My mother and her generation, perhaps evoking a Christian ethos as well as traditional notions of manners, used often say, “if you can’t say anything nice about someone, say nothing at all”.
That is a tough ask when it comes to the odious Daniel “rubber bullets” Andrews, literally the Teflon Man, so I won’t try. He is now mercifully departed from the scene south of the Murray, as of COB Wednesday 27 September 2023. Hero to many (apparently), ogre to some (who, no doubt, will have joined the Resignation Celebration on the steps of State Parliament), Labor record holder to the red-shirted faithful. One of the greats, said Stephen Conroy, himself decidedly not one of the greats.
Perhaps Andrews is retiring to spend more time with the poor (then teenaged) cyclist Dan’s wife mangled while driving the Andrews-mobile back in 2013. Or to do some much-needed maintenance work on the two-stepped staircase of his holiday home, down which he apparently fell when he injured his back badly during Covid. (Some gossip circulating following the “fall” suggested a darker backstory). Or to take up corporate gigs run out of Beijing. Perhaps as CEO of the Belt and Road Initiative. Maybe a sinecure at one of his new Governor’s former universities (Monash or RMIT). (The current Governor of Victoria is my old boss, Margaret Gardner, wife of Albo’s Secretary of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet).
Andrews’ “record” is one of:
· hyper-debt;
· a culture divided;
· an embedded radical feminist bureaucracy;
· a patently corrupt and vicious police force;
· a train-crash education system where pupils learn nothing except false history and green ideolog;,
· a state carpet-bombed with wind farms;
· an out-sized, politicised cadre of “ministerial advisers” the size of a small army;
· a culture of hatred of the Church (especially the one, the Church of Rome, to which he nominally belongs but always sought actively to defenestrate).
Such a “record” has only been possible because of Victorians’ peculiar love of leftist authoritarianism and (not unrelated) the truly pathetic absence of any parliamentary opposition. And, of course, because of Andrews’ long-term strategy of surrounding himself with a praetorian guard of sycophants who never dared to say a word against the Dear Leader. The Maoist Down under.
Critics of the departing Premier will all have their own lists of Andrews’ sins, and their own take on his reign. For example, the National Civic Council weighs in:
The National Civic Council welcomes the resignation of Premier Dan Andrews. Under Andrews’ dictatorial “my way or the highway” style of leadership we witnessed an erosion of the Westminster tradition of Government, through his outrageous overspend on staff to keep the Labor Andrews’ spin machine churning.
The Andrews legacy includes; his breach of faith in terminating the Commonwealth Games in Victoria; his dictatorial handling of protracted Covid lockdowns; the abuse of police powers to squash dissent and free speech; the nonsensical closure of borders, churches and schools and its terrible impact on our children’s development and the isolation from family and relatives of the sick and dying; his high-handed disdain towards anyone who disagreed with his radical social agenda and finally his opting to bypass Infrastructure Australia in the hugely expensive Suburban Rail Loop project have raised even more questions about accountability and prudent decision-making.
The financial status and massive debt of Victoria’s economy as a result of Andrew’s spending is a disaster.
Dan passes a tainted chalice to his successor.
(Source: mailed newsletter).
The Dystopian Down Under notes:
He leaves a legacy of brutality, debt, and corruption.
Short and to the point.
She says that Andrews had an “abusive relationship” with Victorians. Perhaps Stockholm syndrome might be renamed to suit geography a little closer to the Yarra. As Rebekah Barnett (DDU)suggests, perhaps we should all re-watch Topher Field’s shocking and brutal film, Battleground Melbourne, to remind ourselves just what a mini-me Ceaucescu or Pol Pot Andrews was. The thug’s thug.
https://battlegroundmelbourne.com/
Barnett’s own scandal sheet of Andrews “legacies” is well worth consulting. The NCC’s list and my own merely scratch the surface. It is numbing.
