Dan Andrews seems remarkably at ease for a man emerging from a soul-crushing week. It’s a Friday morning in mid-June and we’ve met at a skate park in his electorate of Mulgrave, in Melbourne’s suburban south-east. On Monday, he sacked his “very good friend” – as he called Small Business Minister Adem Somyurek in 2018 – who was caught running an industrial-scale branch stacking operation laced with misogyny and homophobia.
By last night, another two ministers had gone and several investigations were afoot, some likely to become quite uncomfortable for the 48-year-old. “Every day this week has felt like a whole week in itself,” he says.
At least, on this morning, the pandemic seems to be behaving itself: a manageable 13 new cases. Among Australia’s current premiers, he is the longest-serving – almost six years – and is still being lauded nationally for steering Victoria through COVID-19 and the summer bushfire crisis before that. His approval ratings, which will dive abruptly within the coming month, are still sky-high. For now, it seems everyone is a Dan fan.
“Mate!” A man shouts at us from the window of a passing car. “Mate! You are doing a great job! Can we get a photo?” Two dark-haired men in fluorescent orange fleeces leap out of a plumbing van with the elastic energy of cartoon figures. “You have to be COVID-safe!” the Premier warns, manoeuvring into his selfie position, 1.5 metres behind them.
Andrews smiles when I ask if the tradies are on his payroll. “It happens quite often,” says his media adviser Stephanie Anderson. And sure enough, two minutes later, another man shyly approaches, phone in hand.
Here in blue-collar Noble Park, a 35-minute drive from the CBD, the Premier wants to show me one of his level crossing removals, just over the road from the skate park. In this case, the train tracks have been lifted like a freeway overpass so that traffic can flow underneath (when Andrews took power in late 2014, 178 rail-and-road intersections bottlenecked Melbourne; Sydney has about nine).
I’ve become an earnest student of level crossing removals since discovering that they – along with Midnight Oil and an intelligently designed golf course – get Dan Andrews really excited. We look across to the “sky rail”: the spaceship-like new train station, its curved steel glinting in the sun, sits atop the elevated line as if an alien parked it there. Underneath, cars flow unimpeded by boom gates and, where train tracks once were, residents amble around new parkland between fat concrete pylons.
Under Andrews’ Labor government, 38 dangerous level crossings have speedily disappeared, with another 32 to go by 2025, all for an eye-watering price tag of about $13 billion. It’s smart infrastructure policy – more trains can run, lives are saved, communities reconnected – but also smart politics: in electorates across Melbourne thousands of voters have more time, with trips often cut by up to 30 minutes, less frustration in their lives, and possibly a job due to the project.
Andrews visits the partly constructed Noble Park "sky rail" overpass in 2018. Tackling the traffic bottlenecks created by rail-and-road intersections this way has been popular with the electorate. Credit:Chris Hopkins
“We’re underwriting the livelihoods of literally hundreds of thousands of people,” says Andrews. “This kind of tells our story: we say what we do and we do what we say we’re going to do.”
We walk to another vantage point. “My grandfather was a train driver,” he says, looking up at the sky rail again. He is speaking of Michael White, his mother’s father, who died a few years before Andrews entered state parliament in 2002. They were close. White, a union man, shovelled coal on steam trains in regional Victoria, and fired and drove the Southern Aurora and Spirit of Progress before driving the “sparks”, the new electric trains.
“He drove this line a bit. And I’ll tell you, he would not recognise it now. But I think he’d be pleased.” Andrews, wearing dark jeans and a long navy coat, is still looking sentimentally, perhaps even a little misty-eyed, at the elevated rail. At least publicly, the Premier almost never ponders the past and his place in it. Is this, I wonder, a rare moment of reflection? Could he be thinking about his legacy?
Later, at his Noble Park electorate office – a former lawnmower shop – we file through the back door to find an elderly constituent in her navy slippers, a beige knit top and silk scarf over her hair, sitting with Andrews’ electorate officer. He stops to talk; she starts to cry (she’s having trouble getting a walking frame). “I just wanted to see you and I’ve seen you now,” she says.
“Don’t get upset! We’ll take care of it,” Andrews declares, offering her tea. First the fan-boy tradies, now his mere presence is soothing old ladies. Can today’s optics get any better?
Andrews settles into his chair. His windowless office has an open box of wine on the floor, a golf iron and a mini-gallery of Gough Whitlam paraphernalia – including a newspaper clipping of his 1972 federal election win – on the wall behind him. He apologises for leaving his phone on the desk during our interview. He’s waiting to hear from Chief Health Officer Professor Brett Sutton and mentions something about stubborn new case numbers.
