Rapturous applause swept One Nation’s campaign launch in Melbourne on 3 October as Mark Nicholson, the party’s lead candidate for the Northern Metropolitan region in the upcoming state election, declared that a One Nation government would jail former Labor premiers Daniel Andrews and Jacinta Allan “by Christmas”.
This was not just some one-off Trumpian gesture. Visceral hostility to Andrews, denounced by Murdoch’s Herald Sun and Sky News as “Dictator Dan”, has for years been a core feature of far-right politics.
Andrews is seen as the devil incarnate, the epitome of a communist leader akin to North Korea’s Kim Jong-Un. He is portrayed as being engaged in a dark “globalist” conspiracy to destroy the Australian way of life, including by giving a treaty to Aboriginal people and destroying important freedoms like the right to spread disease so beloved by anti-vax cookers, White Australia supporters and purveyors of Great Replacement-style conspiracy theories.
Far right hostility to Andrews soared during the COVID-19 crisis when violent fascist mobs, whipped up by enraged small business owners, took to the streets to oppose life-saving public health measures. The fact that Andrews’ pandemic measures were popular and Labor kept winning elections in landslides further inflamed their outrage. How could this “communist” keep winning!!!
But it is not just One Nation and the far-right fringe for whom Andrews is enemy number one. The Liberal party, the whole of the corporate media and the broader capitalist establishment have sought to demonise him, the way in an earlier era they demonised Labor leaders Gough Whitlam and Jack Lang.
In part this reflects the born-to-rule mentality of the Liberal Party’s traditional wealthy backers. Victoria, the state of Menzies, had once been the jewel in the party’s crown. Now, Labor upstarts like Andrews repeatedly win elections. Intense frustration with the state of the Liberal party, which since the Kennett era seemed utterly incapable of getting its act together, simply made them even more bitter and deranged.
The ruling class, of course, generally prefer Liberal governments over even right-wing Labor governments, because of Labor’s remaining, though much eroded, links to the unions and its working-class voting base. The Liberals are simply their sort of people.
But Andrews, though far from being a radical leftist, was more independent of the corporate media and traditional big business institutions than previous right-wing Labor premiers like Steve Bracks and John Brumby. He was also a more interventionist premier, being much more prepared to use the state to push forward economic development rather than simply relying on the so-called free market. Public service employment substantially rose during Andrews’ first two governments, something the neo-liberals bitterly resented.
During the pandemic, Andrews unapologetically stood up to the hostile media pack in his defence of his government’s health measures during his daily press conferences. This stance earned him the approval, reflected in polls, among the large numbers of people who regularly tuned in. He established an image as the strong leader defending the health of ordinary people against the vested interests who hated the health measures because they impacted on their profits.
The widespread public support for this stand was reflected in the hash tag #IstandwithDan going viral at the time. At its height, 77 percent of the Victorian population backed his handling of the pandemic and Labor won unprecedented support from university educated white-collar voters in the Liberals former eastern suburbs heartlands.
This inflamed the hostility of the media and in particular the Age, which is commonly seen as more liberal than the Murdoch press. But the Age is a thoroughly establishment institution and is accustomed to playing a role of king maker—it was central to bringing down the Whitlam government in 1975, as well as the Cain/Kirner state Labor governments and installing Liberal Premier Jeff Kennett in the 1990s.
The Age became increasingly outraged that Andrews was not at its beck and call and seemed impervious to its criticisms, including of his scrapping the East/West tunnel project, his deals with unions like the firefighters and the CFMEU and his failure to cut government spending and the size of the public service.
The Age relentlessly campaigned against the Suburban Rail Loop. It attacked the project for not having a proper “business case”: simply building a railway to help workers get off the road and move around the city to see their friends and relatives was simply an abomination against the laws of the capitalist market.
But despite the intense hostility of the media and the broader capitalist establishment, and despite being from the ALP Socialist Left faction, Andrews was in no sense an anti-capitalist or radical. Indeed, as early as his days as gaming minister in the Bracks Labor government in 2006 he had cultivated a relationship with influential business people.
Those relationships deepened after he unexpectedly won the 2018 elections. The Labor right had allowed him to remain leader as they thought he would lose and they could then take back the leadership.
That victory cemented Andrews’ leadership and control over the cabinet. He went on to establish a very close relationship with the likes of billionaire trucking magnate Lindsey Fox, described by Labor colleagues as Andrews’ “go to billionaire”.
Andrews and his wife Catherine were regular guests at luxury dinners at Fox’s cliff-top Portsea compound attended by Fox’s sons, who play a key role in running his empire and a circle of über-rich business figures, influencers and spivs such as promotions guru Michael Gudinski, media figure Eddie McGuire, multimillionaire Gerry Ryan and Luke Sayers, former CEO of big four accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers and president of Carlton football club.
