The Victorian Premier leads by diversion, distraction, and division.
He doesn’t answer journalists’ questions – diverting their attention to another issue.
The King of Obfuscation answers questions about apples with his own handpicked oranges.
He then uses distraction.
Exhibit A: the $15 million to sponsor the national netball team. The diversion played almost perfect cover for a budget blowout announced later that day of $500,000,000.
But it is his willingness to divide and conquer that is his greatest skill.
He has done it in office. And he is doing it on the campaign trail.
In office, he has divided between city and country, spending more than double ‘inside the tram tracks’ of Melbourne than in country and regional Victoria.
He has divided on colour, where Welcome to Country ceremonies at schools have usurped the singing of the national anthem or flag raising.
He has divided the community on Covid-vaccination status – with jobs for the jabbed and employment complications for those who upheld their medical right to choose.
He divided on those who can rally and those who cannot. Black Lives Matter can gather in the thousands, but a pregnant mum in her kitchen cannot cry for freedom on Facebook.
He divided on who got Covid fines and was answerable to Covid standards. But asked questions in the Hotel Quarantine Inquiry and ‘he can’t recall’.
He has divided on place of work: the private sector effectively shut down during his excessive Covid-lockdowns. Many haven’t survived, others are just holding on and find themselves squeezed by the surge in energy costs, supply chain ramifications, and workforce shortages.
Other than escaping Dan Andrews’ Victoria, where have these workers gone?
Many have left the private sector, finding safe harbour within the state’s bulging bureaucracy. On guaranteed incomes they worked from the comfort of home. And for many, the pyjamas haven’t come off.
They await the 5-4 policy: paid for five days, but only working four.
He even divided his own party – swiping away those in factions not to his fancy and palming off as ‘mentally-ill’ those who dared stand up to him.
And he even decides which ‘victims’ he supports. After Cardinal George Pell’s 7-0 High Court victory in April 2020 in which charges of historical child sex abuse were overturned, the Premier’s response to all alleged victims of such abuse was: ‘I see you. I hear you. I believe you.’
Yet in the case of the young cyclist involved in the 2013 accident with the car Daniel Andrews was in, and allegedly driven by his wife, the Premier fails to make any further comment at all, despite new information coming forth. Given the cyclist’s injuries, he was definitely a victim of something – at the very least bad luck.
On the campaign trail, his politics of division is on full show.
His contempt of the private sector is centre stage, his love of Big Government neon-lit.
He is treating the public workforce as his private army, dividing with coin and audacity.
With what he clearly believes is a bottomless financial bucket – he is busy enticing voters by offering sign-on bonuses to new nurses for the next three years.
The $5,000 bonus will only go to those who choose to work in public hospitals. He’ll also pay their HECS fees.
It follows $3,000 already given in bonus payments, plus free meals, for public health nurses for their efforts during the heady days of Covid. Perhaps he could also offer a bonus to anyone who can locate the 4,000 additional ICU beds announced on April 1, 2020? April Fools it was, and the $1.3 billion joke was on taxpayers.
But I ask this question: were public health workers the only people who worked hard during this time? What about the nurses working in private hospitals? What about the people stocking empty supermarket shelves? Weren’t these people working hard too?
Too bad, it seems, for the private health sector which saved the Victorian hospital system from total collapse during the Premier’s Covid-lockdown.
Too bad for the private sector which knows that in the real world scattering the financial chook feed is ruinous. It can’t compete.
After his campaign spiel to the nurses, the first question asked by a journalist was, ‘Will these sorts of sign-on bonuses be made available to other public servants and frontline, paramedics, police, firefighters?’
The answer: ‘…We’ll have more to say in other policy areas in days to come.’
That’s a yes.
And it’s a foreboding, ruthless, political, cynical, big-government, socialist mechanism to divide the Victorian community even more.
His plan to enshrine his proposed State Electricity Commission into the Victorian Constitution so it can’t be privatised is similarly oppressive and in contempt of enterprise.
The Constitution provides the rules by which we are governed, not the policies by which we live.
The private sector can go jump. That’s the message. That’s Dan’s DNA.
Dividing and conquering is not the way forward.
But when it comes to division, this Premier is in a league of his own.
Bev McArthur is Liberal Member for Western Victoria and Shadow Assistant Minister for Scrutiny of Government.