At one point I ask if he’d like to see himself in bronze alongside other long-serving premiers – Albert Dunstan, Henry Bolte, Rupert Hamer, John Cain Junior – in the city’s Treasury Place. To qualify, he’d have to win the next election in 2022, and there’s been persistent rumours he’ll leave before that.
Andrews has reshaped Melbourne. But his handling of the virus, this tiny but potent enemy, could eclipse all.
“That has never been something that I’ve been particularly concerned about,” he says, then pauses. Statues have been topical lately, he adds. “ ‘We visited a very important statue today,’ is the way I would answer your question.” The sky rail? “Yeah. And [important] not to one person but to thousands of workers who were given the opportunity because I lead a government that gets things done to fundamentally change a community. That’s the best sort of statue I can think of.”
But legacy in politics is a fickle thing; even more so in a pandemic. Eighteen days after we meet, bungles in the state’s hotel quarantine system thrust the Premier into crisis. With COVID cases spiking, he sends Melburnians back into lockdown for the next six weeks. This time, while some are forgiving, others are white-hot with anger. There are calls for him to resign.
Andrews – a masterful and at times ruthless politician – has reshaped Melbourne with a popular infrastructure boom and driven a bold social reform agenda, including introducing voluntary assisted dying laws. But his handling of the virus, this tiny but potent enemy, could eclipse all.
How he emerges rests on the capacity of voters to excuse mistakes made in these unprecedented times, and on whether a government inquiry into the quarantine system – which will begin questioning witnesses on Thursday – exposes more fundamental problems about the way Andrews runs his government.
In late May, for my first interview with Andrews, I catch a near-empty tram into a city centre that seems sad, almost ghostly. Cafe doors are shut, coffee machines silent, food courts cordoned. The Andrews government, though, is at this point cautiously optimistic: only five new cases announced that day and, on this particular morning, parents are packing their first school lunches in weeks, waving off the initial tranche of kids returning to the classroom.
The stately Treasury Place, where Andrews’ official office looks out over Treasury Gardens, is empty except for the bronze premiers. I clear security and wait for Andrews in the Victoria Room, which has a modern couch, on-trend black floor lamp and, incongruously, a Downton Abbey-style grand sideboard – a “beautiful piece of walnut furniture”, he reckons – against the far wall.
This pandemic, like the bushfire crisis, has shone a spotlight on Andrews’ gift for communicating with voters, even when the tide turns against him. There’s something about his boy-from-the-country nasal tones, combined with his get-on-the-beers vernacular and active, short sentences that cuts through.
The crises have also revealed Andrews’ pragmatic willingness to reach across party lines: witness his “bromance” with Scott Morrison, a Liberal prime minister and Labor premier who rarely criticise each other [although friction emerged this week over the aged-care outbreak]; and his strong relationship with NSW Liberal Premier Gladys Berejiklian, which she describes as one of mutual respect and “deep frankness”. “He’s very much someone I take at his word,” she tells Good Weekend in May.
If Andrews has been criticised for anything it’s that he’s been too tough. He banned golf and fishing in the first lockdown and briefly instituted the so-called “bonk ban”, forbidding visits between intimate partners not living together (quickly rescinded after a backlash).
Some took to calling him Chairman Dan or Dictator Dan because of his hardline restrictions. But in late May, as I wait for him, that is the minority view. A month before, Newspoll found 85 per cent of Victorians thought he was handling coronavirus very or fairly well. On this May day, Andrews’ overall approval rating of 75 per cent is still better than every premier except for Western Australia’s (Labor) Mark McGowan and Tasmania’s (Liberal) Peter Gutwein. Wheeler Centre host Sally Warhaft captured the prevailing sentiment when she tweeted: “Grateful Dan Andrews is our Premier. Thrilled to bits he’s not my Dad.”
The Premier arrives looking first-day-of-school neat, wearing beige trousers, a sharp blue suit jacket over a white shirt with no tie, and R.M. Williams boots (this ensemble has become a sort of uniform after a 2014 election makeover transformed him from dorky Daniel to dapper Dan).
He seems relaxed, with no hint of tiredness, but then he’s never been a big sleeper, requiring only four to five hours a night (he says he often has middle-of-the-night phone chats with his mate and “great Victorian”, music entrepreneur Michael Gudinski, another poor sleeper; they met through a shared interest in enhancing Melbourne’s status as “the live music capital of the nation”).
