Andrews again wears jeans, this time a more casual, Sunday pair. Pausing outside a treasury building where officials are waiting to brief him on the legality of releasing commercially sensitive documents relating to the Napthine government’s contentious East-West Link road project, he promises to recall parliament before Christmas to start pushing through his legislative agenda.

The Labor buzz words in this campaign are ‘‘optimistic’’ and ‘‘positive’’. Andrews repeats them as he does the Sunday TV shows, outlining his immediate plans to provide payroll tax concessions to employers who hire long-term unemployed, remove rail level crossings, strike industrial peace with paramedics, restore TAFE funding and establish a royal commission into family violence.

“My strong view is that Victorians and indeed perhaps many other Australians are sick and tired of the old, negative politics,’’ he says. “They want a positive and optimistic plan that is grounded in common sense, that comes from hard work, that is all about providing those things that are so important in local communities.’’

It won’t be long until this is put to another electoral test. On March 28 next year, NSW voters will go to the polls and the Moss Group has already begun work on Labor’s campaign. NSW ALP leader John Robertson faces a similar task to Andrews — tipping out a Coalition government after a single term in office. Robertson’s prospects against the popular Baird government seem bleak but as Victoria showed on Saturday, nothing is impossible in politics any more.