Lindsey Fox is close to the former head of the ACTU Bill Kelty, who notoriously became a director of Linfox. He is something of a maverick in the capitalist class and at the height of the COVID-19 crisis publicly defended Andrews, who was being relentlessly attacked by other bosses. Nevertheless Fox, a long-standing backer of Jeff Kennett, Tony Abbott and Cardinal George Pell, is in no sense some “woke” or progressive capitalist.
Andrews cut innumerable deals with billionaire property developers, who will also benefit massively from Labor’s appalling decision to rip down the high-rise public housing towers. And the real scandal about Labor’s Big Build is the enormous profits that major construction companies milked from the public purse.
Andrews’ other hand-outs to business included the privatisation of the Port of Melbourne in 2016, the Land Titles and Registry Office in 2018 and VicRoads Registration and Licensing in 2022 and the Public-Private partnerships to build more toll roads like the West Gate Tunnel and North East Link.
In retirement, Andrews has been establishing a consulting business with links to China including for mining magnate Andrew Forest’s Fortescue Metals.
The gloss was coming off the Andrews’s government by the end of the pandemic. Andrews eventually caved into right wing pressure and eased restrictions too abruptly, needlessly costing lives. As well, the pandemic led to a massive surge in government debt, in part because of the enormous hand-outs to businesses, at the same time as state revenue started to decline.
Labor comfortably defeated the helpless Liberals under Matthew Guy in the 2022 elections but the signs were there that the tide was beginning to turn against them with their primary vote down 6.2 percent to 36.7 percent.
Under intense pressure from the establishment to “rein in the debt” Labor moved to the right reversing what had always been a fairly modest reform agenda. The money from property sales that it had relied on began to dry up and Labor was simply not politically prepared to seriously increase taxes on big business or impose a wealth tax to fund vitally needed spending on health, education, public housing and infrastructure in new housing developments.
Nor was Labor ever prepared to mobilise its working-class supporters to defend even the most basic reforms from ruling class demands for cuts. And the union leaders disgracefully refused to fight Labor’s harsh pay caps on public sector workers and the increasing number of job cuts.
In 2023, the Big Build construction projects that had been so vital to Andrews’ image as the leader that “got things done” began to be substantially cut back. Then in September, just days before he stood down as premier, Andrews announced the demolition of all 44 of Melbourne’s high-rise public housing towers—a gift to private developers.
The right-wing shift continued under Andrews’ successor Jacinta Allan, who brushing aside environmental concerns, fast tracked approvals for AI data centres. In late 2025, Allan declared that her government would be “ruthless” about attracting data centre capital investment.
Allan never had anything like the popular support Andrews had as the strong leader who could stare down attacks from the Liberals and the corporate media. So the stepped-up right-wing attacks that cut through more, especially in some of the outer suburbs, which Labor had long neglected and where law and order was more of an issue.
Allan dropped plans to raise the age of criminal responsibility to 14 and introduced tougher bail laws, which disproportionately impact Aboriginal people. Adult time for adult crime was increasingly the reactionary mantra of Allan and her deputy Ben Carroll.
The press whipped-up law and order hysteria which intersected with the relentless Age-led and ABC-backed campaign against the construction union, which discredited the whole Big Build infrastructure project, including important developments like the Suburban Rail Loop which had previously been highly popular.
The sacking of Allan as ALP leader and her replacement by Carroll was a further victory for the right and the financial establishment. The message sent from the big end of town was loud and clear: we control this state. Labor governments are only to be tolerated if they totally know their place. There are to be no more Dan Andrews.
It was also an explicit warning to Albanese: don’t you step out of line and get too full of yourself. Federal Labor’s very modest changes to the tax system were denounced as being too much like Dan Andrews.
Ben Carroll as new Victorian premier is doing everything possible to distance himself from the Andrews era. One of his first measures was to officially scrap the building of a statue for Andrews for having served more than 3,000 days as premier—a project that infuriated the far right.
Carroll has bent over backwards to ingratiate himself with big business and introduced tougher crime, bail and sentencing laws. None of this did anything to appease the bosses, who simply demanded more. Nor did it to do anything to improve Labor’s standing with working class voters fed up with federal and state Labor governments that presided over years of cuts to wages and basic public services.
Labor has simply prepared the ground for the likely election in November of a hard right Liberal government supported by One Nation that will further accelerate the assault on working class living standards and democratic rights. This sharply underlines the importance of building a fighting socialist alternative to Labor and the whole capitalist system; a socialist alternative that will champion the rights of workers and all the oppressed.
That is something that the Victorian Socialists, which are standing in every seat in the Victorian elections, has set as its goal. Join their campaign!