For the past two months, Andrews has run Victoria from his home in suburban Mulgrave, only coming into this office for national cabinet meetings and media conferences. He tells me about the night the lockdown’s economic impact hit him: his driver was taking him home along the usually busy Monash Freeway at 9pm and there was not another soul on the road.
“I thought: ‘This is really serious. This has fundamentally changed the way everybody’s living their life.’ ” The devastating part, he says, has been the destruction of family businesses. “It is heartbreaking to think that decisions we’ve taken, and had to take, would wash away decades of hard work.”
Amid all of the life-changing and economy-wrecking decisions a government makes in a pandemic, in late March, Andrews and his ministers made one that might then have seemed relatively minor: they chose not to involve police, the Australian Defence Force or the Australian Border Force in the state’s hotel quarantine system. Instead, the Andrews government appointed private security firms to guard the hotels. (In NSW, police oversaw the operation with 500 officers, plus help from 150 ADF members and some assistance from private security firms.)
But, at this point, no one is even worried about the hotel quarantine system, and Andrews’ reputation as a crisis leader – underscored by his calm, consistent and empathic presence during the bushfires – is intact. How, I ask, does he approach a crisis?
He is, at first, uncomfortable. “I don’t sit down and sort of self-reflect or process these things too much,” he says. But then: “When you’re tested, it does really find you out. When it’s on … you have got to find it in yourself … You have to talk up to people; people are smart. You’ve got to be respectful and share your plans. You need to be frank, not blunt. And you need to believe in what you are saying.”
Every Sunday afternoon after attending the local Catholic church, a teenage Daniel would help his father Bob lift tonnes of salami, ham and bacon from a cool room into a refrigerated truck. Bob, a big man in physicality and personality, ran a Don Smallgoods franchise based in Wangaratta, about two and a half hours’ drive north of Melbourne.
The family – Bob and Jan, Daniel and younger sister Cynthia – moved to Wangaratta when Andrews was 10. They’d lived in the modest Melbourne suburb of Glenroy, by the train tracks, and owned a milk bar. But in 1982 the shop was damaged when the next door supermarket was blown up in a suspected arson attack. Bob and Jan, both country people originally, decided they wanted a fresh start in north-east Victoria.
On school holidays, Andrews would climb into the truck’s passenger seat and drive with Bob to every butcher shop, deli, cafe and pub in regional towns like Yarrawonga, Corowa, Mount Beauty and Bright. The loading work on those Sunday afternoons was “awful”, he says, back-breaking and all dead weight. If something wasn’t loaded perfectly, there’d be “hell to pay”.
Andrews with his late father Bob, who ran a smallgoods business.Credit:Courtesy of Daniel Andrews
“He was a workaholic but he was an absolute perfectionist,” Andrews says of Bob, who died in 2016. What happened if things weren’t perfectly done? “Oh, there’d be words. Short words. Ones you probably can’t print.”
The Andrews family was not overly political – Bob was a swinging voter and Jan supported Labor – but it was religious. Andrews’ attachment to the church has dimmed since, but his Catholic upbringing – and education at Wangaratta’s Galen Catholic College – instilled the values of compassion and caring for others. This was a “natural step” to a life in Labor politics, he says.
“We learnt that if you’ve been fortunate in your life, then you are obliged to give back. If you had the opportunity to do good work, then you should seize that.” Schoolmate and fellow Midnight Oil enthusiast Dean Campagna tells me Andrews was a “natural-born leader”. He wasn’t necessarily in the cool group, but that didn’t matter. “He could relate to anyone: kids who were a bit nerdy and those who were sports fanatics.”
Andrews with his mother, getting ready for his year 10 formal; and as Premier: his 2014 election makeover transformed him from dorky Daniel to dapper Dan.Credit:Courtesy of Dan Andrews; Kristoffer Paulsen
In 1991, Andrews left Wangaratta to live at Mannix College, Monash University’s Catholic on-campus accommodation. A politics and classics student, he was in the common room answering every question on Sale of the Century when his future wife Catherine – wearing a psychedelic bodysuit and purple jeans – walked in. They started dating soon after that evening, and he
proposed to Catherine, who has a master’s in public history and is now a historian and freelance writer, when she was 24, he 26, and they married in 1998.
