The expected third straight triumph of Labor in Victoria will consolidate the trend that makes the party the first choice of state voters in all but the worst emergencies, writes Mark Sawyer.
The Victorian election on November 26 looks like a walkover for Labor Premier Daniel Andrews in his rematch with the Coalition’s Matthew Guy. Labor is set to deal out a thrashing to the Coalition opposition, and the Teals will give them a supplementary stab.
It looks as if four years of soul-searching awaits the Victorian Coalition, which has governed for only one term this century. And Labor, despite presiding over one of the world’s longest Covid lockdowns, and a run of scandals, will extend its current term to 12 years.
The biggest danger for Labor is voters who were alienated by the lockdowns, particularly in Melbourne’s west, but the beneficiaries could be independents. Memories of that awful time, which spurred his detractors to call the Premier ”Dictator Dan”, are fading, observed one voter, who asked not to be named:
I don’t really think the lockdowns will factor very high. There’s a small rump of weird Covid rights, MAGA, flat earther type protesters who try to clog up the city nearly every weekend, but I’d say they’re on the extreme lunatic fringe and not really considered at all relevant by the mainstream.
Bookies have the Coalition as the very definition of a rank outsider. Labor has narrowed from $1.20 to $1.05 since September. The Coalition was at $4.50 in September, a blowout from $3 in July. As of November 2, the Coalition is quoted at $10.
Perhaps the only solace for the Coalition in those figures is the memory of 1999, when the Coalition government of Jeff Kennett was considered a dead cert. Instead, Labor won narrowly. And victory this time, as economic storm clouds gather, could be worse than losing.
The stronghold
Victoria has been a Labor stronghold for 40 years. After losing nine straight elections, the ALP won under John Cain in 1982. The party has won eight elections and lost only three in those 40 years.
It is part of the trend, noticeable since the 1980s, for the ALP to be entrusted to the keys of the state treasuries much more often than it wins at the federal level. If you were being sexist (not here, of course), it is because Labor is more compatible with the ”mummy” state governments, with their responsibilities for health and education, than it is with the federal government’s ”daddy” roles of border security and defence. (Blame the Americans, not MWM, for these odious analogies).
This century, Labor has won 25 state elections and the Coalition 11. It generally takes cataclysmic mismanagement or sheer exhaustion for Labor to lose at state level. NSW had Labor governments for all but 18 of the 70 years to 2011, when the ALP government finally sank under the weight of scandals. Twelve years is a long time for the Coalition to rule in NSW and a change looks inevitable at the election due on March 25.
Elsewhere, Tasmania returned to the Coalition in 2014 after a long period of Labor rule, while the other states have dealt out humiliations to the Coalition, either by repudiating one-term governments (Queensland, South Australia) or destroying its party status (Western Australia).
Skewing left
Even if it did not always skew left, Victoria has always gone its own way. At Federation its whiskery, whisky-drinking leaders favoured Protectionist trade policies against the NSW push for Free Trade. Victoria was the first jurisdiction to outlaw Scientology, although no prosecutions were made. It was the second state to legalise homosexual acts in 1980, four years ahead of NSW and a decade ahead of Queensland. It registered the strongest Yes vote of the six states in the republic referendum in 1999. The 49.84% Yes vote was a whopping 12.4 percentage points stronger than in the most anti-republican state, Queensland.
Don’t tell Mr Menzies: how Victoria became the progressive jewel in the national crown
And Victoria has been at the forefront of Indigenous recognition, healing and restitution. In 1984-85 the state spent a year celebrating 150 years of self-government, with scant recognition of the original inhabitants. It was as if history began with a colony named for Queen Victoria. Now there is the first national inquiry into colonialism.
This ‘’truth-telling’’ process into injustices suffered by First Peoples, the Yoorrook Justice Commission, is holding hearings all over the state. The commission is examining the effects of colonialism on Victoria’s Indigenous people, looking at massacres, dispossession and incarceration rates and deaths in custody. The commission also aims to expedite the process of a formal treaty.
The man at the top
Andrews is a canny player. After eight years in power he is the longest serving leader on the national scene, and would become Victoria’s longest serving Labor premier if he is still around next Easter. And there is little reason he wouldn’t be: he has pledged to serve a full term. To freshen up his team for that third term, he has eased out some of the most senior ministers over the past year.
Andrews moves quickly when he senses an opportunity. In the wake of the controversy that led to the withdrawal of Netball Australia’s sponsorship by Gina Rinehart’s Hancock Prospecting, the state stepped in. The state tourism body Visit Victoria is ponying up $15 million over the next four-and-a-half years.
In an analysis by Crikey, Andrews is every bit as economically conservative as any other Australian leader, reserving progressivism for cultural issues. For instance, his government has made far-reaching changes to the laws around prostitution. Opponents say the Sex Work Decriminalisation Act of 2022 removes vital restraints on the industry, even allowing brothels to evade town planning controls. In an excoriating analysis in the Jesuit journal Eureka Street, journalist Juliette Hughes and Kathy Chambers (a member of CATWA, the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women Australia) described the legislation as the ”wish list of the sex industry”.
With very little public debate or consultation, Victoria has repealed almost all laws relating to prostitution (excepting only the exploitation of minors for commercial sex and some location restrictions on soliciting). Alone among all recreational activities, sex for payment is now unrestricted, even regarding health and safety.
