What Albo can learn from Dan ‘getting shit done’ Andrews

No politician becomes a leader, let alone a prime minister, without good fortune. Given how hard politicians work, though, it’s no surprise there’s a tendency to play down the role happenstance plays in two-party electoral races.

What John Howard demonstrated in 2001 is that a smart, hardworking political leader can stretch their luck and, in the process, extend the life of their government for a term — or two. Howard backed his luck in 2001, dominated the political landscape until 2007, and cast a political and cultural shadow that still lingers. That’s why every national leader since Howard departed is expected to replicate his standards — lowering taxes, paying off debts and delivering surpluses — while acting as America’s loyal deputy on the world stage.

Will Albanese have the luck to get out from under Howard’s shadow? The answer to that question might be found in the story of another politician of great good fortune, Daniel Andrews.

The former premier of Victoria retired undefeated in 2023, after three election victories and almost nine years in power, but it’s still too early to calculate the profits and losses of the government he led, let alone the government Premier Jacinta Allan inherited. That’s because the impact of the Andrews-Allan government’s decade-long infrastructure blitz — not to mention initiatives such as the landmark Yoorrook Justice Commission — won’t be fully realised until well after the 2026 state election.

For instance, will the $13.4 billion Metro Rail Tunnel — in tandem with the ongoing work to remove 110 level crossings by 2030 — change the way Melbourne lives and works, unlocking high-capacity train services and fast-tracking the development of a new suburb in Arden? Will the $26 billion North East Link project— connecting the Kennett government’s incomplete ring road to the Eastern Freeway — reduce congestion, boost productivity and economic activity? Will the delivery of the Suburban Rail Loop’s first $34 billion stage slow Melbourne’s outward sprawl and turn Monash into a national hub for education, research and economic activity? Will the $12 billion airport rail, like the Suburban Rail Loop, turn Sunshine into a regional hub for research and economic activity? Will the $12 billion West Gate tunnel cut congestion and make Melbourne’s west more productive and liveable?

Don’t expect to find considered answers to questions such as these until the 2030s — at least. As for Andrews, in a friendly interview with Labor strategist Stephen Donnelly on the Socially Democratic podcast, he gave a typically bullish answer to the infrastructure question:

Getting shit done matters. That was our culture. That was our practice … Important work is never easy, and if these projects were easy they would’ve been done decades ago and they wouldn’t be on the docket now. North East Link, for instance; we’ve got a ring road with a gap in it. Makes no sense at all. Right? That’s going to finish up being one of the biggest projects in the state’s history, maybe even the country’s history. It’s a massive, massive project. It’s not about ‘can it be done?’ It’s ‘what’s the alternative?’ It has to be done. These things have to be built, otherwise, as we hurtle along to being Australia’s biggest city, our quality of life will be unrecognisable if we don’t get on and build the transport infrastructure that we need. And it is road and rail, as well as hospitals, schools — all of that.

Andrews has a point. Melbourne’s population has grown by 2 million since 2000 — compared to 1.2 million during the last population boom, between 1947 and 1971. This kind of demographic explosion puts services and infrastructure under extreme duress. In the 1950s and 1960s, then premier Henry Bolte responded by boosting taxes and spending — driving Victoria’s debt up to more than 50% of gross state product. Victoria’s current infrastructure drive, together with massive pandemic-related expenditure, is projected to take state debt up to 25% of GSP by 2028, roughly half of the debt levels Bolte incurred to cater to baby boomers. “Getting shit done” is not cheap.

Andrews was lucky to win power in 2014. His good fortune was threefold: fronting a political machine reinvigorated by local, digital campaign tactics imported from America; opposing a state government that sacked its leader and stalled on reform; and coming hard on the heels of the Abbott government’s disastrous 2014 federal budget. Like Howard, Andrews made the most of his luck, leading a hyperactive government that launched an unprecedented infrastructure blitz. The focus on infrastructure made sense: there was a need to make up for decades of underspending and catch up to a runaway population boom. In the process, he drew equal shares of curses and hosannas.

Overall, much of the praise and criticism of Andrews — who, like Kennett, incited adoration and hatred — is one-eyed, if not cross-eyed. Andrews was neither dictator nor saviour. Instead, he was a leader of conviction who, at times, was limited by impatience. Of course, that impatience had merit when it came to the infrastructure blitz. It also helped fire Victoria’s mobilisation in response to the pandemic. Melbourne’s epic lockdowns — soundtracked by the live-streaming of Andrews’ daily media conferences, which he held for 121 days straight — confounded conventional political wisdom. Andrews was supposed to be committing political harikari by locking Melbournians in their houses and apartments. Why, then, was he reelected in a landslide immediately after the worst of the pandemic?

One way to judge Andrews’ 2022 election win is to see it as a vote of confidence in strong leadership. I have another theory. Victorians didn’t like the lockdowns — many were traumatised by the isolation — and they weren’t impressed by mistakes like the botching of hotel quarantine, but they liked the fact that Andrews was direct and decisive and were angered by the Morrison government’s perceived and real attempts to undermine Victoria’s public health efforts. In short, more Victorians loved than loathed Andrews, and they didn’t trust the alternative.

Coming hot on the heels of the 2019-20 summer of biblical bushfires, the pandemic also helped shift the political attitudes of many Australians. Voters — especially those aged under 35 — saw their world speeding towards a series of brick walls such as climate change, housing and energy shortages, and generational inequality. During the pandemic, they also saw the difference an activist government could make.