They have three children: Noah, 17, Grace, 15, and Joseph, 13. “Cath is 100 per cent his rock and his best friend,” says sister Cynthia Andrews. (Catherine told ABC radio that while her husband’s ear and phone had been almost inseparable, he’d eaten more meals at home during lockdown than in the previous 20 years. “My job is to look after him and I couldn’t think of a better human to look after.”)
Andrews’ wife Catherine tweeted this image of her husband working from home during the pandemic, writing alongside it: “This man does not stop,” accompanied by loveheart emojis. Credit:Courtesy of Catherine Andrews
In late 1995, fresh from university, Andrews embarked on his career as a Labor machine man, working in the electorate office of federal MP Alan Griffin. What he mostly did was factional work for the south-eastern or Griffin Left, as it was called, part of the Socialist Left wing of the Labor party. This meant engaging in constant fights with other factions and sub-factions over party control, internal party ballots, preselections and positions.
Andrews quickly became known as a factional hardhead. A long-term Labor player puts it this way: “Daniel was the first one to go to war in every internal battle. He was the one saddling up saying, ‘Let’s kill the person.’ ”
Greens member Geoff Lazarus, a Socialist Left member in the 1990s, goes further: Andrews, he says, had a reputation as a branch-stacker for the Left. (“I don’t think that’s a very fair or accurate characterisation” is Andrews’ response. But he agrees political parties can be brutal, with people trying to amass power to get the job they want, to do good work. “From time to time there will be acts of bastardry.”)
In 2002, after a three-year stint as the Victorian Labor Party’s assistant secretary, Andrews, aged 30, was elected the state member for Mulgrave. From there he rose precociously: appointed immediately in the Bracks government as parliamentary secretary for health, made a minister for gaming, multiculturalism and consumer affairs in 2006, health minister in 2007 – handling 2009’s swine flu outbreak – opposition leader in 2010, and premier in 2014, aged 42.
Andrews with his mother Jan, and wife Catherine, at Jan’s farm in Wangaratta.Credit:Mark Jesser
I first met Andrews around 2009, when he was health minister in the Brumby government and I was The Sunday Age’s state political reporter. The ministers and media were having dinner at a central Victorian pub. Andrews sat down at the table and, with unnatural enthusiasm and specificity, explained the details of a machine he’d just inspected at a local hospital. This is going to be a long night, I thought, reaching for my wine.
I never imagined [Andrews], with his slightly bent undertaker’s posture and Mr Bean hair, would become premier.
I never imagined this earnest dinner companion, with his slightly bent undertaker’s posture and Mr Bean helmet hair, would become an all-powerful Victorian premier. I could envisage regional and rural development minister Jacinta Allan or water minister Tim Holding as leader one day. But never Andrews. I realise now that, like many people, I underestimated him.
Looking back, that dinner told me two things. First: he is always safe with the media. He will never be the late-night raconteur regaling the media with risky off-the-record anecdotes – which is not to say he’s humourless; indeed, in private he has a dry, devastating and sometimes mean wit that can land him in trouble.
He’s been known, for example, to pass around witty but biting notes about the performance of his colleagues in meetings. “You’d be going to an event, sitting in his car, and he’d just be scathing of someone, like one of us,” a former Labor MP tells Good Weekend. “And you’d just think, ‘Oh. I wouldn’t want you turning on me.’ ”
In 2016, he made a jibe about an overweight Liberal backbencher in parliament and apologised. He also reportedly told several Labor MPs not to worry about a Liberal suffering from bowel cancer because she’d soon be “shitting in a bag”. (He denied that one.) And second: he knew everything about that machine – from its price tag to its acronym – because that’s his work ethic and obsession with detail. “It gets back, believe me, to those Sunday afternoons loading the truck.”
Some current and former MPs and staffers say Andrews is loyal to his office staff but as party leader, can be vindictive and demands total fealty.Credit:Kristoffer Paulsen
Dan Andrews looks tired. The man I witnessed in question time just a month ago, so brimful of swagger, is gone. This man approaches the media conference podium on Tuesday, July 7, with news no Victorian wants to hear: there are 191 new cases today and Melbourne, plus a shire to the city’s north, will return to lockdown for six weeks the next day. This follows the lockdown of 12 “hot spot” postcodes and a distressing, heavily policed “hard lockdown” of some of Melbourne’s most vulnerable people in nine public housing towers, a move that sparks an ombudsman’s inquiry.