Barnett also refers to the Australian Financial Review’s sober assessment of Andrews’ fiscal rectitude:
Aside from mismanaged pandemic spending, the AFR notes that Andrews essentially flushed public money down the toilet: “He blew $1.1 billion cancelling Melbourne’s East West Link road project and $380 million on compensation for cancelling the 2026 Commonwealth Games.”
All this is hard to believe. Spending a billion and a half on literally nothing. That takes more than a little chutzpah. And it is hard to believe he won three straight elections, with ease. So much for Danny Boy.
It isn’t often that you lose three men of consequence from the workforce and the front pages in such short order. A little like losing Marsh, Lillee and Greg Chappell on the same day (as Australia’s cricket team did in 1984). As well as Andrews, we have also lost Alan Joyce and Rupert Murdoch. Much has already been said about each.
Joyce, I have already written about at length.
https://paulcollits.substack.com/p/come-fly-with-me
Since his departure, and the slow-to-arrive but inevitable reassessment of his tenure that has followed his exit, the main things we have learned have been his $2 million of free Qantas flights (if he can actually find a Qantas pilot willing to fly him) and his initial and singular contribution to the aviation industry with Air Lingus, all those years ago, when he pioneered (with his brother) the tawdry practice of flight cancellations for fun and profit.
(The Australian, source paywalled).
The rainbow leprechaun has come full circle, you might say.
Which brings us to the third retiree, K Rupert Murdoch, named after his eugenicist father Keith Murdoch, and proprietor of The Australian newspaper, aka The Daily Vaccinator. Others have rightly lauded Murdoch’s ambitious and fruitful quest in starting, nurturing and continuing to support the standout Australian broadsheet. As John Ruddick MLC opined in 2018:
https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/media-2/2018/04/rupert-murdochs-greatest-legacy/
The Oz has been responsible both for truly great journalism (Hedley Thomas, Greg Bearup, Janet Albrechtsen), as well as appalling ignominy during Covid.
One of its columnists, Angela Shanahan, contrived (in 2020) to praise the first of our retirees for his lockdowns in Victoria. The world’s worst and longest. No mean feat for one apparently ensconced on the right of politics and with some aspiration to objectivity and common sense. She trumpeted:
Andrews did well, so did Melbourne.
Was the freedom of Melburnians ever really taken away, or were they actually using it for the public good?
(Source: The Australian, paywalled).
Andrews did well? There was no loss of freedom? This is insanity on steroids. Making a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. Not content with her effort in 2020, Shanahan rounded back in support of Andrews earlier this year:
Hold a pandemic inquiry, but leave politics out of it.
If the public had really opposed Dan Andrews’ response to Covid, his government would have been thrown out.
(Source: The Australian, paywalled).
Again, this is rubbish, an inadequate understanding of the dynamics of Victorian electoral politics, and an alarming example of “might is right” thinking. Andrews won an election. Ergo, people supported his Covid lunacy. Ergo, this makes Andrews’ covid regime defensible. None of these things follow. Sadly, she is right, though, about the absence of any meaningful popular protest against Covid regimes like that of Andrews. (Does the deep Catholic Shanahan think that gay marriage is fine because most Australians supported it in a plebiscite?)
The go-to hit man conducting a war on the un-vaxxed was also a Murdoch employee, Peter Hoysted, aka Jack the Insider, who was unleashed on a regular basis with his particular pro-vaxx line in elitism, anti-science sarcasm, abuse and lies. Murdoch’s executives also managed to shut Alan Jones out of mainstream journalism, first firing him from The Daily Telegraph and then from Sky News. Jones had been, as is his wont, a rare voice of sanity and perspective during the plandemic. When he got a little too close to straight-out denying the narrative that Murdoch supported, he was suddenly gone.
Perhaps Murdoch’s greatest contribution to the Covid narrative (aka State lies) was to not allow one single word in nearly three years to be said against the precious vaccines. The Covid jabs that were unnecessary, useless and dangerous, and in the cause of which effective, safe Covid treatments were denied to people. A sin of omission. A lethal sin of omission for which Murdoch ultimately should be held responsible. No less responsible than, say Daniel Andrews. This sin – nay, crime – is far worse than the spittle-flecked insults hurled at the Covid-awake by the Murdoch payroll man, Hoysted.
