On 27 February 2003, the new MP for the outer suburban Melbourne electorate of Mulgrave rose to his feet to deliver his first speech in the Victorian parliament. Maiden speeches are traditionally where a new MP lays out their core motivation and their vision, but Daniel Andrews eschewed stirring prose or self-revelation.
There was nothing in this first outing to indicate that, 19 years later, he would become Australia’s longest-serving incumbent government leader and one of the country’s most significant politicians.
Politics, he said, was “an honourable profession”.
The source of that honour? “Hospitals when we are sick; schools to give our kids the best start possible and a police force that is given the resources it needs … these are the things that define state politics – at least they should.”
A former senior public servant who has worked closely with Andrews says, “I doubt if he would change the tenor of that speech today.” He would not add any grand words: “He thinks there is a limited market for visionary leaders”.
Andrews’ political methodology is a hard-boiled, pared down, practical and sometimes ruthless exercise of power, rather than the product of intellectualising or rhetorical flourish. He thinks in big pictures, but talks small and concrete.
The former public servant says: “He is a visionary. But he is a visionary without a guiding philosophy.”
On 26 November, Andrews will seek another four years as Victorian premier. If he succeeds, as all the polls and pundits expect him to do, he will go on to lead the state for a total of 12 years. This is the kind of longevity that changes societies, dominates notions of the politically possible, and defines communities.
Yet to those outside Victoria, and many of those within, Andrews’ grip on the state can be baffling.
He has, in his second term, confined Victorians to their homes in the strictest Covid lockdown measures in the country and some of the most rigid in the world. His government has faltered, made very public mistakes, been wrapped up in scandal, and performed about-turns. The state’s levels of debt are soaring. Every dinner party or school-gate gathering includes a story about a health system on its knees.
Sections of the media, particularly the Murdoch-owned tabloid the Herald-Sun, have been relentlessly negative about every aspect of the Andrews government, sometimes with scant respect for the facts. Popular radio hosts also like to give him a kicking. The Nine Entertainment-owned Age newspaper is more balanced, but hardly his fan.
And yet his public opinion ratings are resilient. He seems untouchable.
The story of Victoria as it approaches the election is partly about the nature of the state, and the differences between it and the rest of Australia.
It is also about modern Australian political leadership, and in particular the kind of Labor leader that emerges from factional warfare and party dysfunction. No part of the ALP is more toxic than the Victorian state branch. And nowhere is the Liberal party more hapless.
But it is also about this man, Daniel Andrews. Even before a serious back injury forced him to take six months off work, he walked in a hunched-forward fashion, as though about to push through a scrum. He is earnest, dour and dogged – the reverse of charismatic – and yet, as he demonstrated in his extraordinary run of 120 answer-all-questions Covid press conferences, oddly compelling.
Character and compassion
So close to an election, even Andrews’ normal critics are reluctant to speak for an essay of this sort. But the lineaments to his persona and personal history are well known, and imprinted on the public consciousness.
A recent biography of Andrews by political journalist for the Age Sumeyya Ilanbey reported that some of Andrews’ colleagues regard him as a narcissist. That is to pathologise what others describe as a strongman style – determined and intolerant of dissent – combined with a highly centralised approach to government.
Yet at times he shows a courageous compassion. On the day the high court cleared the Catholic then archbishop George Pell of child sexual abuse allegations, Andrews tweeted that he made no comment on the decision: “But I have a message for every single victim and survivor of child sex abuse: I see you. I hear you. I believe you.”
I make no comment about today’s High Court decision.
— Dan Andrews (@DanielAndrewsMP) April 7, 2020
But I have a message for every single victim and survivor of child sex abuse:
I see you.
I hear you.
I believe you.https://t.co/gu9Tkw2CLu
A former cabinet minister interviewed for this article commented: “I don’t particularly get on with Dan on a personal level. He is a very hard man. But look at that. He didn’t need to say it. He didn’t need to say anything at all. For those who say he is a narcissist – consider the empathy. And in that I see the roots of his progressiveness.”
People draw a comparison with Anthony Albanese. The two men are friends, having shared a flat in Canberra when Andrews was working as a political staffer. Both Andrews and Albanese rose to be assistant secretaries of their state ALP organisations – the most senior positions for the Left faction – Albanese in NSW, Andrews in Victoria. Both were known as apparatchiks and accomplished factional operators before entering parliament.
There are other similarities: they have in common, for example, a reputation for “the freezer” – a willingness to sideline rivals and those who have displeased them. But there are also important differences. Those who knew Albanese back in the day of inner Sydney factional battles talk about how passionate he was, sentimental, and how quick to tears. Nobody has those kinds of stories about Andrews.
Andrews was born in 1972 to bank workers who had left their jobs to start a milk bar in the working-class suburb of Glenroy, before selling the business and moving to Wangaratta, where Andrews’ father worked delivering Don Smallgoods. His mother returned to work as a bank teller. Andrews’ father reportedly voted National party, but the young man’s main political influence was his maternal grandfather, Michael White, a train driver and committed trade unionist.
