Bypassing political norms put Andrews on road to longevity
Nine men and one woman have had the honour of being premier of Victoria since Sir Henry Bolte retired in 1972 after 17 years in the post.
Of the nine, four had been teachers before entering parliament. Two were lawyers. One was an architect, another a veterinarian, yet another an advertising man. Only one eschewed a pre-parliamentary career and pursued politics as a full-time vocation straight after completing his university studies, working first as an electorate officer and then as a party official. Should we be surprised that this last-mentioned premier is the incumbent, Daniel Andrews?
Premier Daniel Andrews tours the new Monash Heart Hospital on Sunday. Credit:Pool
Andrews is a political beast. He entered parliament aged 30 and never spent a day as a backbencher looking for something to do; he was immediately appointed a parliamentary secretary. At 34, he became a minister. At 38, he took over as Labor leader. At 42, he became premier. Now, at 50, he’s racked up 3000 days in that job and is entitled to hold it for a thousand more.
How has he achieved this? Through astute political judgment, a near-total lack of sentimentality about foes and friends alike, spectacular luck with his opponents, and the coincidence of his rise with the spread of digital and social media, allowing him to bypass traditional forms of accountability.
Andrews understands that governing today can never be just about the politics. Even if you can play that game well, it won’t be enough to sustain electoral support. It must be accompanied by active policy implementation. This was the lesson of Jeff Kennett’s spectacular election loss in 1999. Talking about governing for the future and regularly promising a social dividend for Victorians, which Kennett did, is all well and good, but people need to see and feel the government doing things – without let-up.
This is especially so when the state and its capital city are growing at a historically fast clip. After the setbacks of the pandemic lockdowns, Melbourne is back on track to overtake Sydney as the country’s most populous city within the next 10 years. Demand for services and roads and schools and hospitals will only increase, and every future government will struggle to keep up, just as Andrews’ government does.
Two key shifts have underpinned Andrews’ ascendancy. One is the changing social and political complexion of the state brought about by the heavy influx of Asian migrants as the state has boomed. The Labor Party has invested substantially in making connections in these communities and the results have been there to see in the successive landslide victories of 2018 and 2022.
The other is the decline in the capacity of the mainstream or legacy media – newspapers, talkback radio, free-to-air and pay-TV news – to influence political outcomes. Simultaneously, the reach of social media has expanded, giving Andrews access to a growing cohort of young voters attracted to his unyielding pursuit of “progressive” social policies.
Andrews intuited early in his time as leader that the old media rules were no longer operating. His travails in 2020 showed how much things had changed: the government’s leader in the upper house resigned; the Victorian ALP was suspended by the national executive because of a branch-stacking scandal, leading to one minister being sacked and two more ministers resigning; the hotel quarantine catastrophe led to the resignations of yet another minister and two departmental heads. Once, any of these events would have given a government the wobbles or worse. But no.
More than that, Andrews gave not even a hint of regret that so many senior colleagues had been added to the scrapheap. He just kept going. Most voters were not turned off by his ruthlessness. Even the interminably long media conferences Andrews gave most days during lockdowns ended up working in his favour, with the attempted “gotcha” questions from reporters doing more for the premier’s standing than theirs. This is not all to the good. It means that not just Andrews, but future premiers, can successfully wait out serious controversies on the assumption that the public’s attention is too diffuse for most political issues to escalate.
Plain luck has helped Andrews. The Liberal Party has been in poor order since Kennett’s final defeat. In Andrews’ time as leader, his opponents have been the Liberals’ one election winner, Ted Baillieu, who seemed curiously inert as premier. His successor, Denis Napthine, was a Kennett-era relic.
And then came Matthew Guy, whose purpose in aspiring to be premier never seemed clear. New leader John Pesutto has a mighty job ahead of him. No premier since Bolte, who came to power at the outset of the Labor Party’s big split in 1955, has had such similar good fortune as Andrews.
Andrews is a transactional leader, in politics to be listened to or in some cases respected but never loved – or even well-known as a person. After he decides to go or is given his marching orders, don’t expect him to stay in the public sphere as Kennett has. He’s in politics to do a job for the party in which he immersed himself at the very onset of his adulthood, and once the job is over, it will be over. That’s the deal.
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