Dan the man remains an enigma: a genuine leader, but for what?

“History on horseback” — Hegel’s famous description of Napoleon — can be adapted for exiting Victorian Premier Dan Andrews as “history with a bad back”. Even before he took a swan dive off three wooden steps, the man who has dominated the life and politics of Victoria for a decade had a stance that had people asking: “What’s up with that dude?”

For a decade, and long before COVID hit and the Dan press conference was a thing — with Dear Leader standing, in a black undertaker suit, oddly angled, about to introduce an expert to tell us which part of the city was next to be covered with an even layer of concrete — we wondered, what was going on? Was it something you don’t joke about? When he’d put on his jacket, had he left the coathanger in? It always seemed oddly appropriate to Victorian Labor’s complexly angled politics. Call it chiropraxis. It’s the air of a man underestimated for much of his early life.

Much of Victoria certainly did, when this gawky, geeky Labor fanboy shambled on stage after John Brumby’s 2010 defeat. Jesus, I thought, watching one of his first awkward appearances, honking and shambling and blinking, where’d they get this bloke? Ah yes, from the Socialist Left. The usual crap sandwich, the Left getting to take command when nothing was left to lead. Andrews, the new opposition leader, had the gravitas of a traffic cone, put there to mark the place the Right back themselves into after a 2014 loss, aiming for a chance in 2018. For a couple of years, Andrews struggled to get any sort of hearing at all. Inside the party, he was known, apparently, as a focused and efficient operator. From the outside, he looked pure Labor stooge, like an organiser from the old Misos climbing out of a Volkswagen at 7am to talk to nine workers at a chicken sexing facility.

It was an easy mistake to make — and the Victorian Liberals certainly did. They had never fully accepted Labor’s 1999 surprise victory as legitimate, still less the 200x consolidation with a majority win. Neither, to a degree, had Labor. Jeff Kennett’s 1992 victory had been taken as a laying of the foundation for another two decades in power, one which would have consigned the Cain-Kirner era to interregnum status within a two-generation Liberal rule.

Instead, with Andrews in the leadership slot, Labor’s Victorian factions maintained a stability pact that allowed them to turn the guns outwards for a few years. Strategy, polling and policymaking got more professional. The last vestiges of the old “social movement”, which Labor had hung around the Bracks-Brumby government, went. This was now an efficient machine, turned back to the suburbs, sweeping to victory. Coming in amid the mild global stagnation of the 2010s, it was tasked with building on the Bracks-Brumby refashioning of Victoria as a place that either taught shonky degrees to Indian students or sold coffee to the teachers of them, while rendering Melbourne as a boutique liveable city, all converted warehouses and queer puppet festivals.

Build on it the Andrews governments did, but it also changed approach. The global stagnation put the onus on the state to fill a demand gap, as Western capitalism began its long decline. The party swung into this with massive infrastructure programs, which kept the state — now really a city-state with a hinterland — ticking over while making concrete improvements. Concretely concrete. Level crossing removals were the start, and the middle, and the end; a program of initial utility long since overextended at the cost of other projects. There was resistance at first. Then people saw the long overpasses rising above old shopping streets, and the linear parks beneath, as actual change, movement, something. What was presented as a rail project was really a car project, smoothing flow. This was the first of what would become the characteristic Andrews government one-two, Labor putting itself in the service of facilitating capital, while presenting its policies as a continuation of the social democratic, or social market, project.

It was that. But it was material social reform as an add-on of an add-on. The Metro tunnel (an inheritance), the level crossings, the West Gate tunnel, the North East Link and that modern ghost train, the Suburban Rail Loop — each has been an intentional money pit, which has kept certain sectors ticking along while health and education suffered. When this debt-fuelled demand suffered the hit of inevitable interest rate rises, Dan said he had been misled by the money managers and was shocked — shocked — to find that money had a price, something not even little children believe. The truth was that COVID had caught the state short, and everything had to be thrown at what it and the lockdowns here had caused, which was a hole dug inside a hole. 

But it worked, politically and party-politically. Andrews’ Labor success was dual, not only refashioning the state but securing, by those second and third election victories of such scope, a near-totalisation of his government’s legitimacy, and a consequent hollowing out of the Liberal Party.

We are now so used to this having happened that we forget what an extraordinary political achievement it is. It was accompanied by parallel internal victories, not only with the crushing of the Adem Somyurek and related groupings — less a faction than a crew of grotesques out of a Tim Burton movie — but with victories inside the Socialist Left. There was corner-cutting, to put it mildly — the Red Shirts, the money-funnelling revealed by IBAC’s Daintree investigation — and there will doubtless be more to come. How much and how deep it all went may ultimately discredit the memory of this government. At the same time power became vastly concentrated within the Premier’s Department — and then within the fixers’ bunker, the Premier’s personal office. 

But it kept Andrews ahead of the game. All that occurred came with an accommodation with the SDA union, but that was not really important. Labor’s commitment to being the party of capital is now so comprehensive that the old left-right divisions don’t amount to much. And the SDA was now such a compromised and morally discredited organisation (its valiant anarcho-syndicalist-libertarian-communist faction aside) that it couldn’t even find the oomph to object to the militant left progressivism that Andrews twinned with service to capital.

So our future was not a boot stamping on a human face; it was Dan’s stupid face grinning at a performance of drag queen storytime, staged at Parliament, in solidarity with an event that had been chased out of a public library by threats. That was part of a comprehensive commitment, from assisted dying through gender affirmation, multiple treaties and much more. Most of it is not to my taste, as a socialist social conservative, and I suspect a future Labor government, or opposition, will have to part-retreat from much of it, as such social change hits the suburbs. But there’s no doubt it has claimed fierce loyalty from a core of progressives, happy to march behind the rainbow bulldozer as it ploughs on.

Rainbow, yes. But still a bulldozer. The communal concern will always yield to the demands of capital. The spirit of Treaty didn’t matter much when the Djab Wurrung trees stood in the way of that most bewildering of ambitions: making it easier to get to Ararat. The letter of Treaty could be mobilised by finding one group to agree to it, while dozens didn’t. The final act, as I noted yesterday, was to give us a comprehensive building program by destroying much of what remained of public possession of the city, a final act of neoliberalisation. Five days after bringing that in, he has resigned, and says he probably won’t be working in the public sector. Well, just fancy that! 

There is a lot more to say, but deadline looms. If my assessments now and before sound churlish, that is partly for this forum. Elsewhere I have and will, for what it’s worth, defended the man and his government for strong and steady leadership of a type that Labor premiers often struggle to achieve, for achieving a progressive agenda that expresses the art of the possible under limited circumstances. But the possibilities have been very limited indeed in some respects.

To be honest, I don’t really understand what Labor people, who aren’t utterly amoral, think they are doing in what they have pursued: the relentless proliferation of a totalitarian capital — vast decentred underserviced suburbs, JB Hi-Fis to the horizon connected by freeways built by a privatised roads corporation, and the final destruction of the public housing system. This is what you all got into this game for? In your party for? The man who has led that here for a decade remains an enigma to me, an energetic agent of much of what the political tradition he joined tried to provide an alternative to.

No-one can deny his achievements, not least in remaking himself from goofy wonk to genuine leader, of a movement and a society. But as far as the “unquestionable present” went, the man with the funny stance has stooped to concur. 

Were you happy to march behind Dan Andrews’ rainbow bulldozer? Let us know by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.