Like Albanese, Andrews was raised a Catholic, but today retains the culture rather than the whole belief system. His Catholicism did not prevent him from backing the decriminalisation of abortion laws when he was health minister, nor introducing voluntary assisted dying as premier, nor his post-Pell verdict tweet.
At Monash University, he largely bypassed student politics for the main game, working casually for the federal MP Alan Griffin. Upon graduation, it became a full-time job.
The work set the pattern for his methods now, a practical approach that largely overlooks the media and focuses instead on speaking direct to people, tackling problems where they live, and building communities of interest – while either branch stacking or vigorously recruiting (depending on your point of view) to build Griffin’s factional power base.
From his early 20s, says one of those who knew him at the time, Andrews was clever but not brilliant, diligent and “prematurely middle-aged”. He was heavier and daggier than he is now and a bit precious. He used to object to being called “Dan”. It had to be Daniel.
The shift from Daniel to Dan was part of an image makeover, including better suits, glasses and weight loss when – in the wake of the 2010 defeat of the Brumby Labor government – he took the party leadership, correctly predicting that Labor could return to government with him as premier in just one term.
Labor now looks like the natural party of government in Victoria. It has been in office for three-quarters of the last four decades. The ALP has also won the two-party preferred vote in Victoria in 12 of the past 14 federal elections.
Andrews’ main legacy is already clear: the huge infrastructure and public transport projects that will mould life in Australia’s fastest growing capital for the century ahead. These range from the hugely ambitious 90km suburban rail loop to the humbler – yet also transformational, for individual commuters – program to remove level crossings that clog the suburbs.
Added to this record are the social reforms. Victoria under Andrews became the first state to legalise voluntary assisted dying. It held a landmark royal commission into family violence. It is the first to start the process of negotiating a treaty with First Nations people – a fraught process mired in problems, but far ahead of any other jurisdiction. It has decriminalised street-based sex work.
As the previous federal government stepped away from investment in early childhood development, the Andrews government made kindergarten free from next year for three- and four-year-olds, saving families up to $2,000 a child. In June this year, together with NSW, it added a new year of universal prep for four-year-olds from 2025. During the pandemic, there was Australia’s first scheme to provide sick pay for casual workers.
These initiatives are mostly overlooked by the media when they struggle to explain why Victorians are, at worst, only manageably discontented with their government.
A unique political culture
Victoria has long been Australia’s most progressive, politically minded state. The significance of this is often missed by outsiders who misunderstand Andrews’ grip.
Victoria is one of only two states not founded on convict transportation. It was settled by ex-convicts and the gold rushes saw huge numbers of people from all social classes mixing in the same squalor, united in their resentment of the heavy hand of colonial government. The sentiments that led to the Eureka Stockade were widely felt.
Thanks to the gold rushes, there was money to build, but a scant labour force – meaning the union movement, and hence the Labor party – got its firmest footing in Victoria. Key reforms, such as the eight-hour working day, were won here first.
More than in NSW, Victorians expect that if there is a problem in society, government will take the lead in fixing it. Successful Victorian premiers on both sides of politics have been activists. Andrews is in this tradition.
Also in the culture is a greater intolerance of the politics of division. It may take years to unpick the rights and wrongs of Australia’s Covid response, and the Victorian lockdowns in particular; but opinion polls showed that when things were at their worst, most Victorians accepted Andrews’ call for them to pull together, even when it was resented.
When Andrews said the then federal treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, was “just a Liberal” rather than a true Victorian, in response to Frydenberg’s attacks on the Andrews pandemic response, you could feel the barb hit home. Some argue it was on that day that Frydenberg lost his grip on the electorate of Kooyong, which fell to the independent Monique Ryan at the federal election.
Scandal, resignations, and the opposition
The simplest answer to why Daniel Andrews remains ascendant despite faults and missteps is the parlous state of the Liberal party – no longer the broad-based party of Fraser and Menzies. Since Andrews came to power, local Liberal leaders have blundered around the state as though they have arrived in a foreign country and can’t quite understand the locals.
The issue was tacitly acknowledged this week when the NSW Liberal treasurer, Matt Kean – a leading progressive – visited Victoria. A week earlier, the son of former Liberal premier Ted Baillieu, Rob Baillieu, suggested a Kean-like figure is needed in Victoria.
At the 2018 election, the Liberal leader Matthew Guy, supported by the Herald-Sun, tried a law-and-order campaign focusing on “African gangs” supposedly terrorising the outer suburbs. It went down like a lead balloon and Guy suffered an ignominious defeat. The supposed “crisis” disappeared the minute the election was over.
In the current campaign, Guy has been on firmer ground, focusing on the problems with Victoria’s health system and promising to cancel the suburban rail loop and devote the funds to hospitals. When it comes to health, the downside of long incumbency is that Labor cannot dodge responsibility. Andrews is a former health minister and in that role continued a long record of underfunding public health in particular. Covid also showed up longstanding faultlines.
So far, though, Andrews has outbid Guy on the hospitals and also made potentially transformative commitments to shut down remaining coal plants and replace them with state-sponsored renewable energy. This would be part of one of the fastest transitions from high pollution power to near zero emissions anywhere in the world – far outstripping what is promised nationally.
