One year on, Premier Jacinta Allan must forge a new path

“This decision has been made at a different time by a different government with a different premier.”

When Jacinta Allan uttered these words last month in defence of her decision to abandon moves to raise the age of criminal responsibility to 14, she also neatly outlined the challenges facing a premiership that will mark its first year on Friday.

Jacinta Allan faces a host of unresolved problems as she marks one year as Victorian Premier.Credit: AAP

However much she may wish to draw a line between her government and that of her predecessor Daniel Andrews, on a host of unresolved problems and embarrassing failures, Allan herself is the point of continuity between that era and the one she is trying to establish as her own.

As Minister for the Suburban Rail Loop (SRL) under Andrews, Allan was the face of the largest transport project in the state’s history, yet six years after it was announced the questions over how it is to be funded persist.

Born in secrecy, outside normal planning channels and without an independent cost-benefit analysis, the SRL still has not formally secured $11.5 billion in requested federal government support.

Premier and deputy: Daniel Andrews and Jacinta Allan a day after Labor’s 2022 election win.Credit: Luis Enrique Ascui

As The Age reported this week, repeated failures by the state government to provide necessary detail of the business case to Infrastructure Australia have put even the initial $2.2 billion promised by Anthony Albanese before the federal election in doubt.

Wednesday’s news that Glasgow will host a low-budget Commonwealth Games in 2026, with financial help from Commonwealth Games Australia and an offer of almost $200 million from the $380 million compensation paid by the Victorian government, is a reminder that Allan was also Minister for Commonwealth Games Delivery. When the Andrews government’s ambitious plan for the Games to be hosted across regional Victoria collapsed in a controversy over ballooning costs, we noted that “in a normal government, the person or people responsible for the … debacle would resign”.

Instead, Andrews smoothed the way for Allan’s succession to the premier’s office, though on his way out his housing statement left another massive spending commitment in the new government’s in-tray, which the opposition and voters are bound to look to in assessing Allan’s performance.

When the premier backtracked on the age of criminal responsibility in the face of growing public concern over youth crime numbers, Professor Eleanor Bourke, chair of the Yoorrook Justice Commission, said: “This decision is so contrary to the evidence it is difficult to comprehend.”

Despite coming from the same Socialist Left faction as Andrews, Allan has not been as strongly identified with social policy. Her decision to rule out a second injecting room also flew in the face of a report commissioned by the Andrews government from former police chief Ken Lay, but she surprised some with a U-turn on pill testing.

If the pill testing decision gave Allan an opportunity to step outside her career politician persona and talk about the anguish of a parent confronted with the death of their child, senior government sources were keen to paint a different picture, telling our state political editor Annika Smethurst that this move wasn’t the product of a progressive, liberalising impulse but part of the Bendigo-born leader’s “regional practicality”.

That could be how we end up comprehending many of Allan’s decisions: as straightforward political calculations that knock barnacles off the ship, as Tony Abbott once put it. The problem is that each barnacle removed has cast further doubt on the integrity of the vessel. May’s budget was a stark reminder of the state’s spiralling debt and one of the government’s first responses – plans to amalgamate many of Victoria’s 76 health services – was no sooner mooted than it was abandoned.

How voters respond to all this come election time will depend in no small part on the ability of the state’s Liberal Party to emerge from its years of internal warfare. The still unfolding defamation proceedings brought by MP Moira Deeming against Opposition Leader John Pesutto, complete with a secret recording and mudslinging in all directions, surely cannot help, but have not stopped him from closing the gap on Allan in polling on preferred premier to a single point.

When Allan was first made deputy premier in mid-2022, The Age suggested it was time for a rethink and greater transparency on the Suburban Rail Loop. A year into her premiership, the demand for open consultation and frank assessment of the state’s mammoth commitments across health, transport infrastructure and social policy has only grown.

When she first arrived at Spring Street, Jacinta Allan was 26, a beneficiary of the 1999 electoral backlash against Jeff Kennett’s “secret state”. She became a minister three years later. After so long in the corridors of power, can she pioneer a new way of doing things? Can she shift the narrative that this is a government long on spin and short on services?

If the answer is no, then voters are likely to judge her harshly – not only for the shortcomings of her government but also those of Daniel Andrews’ premiership. And they would be justified in doing so.