To anyone watching the actual results coming in, The Sydney Morning Herald’s early contention that Premier Dan Andrews’ Labor government had clinched a “narrow” victory in Saturday’s Victorian election might have been baffling.
Even at this premature stage, it was abundantly clear Labor was to hold its majority, with the Coalition picking up well under 30 of the 45 seats required. It was in keeping with the strange disconnect between the media narrative around the election and what the reality turned out to be.
Stairgate and Bikegate
In early November, the Herald Sun set the tone for the relevance and accuracy of much of the state’s election coverage by zapping back to life two dead stories like a conspiracy-poisoned Dr Frankenstein. First was the relentless re-coverage of a 2013 car accident that involved the Andrews family and a young cyclist — the whole thing has already been dredged up once before in 2017, and there was nothing new to report.
Then, even weirder, came “stairgate”, a front-page piece heavily alluding to theories that the public hadn’t been told the whole truth about how Andrews sustained a serious back injury in March 2021. Originally been spouted in far-right anti-lockdown circles, these first flowed into the mainstream via opposition treasurer Louise Staley.
Beyond all that was, of course, the general Hun of it all:
The polls
The other major theme across the board was the desperate attempts to drum up a narrative that the election was going to be close, despite pretty consistent evidence it wouldn’t be. The possibility of a minority government was brought up constantly, as well as the theory that among the slew of seats the government was in danger of losing was Andrews’ own of Mulgrave. As psephologist Kevin Bonham points out, this is hardly the first time that pearl-clutching at the thought of a hung parliament has proven way off the mark.
A few days out from the poll, the Nine papers argued that the major parties were “neck and neck” in a story about polling that showed Labor was leading 53-47 on 2PP. Eagle-eyed viewers may recognise this as far from neck and neck, and which may explain the whole “narrow victory” thing.
The aftermath
Of course, in Australian journalism, it doesn’t matter if you get it wrong — that’s just more content. The Age savvily quoted former ALP state secretary Nicholas Reece from Andrews’ election night celebration, who said a loud minority of vitriolic anti-Dan sentiment “created a distorted picture in the media … that this election was going to be close”. So that’s what it was.
But this is nothing compared to the “Sky after dark” fringe, whence much of that distortion came. Andrew Bolt responded to Labor’s comfortable win by arguing Andrews had been “fatally wounded” and should quit.
Former Tony Abbott chief of staff Peta Credlin, who had recently produced a documentary called The Cult of Daniel Andrews, spent Sky’s election coverage looking as though her soul was leaving her body — while over on Outsiders, which increasingly resembles a self-help group more than a political panel show, Rowan Dean, so furious he could barely get a sentence out, chalked the result up to “woke Liberals” abandoning conservatives.
And who could deny the massive and catastrophic jump to the left represented by the preselection of Moira Deeming, Renee Heath, Timothy Dragan and Michael Piastrino? Who but a bunch of bed-wetting quasi-socialists would direct their preferences to figures like Catherine Cumming and Tylere Baker-Pearce?
Which put us in mind of the words of former Liberal strategist Tony Barry, who spent the ABC’s election night coverage visibly seething at the state of the Liberal Party: “[It’s] beginning to look like Jonestown. They keep drinking the Kool-Aid”.