Here, then, is the vision, and Andrews as a transformational leader.
And yet, there are plenty of reasons why, in normal times, the Andrews government might be considered ripe for defeat. There has been a succession of scandals, including allegations of “industrial-scale” branch stacking by the senior minister Adem Somyurek, who quit the Labor party before he was expelled.
A joint inquiry by the Independent Broad-based Anti-corruption Commission and the Victorian ombudsman found there was not enough proof Somyurek had committed criminal offences but the investigation uncovered extensive misconduct by Labor MPs, including widespread misuse of public resources, nepotism, signatures being forged and attempts to interfere with government grants.
Two more Ibac inquiries embroiling the premier continue. They involve allegedly corrupt land deals in the city of Casey and state’s fire services reform. The premier has repeatedly refused to comment on active inquiries.
Meanwhile, in the infamous so-called red shirts affair, the Labor party was found to have misused $388,000 in parliamentary allowances to pay political campaign staff during the 2014 election.
Through scandal and resignation, there has also been an extraordinarily high turnover of ministers. Seventeen of the 22 members of Andrews’ original ministry have quit or been sacked over the last eight years. Several of them remain bitter, and have regularly and poisonously briefed journalists against their former leader, fuelling the negative media.
A favourable interpretation of the turnover, particularly four recent departures of key ministers, is that the government is refreshing itself, overcoming the normal problem of long incumbency. But the underlying testimony from multiple sources is that the Andrews cabinet is not a pleasant place to work.
The “Dan Andrews freezer” has become almost a cliche: it refers to how he does anger. Suddenly, even close allies will be cut off, their calls not returned. He has turned on colleagues and thrown people under the bus.
The infrastructure projects have all had cost overruns and other problems. The $125bn suburban rail loop (according to parliamentary budget office costings) was conceived and planned in secret in Andrews’ own department and announced during the 2018 campaign.
The Victorian Auditor-General’s Office last month filed two reviews that found the government had not properly assessed the loop, nor the associated airport rail link. The government committed to these projects without submitting them to Infrastructure Victoria, supposedly its adviser on infrastructure priorities, and without waiting for a business plan. When the business plan finally appeared, covering only the first two sections of the loop, it bent the normal rules for analysis to claim the project would have a positive benefit–cost ratio.
Characteristically, Andrews has pushed it all through nevertheless. His supporters argue that he is right to do so – that the narrow approach of treasuries is throttling Australia’s ability to build what is needed for the future. If their approach had been replicated 50 years ago, they say, most of what makes Melbourne a good place to live would never have been built.
And so Andrews pushes on, pursuing the vision, backing his own judgment and slamming the lid on doubt, questions and discontent.
Leadership born from turmoil
Some attribute Andrews’ ruthlessness during his premiership to a dysfunctional period in the Victorian Labor party, after the collapse of a stability deal negotiated between former senators Kim Carr of the Socialist Left and Stephen Conroy from the Right. This, they say, is simply what it takes to keep your footing as a leader – let alone advance a reform agenda – in the factional warfare of the modern party.
Andrews’ leadership style creates its own pathologies. Present and former public servants talk about the tentacles of the premier’s private office; how Andrews’ advisers will sit in on meetings and even seek to direct senior public servants.
The most consequential findings of Jennifer Coate’s independent inquiry into the failures of hotel quarantine that caused Victoria’s second Covid wave concerned the culture of government and public service. Senior public servants hadn’t briefed their ministers and ministers had shown a culpable lack of curiosity.
An ombudsman inquiry into the politicisation of the public service remains underway, while a separate investigation by the public service commissioner, conducted at Coate’s urging, reiterated to departmental secretaries that “the purpose of policy advice should not be to advance a particular party’s political interests”.
One senior public servant says: “If the public service in Victoria was running well, if Daniel Andrews had a different style and wasn’t a controlling figure, then these things wouldn’t need to be said.”
This is the sort of problem that only grows worse with longevity in government.
A bigger verdict ahead
If Labor is vulnerable, it is in its traditional heartland of the southern and northern urban fringe. These are the communities most affected by – and least protected from – the Covid pandemic.
One party insider predicts Labor will soon face serious challenges from independents, “and not nice polite Teal independents. These will be nasty right-wing populists prepared to exploit resentments”.
Meanwhile, the state’s net debt will – in four years’ time – exceed that of New South Wales, Queensland and Tasmania combined. The last budget piled on more debt to fix the health system. Money continues to be pumped into infrastructure, including a school building program.
Andrews would like to be remembered for his record of progressive legislation and transformational infrastructure. He has almost certainly already achieved that. These things, and the haplessness of the opposition, will likely see him re-elected.
The more important verdict will be the judgment of future generations: the people who will ride those trains, pay that debt and live in the state Daniel Andrews – more than any other modern political leader – has helped to create.
The Victoria of the future will embody both his vision, as well that lack of guiding, moderating philosophy, and the respect for proper process that might bring.
It is a powerful combination. Perhaps also a dangerous one.
