In this interview, Morgan Begg appeared on Mornings with Tom Elliott 3AW to discuss the IPA’s research into the economic and societal decline of Victoria since 2014.
All media appearances posted onto the IPA website are directly related to the promotion and dissemination of IPA research.
Below is a transcript of the interview.
Tom Elliott:
How are you? All right. Well, we had the current day premier, Jacinta Allan, on the programme two hours ago, but what about our former premier, Daniel Andrews? Now, he was premier for almost 10 years. He was elected in 2014, served until late 2023, so 9 and a bit years. To say that he was controversial is an understatement. Now, I got to know Daniel Andrews before he became premier in 2013 and 2014. He was leader of the state opposition back then, and he had a, I think it was once a fortnight sort of segments on the drive show back then. Initially, I found him a bit awkward. He would get a bit cranky. He did take people’s calls, but he didn’t like it when people asked him questions with which he disagreed. He, then, won the election in 2014 and sort of came on the radio fewer times, but still came on, but our relationship really [inaudible 00:01:00] during the pandemic.
Now, I was prepared, and I’ve said this before, I cut all governments some slack for the first six months of the pandemic, because we didn’t know what we were dealing with. This is back in early to mid 2020, but by 2021, when we had vaccines, when we knew that young people in particular weren’t dropping dead in huge numbers, in fact, very few numbers at all, and we seemed to have it under control, and I remember getting vaccinated, my wife getting vaccinated, my daughter, and then still being locked down for months on end. I began to distrust the Andrews’ government enormously. There was the hotel quarantine fiasco. There was the, “I don’t recall who said what to whom,” all these sorts of things. They really trashed the state of Victoria. They politicised the police.
The police would allow a Black Lives Matter protest during the pandemic to go ahead, even though it was illegal, but they would go very, very hard in the second year of the pandemic against people who were protesting against the lockdowns. There was that woman, I think, was it Ballarat she lived in? She got a knock on the door at night because she’d posted something on social media, so the Andrews government, in my view, politicised the police. They ruined Victoria’s economy. When things went badly, they would say that no one’s responsible, and we don’t even remember who decided things. Anyway, the Institute of Public Affairs has written a book about all of this. It’s called The Dark Legacy of Daniel Andrews. Director of Research at the IPA, Morgan Begg. Good morning.
Morgan Begg:
Good morning, Tom.
Tom Elliott:
Well, is his legacy unambiguously dark?
Morgan Begg:
Well, I think that’s a conclusion, not only that we’ve come to, but many Victorians, no one understand as well. The reality is, over the last 10 years, over that Andrews period, Victoria went from being the social and economic capital of Australia to something much more grim. We’re much less free than we were 10 years ago. The state is much less democratic than it was 10 years ago, and we’re much more divided than we were 10 years ago. He’s been out of office almost two years or over two years now, but we’re still dealing with the after effects. In many ways, the current government is really just continuing on. Andrew is 2.0.
Tom Elliott:
Well, and we have a lot more debt as well, and we’re going to struggle to pay that off. Well, let’s look, firstly, how are we less free and less democratic?
Morgan Begg:
Oh. Well, so you have to understand that, in 2014, Daniel Andrews comes to power. It was an unlikely election victory, but he comes to power with a lot of political capital and a lot of control over the Labour Party. So, even from the day one, all of the political decision making came from the premier’s office.
Tom Elliott:
Yeah, that’s right.
Morgan Begg:
And over time, the premier’s office, the Department of Premier became essentially an extension of the premier’s office. All major decisions came out of the premier’s office. The senior appointments throughout the nominally independent public service began to be dominated by partisan appointments, and so the traditional checks and balances that would occur within government to stop the accumulation and exercise of an abuse of power began to be whittled away, and those structures are still in place today.
Tom Elliott:
And I remember his first big decision, having won the 2014 election, was to act the East West Link, even though the previous Labour government under Steve Brax had supported the East West Link. He said it wouldn’t cost us anything, but it cost us $1.6 billion and counting.
Morgan Begg:
Oh, and that was just the first of a series of decisions that his government made, which just had complete disregard for taxpayer money. We’re now on track, by the treasury’s own numbers in 2029, to rack up $235 billion in net government wide debt, and this is completely unsustainable. There’s no plan that has been offered so far to get back on track, and we may never pay it back at this rate.
