The madness of crowds is one thing, but a state of more than six million people succumbing to Stockholm Syndrome is quite another. Yet how else to explain the mad enthusiasm of so many Victorians for their odious, corrupt, incompetent socialist premier?
Easily the worst premier in the nation, especially with regard to the Covid pandemic, Daniel Andrews somehow remains well out in front on opinion polls. The rabid “IStandWithDan” social media army is even more astonishing.
Make no mistake: the Andrews government has been a Covid disaster. Despite the most stringent, heavy-handed lockdowns in possibly the world, the state is simultaneously Australia’s worst Covid performer. Although NSW cases have recently edged past Victoria’s, deaths in Victoria still outnumber the rest of the nation put together. Almost all of this is due to Andrews’s hotel quarantine disaster; yet a state government inquiry found, astonishingly, that no one was actually to blame. To a person, Victorian government officials denied any responsibility or knowledge of the unfolding disaster.
Even when Victoria reaches the determined vaccination threshold, Andrews isn’t about to take his boot off Victorians’ necks.
Even the fully jabbed won’t be able to host visitors, still will be required to work from home, can’t dine inside a restaurant or drink inside a pub, and will be restricted to within 25km of their home.
Instead of rising up in righteous anger, though, Victorians are actually grateful to “Dictator Dan”.
But it’s not as if the pandemic somehow caught a good government unawares. Even before the pandemic, the Andrews government was a byword for socialist ineptitude and corruption.
On his watch, state government debt has exploded from $22bn (or 6 per cent of gross state product) to a forecast $156bn (or 27 per cent of GSP) by 2025. Public sector employment has increased by 16 per cent from 277,000 in mid-2015 to 322,000 five years later. He began his time in office cancelling the much-needed East-West link (at a cost of $1bn in compensation payments to not build a road), yet the replacement project is years behind schedule and billions over budget.
Victoria has the most politically correct educational system in the country, including the “safe schools” program, which is gender fluidity propaganda masquerading as anti-bullying. It was the first state to legalise doctor-assisted suicide, it allows people to change their gender annually on their birth certificate and it even has tried to run its own leftist foreign policy, signing up to Beijing’s Belt and Road “debt-trap diplomacy” giving Chinese firms the inside running on Victorian construction projects as revealed in secret documents this week.
Given the Stasi-like brutality on show in Melbourne over the past week, it should be no surprise that, under Labor rule, the Victoria police have been exposed as shockingly corrupt. This includes not just the notorious Cardinal Pell witch-hunt, but the scandal of “Lawyer X”, where VicPol was exposed as having paid a gangland lawyer to snitch on her own underworld clients.
There has been no attempt to clean up the police despite the Lawyer X royal commission revealing an “anything goes” culture and the double standard policing of Black Lives Matter and anti-lockdown protests. Nor have there been moves to depoliticise the judiciary despite the High Court’s seven-nil demolition of the case against Cardinal George Pell. It seems taxpayer money can be diverted to political polling or to support “red shirts” political staff, yet the Premier remains Teflon Dan.
The Australian
Like Jacinda Ardern, Andrews may be a hopeless administrator, but he is a top-notch media manipulator. Andrews has near tripled the Department of Premier and Cabinet, including a private office nearly double that of the Prime Minister. Much of that seems to be dedicated to a Xi Jinping-like “ten cent army” of social media bullies who routinely swarm any journalist, even from the notoriously left-wing ABC, who dares criticise the premier.
The public service has been hopelessly politicised by a machine-like appointment of dozens of former Labor staffers to supposedly independent bodies, from WorkSafe Victoria to the assistant commissioner of police. Powerful unions prop the premier up with patronage from donations to doorknockers.
Ultimately, though, no end of media and corrupt public service protection rackets can shield even the most dictatorial premier from the judgement of the ballot box.
So long as Victorians continue to vote in droves for the objectively worst politician in Australia, they deserve everything they get.
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