“How are you going to bring the community with you,” a journalist asks about 35 minutes in, “when they are angry?” By the time Andrews walks off stage, it feels like something between the Premier and Victorians has broken. “Our Premier has done his best to cruel the city,” Grant Cohen, owner of the city’s beautiful Block Arcade shopping precinct, told The Age. “The only thing missing from the city is the tumbleweeds.”
In retrospect, that day in Andrews’ electorate office – June 19 – was a turning point, when new cases jumped from 13 to 25 and the Deputy Chief Health Officer Annaliese van Diemen first aired at a press conference her concerns about security guards overseeing quarantine and social-distancing breaches.
By June 29, new cases have hit 75. On July 2, Andrews announces a judicial inquiry into the hotel quarantine system, admitting the virus had escaped two hotels via security guards and caused seeding of clusters in Melbourne’s ethnically diverse and, in some pockets, socially disadvantaged northern and western suburbs. Victoria’s Chief Health Officer Brett Sutton later says it is possible every one of the state’s recent COVID cases could be sourced to the hotel quarantine program.
It emerges in media reports that some security guards, many of them subcontractors, were poorly trained, given insufficient protective gear, failed to stop guests leaving or got too close to them. Andrews uses the example of sharing a cigarette lighter, but more salacious reports surface of guards having sex with quarantined travellers, too.
Speculation, indeed, is rife, partly because Andrews creates an information vacuum: he says he is angry, accountable and sorry; that mistakes were “completely unacceptable to me”. But frustratingly, once Andrews announces the inquiry he refuses to be drawn on any details about mistakes. “That’s not for the premier of the day to answer,” he tells the ABC’s 7.30 program, an answer he repeats constantly in media interviews and press conferences. “I want that done at arm’s length from the government.”
It is a classic Andrews move, several Labor insiders point out: focus on keeping the momentum of the day, then push off any proper accountability to much later, when things could change or the inquiry’s work seems too complicated and confusing. “The millions of Victorians locked up through no fault of their own, need the Premier to stop dodging questions and start giving answers,” says opposition leader Michael O’Brien, who is beginning to find his voice again (but stops short of calling for the Premier’s resignation).
It soon becomes clear that Victorians, and the rest of the nation, will have to wait quite some time for answers. Justice Jennifer Coate’s inquiry will start examining witnesses on Thursday but won’t report until September 25. In a brief, live-streamed sitting on July 20, assisting senior counsel Tony Neal QC says his team has identified seven government departments, including the Department of Premier and Cabinet, as being “relevant” to the inquiry, plus the police and ambulance services, six hotels and eight security firms.
All have been asked to provide statements detailing any of their shortcomings. Neal tells Justice Coate he anticipates witnesses to include “decision-makers from government”, but it is unclear, as Good Weekend goes to print, whether Andrews will be among them. Wrapping up the session from behind the bench, Justice Coate delivers a calm but pointed warning: “I expect no less than full, frank and timely cooperation from all relevant government departments, entities and persons to enable me to do my job for the people of Victoria.”
Behind the scenes, some Labor MPs and insiders are already delivering their own full and frank assessments of the Andrews government’s quarantine bungling. All of those who speak to Good Weekend off the record point to a lack of central co-ordination in dealing with the pandemic, with no clear lines of responsibility or command despite Andrews setting up a special crisis cabinet of eight ministers.
The decision to snub ADF help, they say, was partly due to union pressure. “A lot of that comes from some emergency services unions who don’t like the ADF here,” says one Labor MP. The reliance on private security guards, they say, came from the government’s desire to boost numbers in its $500 million Working for Victoria program, an employment scheme aimed at saving jobs during the pandemic (the Jobs Department confirmed to The Age that 1300 security guards were on the scheme’s books).
“Was it a jobs creation scheme? It looked like it,” says one source familiar with these processes. “It clearly was not driven and managed by [the] Health [department].”
Andrews' approval ratings took a hit when his good friend, Labor powerbroker Adem Somyurek was caught branch-stacking on an industrial scale.Credit:Eddie Jim
Other problems these sources raise include no contingency plans for what might happen if the virus got into the public housing towers, poor public health communication to ethnic communities, and political distractions, including an ongoing turf war between Emergency Services Minister Lisa Neville and Health Minister Jenny Mikakos, and the fallout of the Somyurek branchstacking scandal, which has tarnished the Andrews government and resulted in a temporary federal takeover of the Victorian Labor Party. (The Premier’s office declined to comment on these issues.)
