When he was first elected in 2014, more than a few members of the Victorian Coalition must have asked themselves how they lost an election to such an uninspiring figure as Daniel Andrews.

Not only did he speak in a way that made you wonder if he had just had two pints and a Valium to calm his nerves, for a young Premier – 42 – he was not blessed in any social graces.

The one glimmer of hope the Liberal Party must have clung to was that, surely, here was a walking one-term government if ever there were one…

Nearly a decade later, it’s hard to comprehend the impact Andrews and his government has wrought on Victoria.

The state, which has prided itself on being the country’s most civilised, has become the most secretive and authoritarian, inept and corrupt.

Victoria will remain marred for decades to come by its submission to, outside of China, the most intense, protracted, and unnecessary lockdown.

The state of the Eureka Stockade became a jurisdiction that arrested a pregnant mother, Zoe Buhler, at her home in front of her children for planning to attend a lockdown protest in Ballarat. It was the state that unlawfully detained hundreds of people, mostly immigrants, inside public housing towers for weeks. A state whose justice system placed anti-vaccine campaigner Monica Smit in solitary confinement in prison and scoured her phone and laptop after arresting her on charges that were predictably dropped earlier this year.

Every state and Premier lowered their colours during the pandemic and did their collective bit to make Australia a significantly poorer and less free country, although none more than Victoria.

Three years on from the first delicately stage-managed Covid press conference, Victoria’s position of financial ruin is almost without parallel in the country’s history.

This year alone Victoria will likely spend $4 billion paying down its debt, which has is well beyond $100 billion, nearly a quarter of the size of the state’s economy, and the biggest in the country.

After driving the state into destitution and beggary, spending billions of dollars to attract an international sporting event seemed like a strange idea.

Of the nearly 90 employed in the Premier’s office, more than the Prime Minister’s, didn’t anyone raise a sceptical hand?

Someone must have known that Victoria was never in a position to run the Commonwealth Games, and certainly not across five country towns where you can’t even order an Uber, let alone host thousands of the world’s best athletes.

It is, if anything, a saving grace for any proud Victorian that Andrews has left the Commonwealth Games Federation at the altar.

So riddled with cost blow-outs, malpractice, and a seeming state-enforced mediocrity are all of the state’s ‘Big Build’ projects, there could be no faith the Games would be anything other than a screaming farce and further embarrassment for the state.

Along with the athletes, spare a thought too for consulting firms, who were no doubt already salivating at the prospect that the Andrews’ government, which has spent $24 billion on them since 2014, had another West Gate Tunnel and Suburban Rail Loop to sink their teeth into.

The inevitable result of this financial state of affairs, to which you could add the near doubling of the public service wage bill to in excess of $30 billion, is that rather than claiming to be the sports capital of Australia, the more accurate title is now its tax capital.

In the unlikely event of Andrews contesting the next state election, about three years away, it would be fascinating to see what, if any, the impact of his decision to cancel the Games would have on his leadership chances.

But if he can win an election with an enormous majority after Labor’s ‘Red Shirts’ saga, you wouldn’t put your money on it.

And if he can do it a second time, despite the well-publicised confirmation detailed in Operation Watts where it was shown that the state Labor Party had as much regard for democracy as the Chinese officials they so credulously court, you might even wonder if Victorians admire the way he goes about things. If the public ever does find out how much Andrews’ capriciousness has cost the poor Victorian taxpayer, which is no guarantee, you could rest assured he will be far from public office and even further from accountability.

Indeed, Andrews seems destined to ride off into the sunset on a publicly-funded stallion, proudly flying the banner of the various social justice causes that will keep most of the media loyally in his corner until he decides the defilement of Victoria is complete.

He has been ‘progressive on climate change’, people would say, despite doing little beyond imposing a moratorium on the production of gas, and so making itself dependent on imports from Queensland to keep the lights on.

He would have ‘saved trans lives’ by his staunch support of programs like Safe Schools, never mind the fact that Victoria’s reading standards have declined under his government, according to the most recent PIRLS’ scores.

On human rights, despite ingratiating himself with a dictatorship whose practices he would eventually ape in his home state, he will probably be seen as a trailblazer on ‘justice’ for Indigenous Australians, again without overseeing any tangible progress in areas such as health, education, and incarceration.

Obsessed with image – more than one million of Victorian taxpayers dollars have been spent on government Facebook advertising since 2014 – devoid of principle, and utterly ruthless in Labor’s pursuit and grip on power, their dear leader seems destined to be revered as one of the immortal gods of the progressive Woke movement.

A decade ago, who could have thought the humourless grafter from Mulgrave, whose fake smile had the same effect on the room as fingernails on a chalkboard, would have had it in him to not only to skewer all of his political opponents, but leave Victoria as the most taxed, indebted, and corrupt in the country?

The comforting thought, that surely things can’t get any worse, that there is nothing left to infect, is of no comfort here. The Victorian government’s capacity to do harm has so far proven to be limitless and, as the Games fiasco has shown, the Premier may not be done yet.