Markets 
Victoria is about to undergo an identity change. The Labor government, dominant in the state throughout this century, is set to crash and with it will go an entire political era. Victorians of a certain age have seen this before. They will recall the 1982 state election that concluded 27 years of continuous Liberal government, first under Henry Bolte and then Dick Hamer and briefly Lindsay Thompson. It was as though Rome had fallen.
Victoria had been such a thoroughly Liberal state that the party had governed during those 27 years in its own right, with no need to form a coalition with the Country Party, the forerunner to today’s National Party. Three terms of Labor under John Cain and then Joan Kirner, and two terms of Coalition government headed by Jeff Kennett followed.
When the Kennett government lost office to Labor under Steve Bracks in 1999, a new 27-year political era, this time of Labor dominance – with six out of seven election wins – began. Two months from now, it’s odds-on that voters will show Labor the exit, leaving it with a monumental rebuilding challenge.
No two periods in history ever fully align. As the saying goes, history doesn’t repeat, but it does rhyme. There was a surprise interruption – surprising even to the victors – in this current era when the Coalition under Ted Baillieu just got over the line at the 2010 election. They were four unhappy years for the winners. Victorian voters quickly developed buyer’s remorse, the Liberals began infighting, Baillieu was replaced by Denis Napthine halfway through the term, and normal service was resumed with the election of Labor under Daniel Andrews in 2014.
Which, after nine years under Andrews, almost three under Jacinta Allan and a few months under Ben Carroll, brings us to this inflection point in the state’s democracy. The prevailing verities are being smashed. The established Labor v Coalition model, with the great bulk of the primary votes going to those two sides – more than 71 per cent at the 2022 election – will be subject to a profound rearrangement. This election will for the most part be a three-way contest between Labor, the Coalition and One Nation.
How did we get here? Obviously, something much bigger is going on across the developed world with declining trust in established democratic institutions giving rise to a surge in support for One Nation and its ilk. And three terms is generally seen as the natural maximum for modern governments. But the belligerence and wilful deafness of the Victorian government, especially in the period after the pandemic, has been a thing to behold.
Labor still has its supporters. Polls suggest about 25 per cent of voters would give the party their primary vote if an election were held now. But the contempt expressed towards the government by many of the remaining 75 per cent is remarkable. This was not the case when the Brumby government lost the 2010 election.
The problems that developed under Andrews and continued under Allan were linked to culture, structure and personality. The longer Andrews was premier, the more arrogant and dictatorial he became, freezing out colleagues who asked too many questions or who found themselves in difficulty. He sought to do what no leader should ever do and that was to orchestrate his succession.
He didn’t even want Allan to have to face a caucus ballot to succeed him when he announced that he was stepping down in 2023 – a year after he assured voters he would serve a full term as premier. When Carroll insisted on a ballot, Andrews blew his stack. There was no good reason for Andrews to favour Allan, apart from her fidelity to him.
Andrews had shown himself either incapable of, or uninterested in, trying to heal Victorian society after the pandemic lockdowns. This was extraordinary given that the government’s mishandling of hotel quarantine had led to hundreds of deaths and shamed the state. He and too many of his colleagues failed to read the signs of social distress. The government had been given a reprieve by the public in the 2022 election: its vote took a hit but perversely, its parliamentary majority grew slightly.
Clearly, the public expected a better performance attuned to its anxieties and changed expectations. There was a chance for Labor to reset under Jacinta Allan, but no dice. She was the apotheosis of the modern Victorian state Labor politician, especially its ministers late in its third term – technocrats spouting prepared lines, media-trained to within an inch of their lives, who had lived almost all of their adult lives inside the Labor Party. Former government ministers were aghast that she didn’t halt the Suburban Rail Loop and continued on with Andrews’ daily high-vis, hardhat routine.
It was clear within six months of Allan taking over that she would not be able to cut it, but a combination of caucus weakness and factional pigheadedness kept her in the post for two more years, an unbelievable waste of time. Meanwhile, the state branch, after years of being subject to federal intervention over a branch stacking scandal, had become a Potemkin village, all but ceasing to be a representative community-based organisation. A small cabal of factional chiefs determines every outcome and genuine, contested preselections are rare.
The government dragged the chain on issue after issue – home invasions, tobacco store firebombings and organised crime, bail for youth offenders, gang violence, homelessness, illicit drug use, the degradation of retail strips. There was no leadership. And the potholes! How does a government that prides itself on its approach to infrastructure fail to make that issue a priority and communicate it effectively to the public?
All respect to Liberal leader Jess Wilson for not taking a backward step and grasping the leadership at such a tender age, but what is her plan? Seasoned Liberals from the Kennett years privately express doubts about the quality of Wilson’s senior team and the level of work that’s gone into developing a coherent policy program – a rescue plan for a state that feels poorly about itself. Will it matter to most Victorians? Probably not. For Wilson, fixing the potholes can be her version of Andrews’ politically successful level crossings removal program. Whether we ever see long periods of incumbency again in this atomised age is another matter.
Shaun Carney is a regular columnist, an author and former state editor and associate editor of The Age.
Get a weekly wrap of views that will challenge, champion and inform your own. Sign up for our Opinion newsletter.
Shaun Carney is a regular columnist, an author and former associate editor of The Age.From our partners
Read the full article here