While a product of the Socialist Left faction, Andrews is certainly no fire-breathing radical in every respect. A few days after the death of the Queen in September, he announced that the $1.05 billion redevelopment of the Maroondah Hospital would be renamed in her honour. For some, it was another colonialist act.
The crippled Coalition
As for the Coalition, there is a scant hope it can improve on even its woeful performance from the 2018 election, when Guy led the party to an 11-seat loss. Holding only 27 of the 88 seats, the Coalition needs to gain an impossible 18 seats to win.
And the 2018 election was bad enough for the conservatives. The north-western regional electorate of Mildura went to an independent, Ali Cupper, who had contested the seat for Labor eight years earlier. Bass, south-east of Melbourne, voted Labor for the first time. The once-blue ribbon seat of Hawthorn went to Labor for the first time in 63 years. The new member, retired school principal John Kennedy, lived in an aged-care home and did not hold a drivers’ licence or own a smartphone. Kennedy, 75, is recontesting the seat, and is not expected to lose.
Guy has focused on such bread-and-butter issues as a pledge to reverse Labor’s cancellations of the removal of dangerous level-crossings on train tracks. And a promise to cap public transport fares at $2 a day. But according to the state’s Parliamentary Budget Office, the Coalition has made 59 election promises with no costs attached (Labor has made just two without costs attached). The Coalition is still promising to spend $25.7 billion on 222 costed promises, three times Labor’s promises ($8.3 billion).
Then there are the minor, but not unimportant, players.
The others
Unsurprisingly the Greens maintain strong support, particularly in inner Melbourne, and look a good bet to maintain their three seats in the Legislative Assembly. The party is also a serious chance in Northcote, held from 2017 until the 2018 election by Lidia Thorpe, now a Greens Senator for Victoria.
But the mainstream attention will be focused on a newer alternative to the major parties.
In May this year, Australians turned against the Coalition, turfing out the Morrison government. A striking feature of the election was the success of independent candidates, some known as Teals, campaigning on climate, integrity and treatment of women. In Victoria, Helen Haines in Indi was joined by Monique Ryan in Kooyong and Zoe Daniel in Goldstein.
Victoria will see the first strong Teal campaign at state level, and would also be the first Teal invasion under an incumbent Labor government. Independents are not likely, however, to hold the balance of power.
Nomi Kaltmann, who in August was the first announced Teal challenger, is strong in Caulfield, held by deputy Liberal leader David Southwick by a margin of only 0.1%. Kaltmann is a former member of the ALP. In contrast, it is a former Liberal who is mounting a Teal challenge in Brighton, which sits partly in the federal electorate of Goldstein. Felicity Frederico was a member of the Liberal Party for 17 years, but says the party is not the same as the one she joined. She is contesting a seat held by the party since 1955.
First-term member James Newbury held the seat with just 51.12% of the 2PP vote in 2018, and it would seem that his goose is cooked. It will be a humiliation for the Liberals. Brighton is one of only three electorates that date to the foundation of Victoria in 1856.
The challenges
With electricity prices predicted to rise nationally 56% and gas to go up 44% in the next two years, the government is offering Victorians a one-off rebate of $250 on power bills. The state banned offshore gas exploration (lifting that moratorium in 2020), and still bans fracking.
Its push to renewables leads Australia. On the eve of the election campaign the government announced the resurrection of the State Electricity Commission. Beginning in the 1990s, Labor and then Coalition governments sold the state’s publicly owned generation, transmission and distribution assets. ”It was wrong, it was a mistake to sell our energy companies,” Andrews said.
The move is part of a full-bore campaign to lead the transition to clean energy. By 2030 the state aims to generate half of its energy needs from renewables, up from 21% today. On September 27 came the following announcement:
“The Andrews Labor Government will introduce the biggest energy storage targets in Australia – driving down power bills, creating thousands of jobs and boosting renewable energy investment across Victoria.
Premier Daniel Andrews and Minister for Energy Lily D’Ambrosio today announced the nation-leading targets alongside a $157 million package supporting renewable energy generation and storage projects across the state.
Victoria will reach a massive 2.6 gigawatts (GW) of renewable energy storage capacity by 2030, with an increased target of 6.3 GW of storage by 2035 – that’s enough renewable energy to power around half of Victoria’s current homes at their peak energy use.
The targets are expected to secure 12,700 jobs and $1.7 billion in investment from 2023 to 2035. Storage is vital to soak up solar and wind generation when it’s abundant and then feed that energy back into the grid when it’s needed.
To support these targets, the Labor Government is investing $119 million from the $540 million Renewable Energy Zone Fund in a 125MW big battery and grid forming inverter in the Murray Renewable Energy Zone, between Bendigo and Red Cliffs.
This modern battery technology will help implement our storage targets and stabilise the grid to allow for a smooth transition to clean energy.”
Nation catches up
With his pledge to revive public ownership of the power grid in the interests of the race to net zero emissions, Andrews went to the election in the way he meant to carry on. Even $1.05 looks like long odds.
For two decades, Victoria ran ahead of Australia in its politics. Coalition governments were returned in Canberra while putting in mediocre performances in Victoria. But in 2022, with the election of the Albanese government and the rise of the Greens and the Teals, the nation became more like Victoria. Queensland became the outlier state.
Victory was sweet for Anthony Albanese in 2022, and should be sweet for Daniel Andrews.
Mark Sawyer is a journalist with extensive experience in print and digital media in Sydney, Melbourne and rural Australia.