Most recently, the Murdochs managed to lose their star journalist (Tucker Carlson) from Fox News, apparently to ensure that Murdoch was kept off the stand in the defamation case with the folks who (allegedly) helped to rig the 2020 US Presidential election. Carlson was also, infamously, too fond of speaking truth to Big Pharma power. It was another former Murdoch employee, the late Roger Ailes, who spread the (now oft quoted) word that Big Pharma was responsible for three quarters of all mainstream media revenue. This explains just about everything you need to know about global Covid policy. No wonder Carlson as shown the door. A massive own goal from the supposedly canny Murdochs.
The estimable Conrad Black, in one of his usual, highly informed, sober analyses, this time about Murdoch, stated:
“I’m calling to celebrate the demise of Maxwell,” said Rupert Murdoch down the phone to me on the morning Robert Maxwell’s private effects were being auctioned in a bankruptcy sale. I acknowledged that Maxwell had been a frightful scoundrel, but that he was an unforgettable character and I didn’t like to think of him floating around dead in the Bay of Biscay. “I do,” was the reply. Murdoch, as I was often reminded over many years, was a fierce competitor.
https://unherd.com/2023/09/rupert-murdoch-was-my-fiercest-competitor/
Black’s assessment overall was more restrained than Black was a decade or so ago, when he referred to Murdoch as a “psychopath”.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/mediamonkeyblog/2012/oct/22/rupert-murdoch-conrad-black
But he did argue that Murdoch presided over a culture of “total war”. A culture that found a place for Jack the Insider, for example.
Not an especially nice man, then. Someone who would dismiss his wife (number four, Jerry Hall) from the marriage by email clearly has priorities other than being a decent man. While he was married to number two, Anna Torv, the mother of Lachlan, Murdoch was made a papal knight! Perhaps it was for his services to the institution of marriage.
During the seedy News of the World phone hacking affair, some questioned Murdoch’s high honour.
There are calls from all sides in British politics for Rupert Murdoch to hand back – or be stripped of – his papal knighthood if he is found culpable in any way for the recent phone hacking scandal involving his British tabloid newspaper, The News of the World.
“I think we need to see the extent of what happened and who knew what and when before we rush to judgment. But if it transpires that Rupert Murdoch was aware of these goings on then, yes, he ought to hand the papal knighthood back,” said former Conservative government minister and Catholic convert Ann Widdecombe on July 13.
Rupert Murdoch was made a Knight Commander of St. Gregory in 1998. Although not a Catholic, he had apparently been recommended for the honor by Cardinal Roger Mahony of Los Angeles after giving money to a Church education fund. A year later he also donated $10 million to help build Los Angeles’ new Catholic cathedral.
John Ruddick also noted:
In the 1990s, when Rupert had a minor cancer scare, he was asked at his next press conference if the episode had made him think of retirement and he responded, “No … my recovery has only strengthened my belief in my invincibility.”
No doubt he believed that. And possibly still does, even now, in his post-retirement dotage.
But for me, Murdoch will also be forever the guy who managed to destroy all three rugby league teams that my family members supported in the 1990s, during the super league war that he alone instigated. Where he participated massively – though he wasn’t the only one – in turning football from a sport into a business, just as Kerry Packer had done with cricket. That, you don’t easily forgive, or forget.
So, three giants have left the stage.
Flawed giants who carry, or should, their fair share of guilt over many of the things they have done in pursuit of their manic career objectives. Have they each left the world a better place than they found it? This is often said to be a just measure of a person’s worth. This we might best leave to the historians, but the first draft of history hasn’t left any of them looking all that sharp.
Paul Collits
27 September 2023
No indeed Jillian
No one to mourn there.