Much of the commentary around the emergence of Jacinta Allan as Victoria’s 49th premier is a testament to a universal truth that almost nothing is immune from partisan political framing.
The 50-year-old political veteran was elected unopposed yesterday, though not without a factional skirmish from the right on the part of her now deputy, Ben Carroll.
At once this was seized upon by some as a symptom of a party beset by hopeless internal political division, and one whose “messy handover of power” betrays a leader who plainly exudes less authority than her predecessor and confidant, Daniel Andrews.
Absent Carroll’s intervention, however, the pundits undoubtedly would have rounded on both Allan and the party more generally for marching to Andrews’ orders, or for otherwise manifesting the same autocratic streak and arrogance so many relentless critics associate with the former premier.
So there awaited two unbecoming, negative versions of reality, flickering back and forth like a lenticular hologram, ready for deployment whatever the outcome.
The more sober analysis is, as a former member for Kooyong Petro Georgiou once said, that personal political ambition in politics on the part of anyone, but particularly those who sit in cabinet, is hardly novel. If anything, it’s the general rule.
Which is why the leadership ascendancy of neither Allan nor Carroll on Wednesday was particularly surprising, especially in circumstances where so many of the party’s star performers had vacated the stage in recent months.
This is especially true with respect to Allan, whose long-time mentor, former premier Steve Bracks, credits her with having helped the party crack the iron grip of Jeff Kennett in the 1999 election.
Allan, then 25, made history as the youngest woman to be elected to the Victorian Parliament. By the time of the next election, which Labor won in a landslide, she flirted with history again, having secured a seat in cabinet as minister for employment and youth affairs.
“I promoted two people into cabinet [in 2002],” Bracks told The Australian yesterday, “And I thought at the time either one of them could become premier. The two were Tim Holding, who was 28, and Jacinta Allan, who was also 28.
“She was talented, skilled and articulate. She could handle a brief very well, so I wanted to give her a go.”
Talented, skilled and articulate are qualities both her supporters and detractors appear to agree on. The latter would have us add to that list her tendency, in their view, to be abrupt — the idea that as a person reduced to their essentials, Allan is a “political animal” and no more.
To that end, some might point to her inaugural speech, where she cracked convention by unloading on the former Kennett government. Or her decision in 2018 to direct the state’s trains operators to remove Sky News from railway stations after the broadcasters’ much-criticised decision to platform white supremacist Blair Cottrell.
The difficulty with neat descriptions such as “political animal”, however, is that they apply so unevenly between men and women who occupy positions of power and wield it in all its soft blends and hard extremes. After all, some would point to the Kennett era as a particularly poisonous time for Victoria and say Allan’s speech was justified. And few would disagree with her intervention on the Sky News front.
Perhaps more to the point, how many parliamentarians from the major parties could seriously claim they do not meet the description of a “political animal” with precision? And is it necessarily a bad thing in politics? Someone like Scott Morrison resoundingly makes the case for “yes” as well as someone like Julia Gillard makes the case for “no”.
As Allan is concerned, it’d surely be one of the reasons Andrews selected her as the government’s leader of the house between 2014 and 2022 — and why she’s sat on the frontbench for some 20 years.
Perhaps though it’d be fairer to withhold judgment and wait and see. Contrary to what some say, this isn’t a “glass cliff” situation, where the party has selected a woman to take on the leadership in uncongenial political circumstances.
Across the other side of the house still sits the motley shitshow that passes for the opposition, which — as much as the Dan factor — secured Labor its latest landslide victory in November. And no, most Victorians couldn’t care less about the cancellation of the Commonwealth Games.