I ask UNSW epidemiologist Professor Mary-Louise McLaws if she thinks the quarantine stuff-up was just bad luck or could have been avoided by applying more common sense. She says only the countries that had dealt with SARS and MERS understood how to respond early and aggressively to a pandemic like this one. In Australia, she says, “instead of a blame game or politicising the outbreak, the measure of a leader should be their ability to learn fast and not repeat the same mistake twice.”
Andrews’ Facebook post on July 7 about the second lockdown eventually attracts 13,000 comments, ranging from “We appreciate everything you’re doing in this unchartered territory!” to “You’re supposed to be steering the Titanic through this mess Dan. What a stuff-up.”
The next day brings calls for the Premier’s resignation, particularly from owners of small businesses, some of which won’t survive the second wave of restrictions. Back in lockdown and desperate to get a sense of how deep the anti-Dan sentiment goes, I ask the opinion of the pest controller who comes to remove a rat from my roof (he comfortingly blames the lockdown for this; apparently the rodent is a city refugee, fleeing to the suburbs because the restaurants have closed). He says 25 per cent of his mates forgive the Premier and 75 per cent hate him. “But they just want someone to blame.”
Andrews is quickly slipping in the polls: in mid-July an Essential survey finds 49 per cent give the Andrews government a positive rating for its handling of the pandemic, down from 65 per cent in June.
A Newspoll notes his net approval rating dropped by 20 points in three weeks, to 57 per cent. Labor MPs have started whispering about whether the Premier is the right person to lead them through the post-COVID economic wreckage to the next election (that’s if he wants to stay: his expected departure before the 2022 election has been a persistent rumour for years around Spring Street).
The anger, of course, may pass: Berejiklian survived the bungling of the Ruby Princess cruise ship.
At least his interstate mates are sticking with him: Gladys Berejiklian’s office confirms to Good Weekend that their relationship is still strong. She has not publicly criticised Andrews. Morrison, too, has been supportive, telling Australians that “we’re all Victorians”, although he clearly wants to flag where the accountability lies.
“There’s a Victorian problem and it requires the Victorian government to deal with it,” he tells radio station 3AW. “We will give them every help and support we can for the decisions that they need to make, and obviously they will ultimately be accountable.”
The anger, of course, may pass: Berejiklian survived the bungling of the Ruby Princess cruise ship (914 infections and 22 deaths). But this feels somehow different: when Andrews asked Victorians to go into lockdown the first time, there was an unspoken contract: we’ll do our job and you do yours. Then, just days before pubs, cafes and restaurants were due to open more fully, the city was sent back to lockdown.
At least for now, Melbourne feels like an innocent teenager unfairly grounded on the cusp of a much anticipated party. Some of us are sitting in our bedrooms depressed. Some are scowling in anger. And no one, it seems, wants a selfie with Dan anymore.
From midnight this Sunday all Victorians will be required to wear a face mask when outside their home, regardless of where they live.Credit:Getty Images
Dan Andrews sounds weary and flat. It’s Wednesday July 15 and there are 238 new cases today. It’s been like this – new cases in the 200s – for days and it’s clear Melbourne’s clusters have now seeded an outbreak in NSW. The Premier – who has pulled several all-nighters in the past week – is home in Mulgrave after his daily media conference in the city. I have 10 minutes on the phone with him.
“It’s heartbreaking in many ways to have to do the damage that is necessary,” he says, when I ask how he is feeling. “But that’s the nature of this virus. So, you know, you just do one meeting at a time, one day at a time. It’s gonna be a long six weeks.”
I ask if he has a sense of people’s anger towards him. People are deeply frustrated, he acknowledges, but the “vast majority” just want to “get on and get it done”.
“Ultimately, this is not about popularity or polling, this is about a clear plan.”
I’ve been told that, privately, he’s angry his star has fallen, but as for whether his handling of the pandemic will come to define him, he says he hasn’t got time for such ponderings. “My style, my substance is all about just getting on and getting the job done … if you start worrying about how it looks, it just distracts you from your task.”
The total number of reported cases in Victoria since the pandemic began is now more than 10,000. For now, each day is about the new case tallies – 532, 723, 627 – and the other, sad numbers that inexorably follow: the sick, the very sick, the dead. Across the state 112 people have died from COVID-19. For some, these daily revelations are further proof of the Premier’s failure. For others, the genesis of these numbers is irrelevant, what matters now is to keep going, to continue fighting the virus: “It’s just push on,” as the Premier says, “and push through.”
The online version of this story has been updated.
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