Another byproduct of the pandemic is that more Australians became more politically active, and actively avoided the major political parties. I saw this shift when, during the first pandemic lockdowns, I started working with Pathways to Politics — a non-partisan program aiming to increase the ranks of female politicians in Australia. Since 2020, I’ve met hundreds of prospective politicians through Pathways, and roughly a third of those brilliant women won’t stand for a major political party. Generally speaking, they’ve lost patience — if not faith — with the managerial style of politics that dominated the landscape once the reform era ended. Perhaps that’s why Andrews was so popular with voters: he shared their impatience.

Parts of the media — especially the Murdoch-owned segments — tried to portray Andrews’ impatience as authoritarianism. The reality was more nuanced. Andrews’ behaviour as premier reflected his experience. He was a minister in the Brumby government, which was thrown out of office because of a reluctance to fast-track investment in rail infrastructure. He then saw Victorians throw out the one-term Napthine government for failing to act fast enough on infrastructure. When Victorians turned to Andrews in 2014, he wasn’t about to make the same mistake. He took a fast-forward approach to government, pouring concrete and outsourcing social conundrums to royal commissions rather than sweating on the slow-burn of policy reform.

Politically, Andrews’ fast-forward approach worked; he increased Victorian Labor’s parliamentary numbers in every election. These successes bamboozled media commentators who assumed Australian governments should return to Howard fundamentalism after Covid and focus on reducing debt, cutting taxes and privatising services. Andrews’ critics in 2022, like Dutton’s campaign would in 2025, took the past for granted, failing to realise that the political landscape had changed. ABC journalists Richard Willingham and Raf Epstein discussed the media’s cross-eyed coverage of Andrews in the aftermath of his 2022 victory:

EPSTEIN: It is very clear there was a lot of hatred of Dan Andrews. The big problem for the Liberal Party is it was amongst a small group of people.

WILLINGHAM: Well, a lot of it was in the media. This was a daily, I would say almost unprecedented, sustained attack on the premier’s character from certain sections of the media

Brendan Donohoe, a veteran political journalist who ended his career as a spin doctor for the Andrews government, spoke to Donnelly’s podcast about the behaviour of some journalists during Melbourne’s Covid lockdowns, and how it damaged the media’s public standing:

Journalists thought they would become part of the story. So, I remember saying to one journalist, he rang me and he said, ‘I’m doing a story, you’re restarting flights.’ And I said, ‘Well, that’s news to me.’ And he said, ‘No, no, it’s happening.’ I said, ‘Well, you know, it’s a great story. What proof have you got?’ He said, ‘I’ve got an email.’ I said, ‘Ok.’ I said, ‘I look forward to seeing a tear-out of the email.’ Of course, the story came out, no tear-out of an email. Sources say, sources say, sources say. It was complete crap, absolutely crap … People started to get away with it. It didn’t matter what the integrity of the story was. ‘Sources say’ was enough … During those daily Dans [Covid media conferences], when we got over 100 in a row, because they were such a big theatrical event with a huge audience, some journalists thought that if they were to make a name, they would raise their voice. They’d repeat the question three times about restrictions in the meat industry and whether it would affect veal cutlets as much as lamb backstraps and whether it would force up the price, stuff like that … And when someone would come in, they’d have a camera on them, plus the normal camera on the premier, you knew, well, this is just done for theatre.

What’s revealing about Donohoe’s anecdote is how out of touch some journalists were. They kept prosecuting the case for an end to restrictions even though, as Donohoe went on to explain, more than 60% of the electorate supported public health measures and — at a time before Covid vaccines — lockdowns were the surest way to minimise loss of life. “The media,” Donohoe said, “they were just torn between ‘COVID doesn’t exist’ or ‘it’s very minimal’ or ‘you’re not doing enough to stop that one truck driver coming across the border of New South Wales. We’re all going to die’ … Of course, the truth was somewhere in the middle.”

I don’t think technology is entirely to blame for the death of truth. After all, propaganda has been around for centuries. The difference now is that digital technologies have industrialised the delivery of propaganda. When you strip back the bells and whistles, technologies — together with the data they mine —are nothing more than the accumulation of the best and worst aspects of human nature.

The problem is that, legally and ethically, societies haven’t been given the time to resolve fundamental questions around privacy, data ownership and intellectual property. It’s no surprise that — within this legal and ethical vacuum — human data is being used in unregulated ways to socially engineer everything from culture to actual wars. Fundamentally, misinformation and disinformation are all about cultural cognition — the tendency for our perceptions of the risks of societal dangers, such as climate change, to be shaped more by beliefs than evidence.

This is the cultural and technological tide Albanese has been pushing against since 2019. To his credit, he hasn’t flinched. Since taking over the Labor leadership after the disastrous 2019 election, his approach has been quietly unyielding — consistent and methodical, more about showing than telling. As prime minister, he has rebooted the federal government in his image — steady, competent, risk-averse. On the international stage, he has presented himself as a steady-as-she-goes leader, able to repair relations with China’s President Xi Jinping without provoking Trump. A wise tactic, given the US is led by a man who governs more like a pharaoh than a president. Slowly but surely, Albanese is exorcising Howard’s political ghost.

Is a political exorcism enough? Of course not. To qualify as a progressive leader, Albanese needs to do much more than just hold office long enough to reprogram Australia’s political culture. He needs to develop and implement policies that will save a good country from the political foolishness of the past dozen years. After all, as Keating said at the beginning of his 2002 Manning Clark lecture, “Out here, on the edge of Asia, a long way from major markets and natural groupings, ideas are all Australia has to shield itself from the harsh winds of global change.”

I suspect Labor’s true believers would love Albanese to emulate Keating and pursue a kind of politics as pure and perfect as a Breguet watch, or at least follow the lead of his former flatmate, Daniel Andrews, and try to stretch his political luck by getting shit done.

This is an edited extract from the 2025 introduction of Catch and Kill by Joel Deane.