Tom Elliott:
To me, Victoria really went off the rails during COVID, and as I said, I could cut all governments some slack in the first six months, because we just didn’t know what we were dealing with, but when it became clear, I remember I said at the start of COVID on air that I thought it should just be treated as a bad flu, and I was told I was going to kill people and whatever, and yet nowadays, that’s exactly what we do. We just treat it as like a dose of the flu, but putting that to one side, hotel quarantine was a debacle. Trying to get to zero cases, zero cases every day in a state of almost six million people, that was never going to happen. The ring of steel around Melbourne, the lockdown after lockdown after lockdown, and the point is, other Australian states did not act like this.
Morgan Begg:
Yeah, exactly right, no. And the COVID period really exemplified a lot of the worst tendencies of Daniel Andrews, so all of that power that had been accumulated in the premier’s office, it was given complete breadth during COVID, because all of a sudden statewide emergency orders and public health orders were being issued. Normally, what we were told was, according to the science, that what we’ve actually heard recently from the former chief health officer, Brett Sutton, was actually many of them were political decisions, so it’s good that they’re acknowledging that now, but this was arrogance to the highest degree, abuse of power to the highest degree. We were seeing it, all of the worst tendencies of Daniel Andrews era, just put on a full display.
Tom Elliott:
Do you think that he just saw COVID as the great threat to human civilization and that it was his job, at least in Victoria, to try and stop it, or do you think he saw it as an opportunity to seize power and he took it?
Morgan Begg:
Well, I think, in some respects, he recognised that he had the power, and he saw it as, in my view, politically expedient to use that to sort of show himself as the saviour of Victoria, doing what needed to be done, having the daily press conferences and talking about the numbers. It was very much, it was a big spectacle. It was very almost theatrical in how the COVID response was played out, but of course, what wasn’t a factor was what actually worked, what would actually be proportionate to the situation. Those weren’t a central consideration.
Tom Elliott:
Okay. Now, previous government decided that any premier who served more than, was it 10,000 days in parliament or something like that? No, wait a minute. No, I forget now. 3,000 days, I think it is. 3,000 gets a statue. Interestingly, in two years, we haven’t seen the Daniel Andrews statue emerge yet. Did you think one will go up soon?
Morgan Begg:
Well, there might be a lot of reluctance in the short term, because there’s a lot of ill will, understandably, to the Andrews era. I suspect, under the current government, they’re not really repudiating the central themes of the Andrews era. In due course, if they stay in government, I would expect that will give due attention to that statute question.
Tom Elliott:
Do you think we heap too much blame on Dan Andrews and not enough on other senior cabinet ministers, like Jacinta Allan, the current day premier, for example?
Morgan Begg:
No, I think that’s a fair question. I think there is blame to go around. Ultimately, no matter how much power was centralised by Andrews, that has to be enabled by others around him as well, so I would stand firm that major decisions during the Andrews era came from him personally, but ultimately, someone has to allow that to happen. That power also has to be given. Also, we have to be honest and acknowledge that the opposition, at the time, was very tempered and very ineffective at addressing the abuses of the Andrews government. Who knows? If more of a noise, if more of a blockage had been caused, had been put up by opposition and cross benches during the period, many of these issues we may not be talking about today.
Tom Elliott:
Final question. I mean, in politics, winning and holding onto power is the be all and end all, and he did win three elections in a row, and interestingly, the last one, the 2022 election, he won that well after the COVID pandemic, which sort of seemed like a bit of a rubber stamp for all the decisions he’d been made. Within the Labour Party, is he inevitably a great Labour hero?
Morgan Begg:
Oh. I think that’s the challenge, because he was a very successful electoral politician, and I think we’re seeing that one of the legacies is not just the Victorians, but in other states, Labour leaders adopting the Andrews way of government, and that’s a big problem, but we should also acknowledge that it wasn’t always this way. There are other models of successful labour leadership. Even in Victoria, the Brax Brumby era was very successful, and they had a commitment to things like budget surpluses, low levels of public debt, and a reasonable delivery of public infrastructure project, so it can be done. Daniel Andrews is not the only way. There’s a big responsibility now for the state governments, government MPs, Labour Party members to look in and say, “Which way forward?”
Tom Elliott:
Indeed. Look, thank you for your time. Morgan Begg there from the Institute of Public Affairs. If you’re interested in this book, it is called The Dark Legacy of Daniel Andrews. I haven’t read it yet. I’ve only read a summary, but there will be some painful memories in there, but maybe memories that we need to have a re-look at. [email protected]. So, there’s Daniel Andrews’ legacy, and if the statute of even does eventually appear, where should we put it? I remember I asked this about a year ago, and the most popular place was in the middle of Port Philip Bay. What is Daniel Andrews’ legacy? I used to have a producer here. She had been the recipients of a donor organ, which kept her alive, obviously, and she was very grateful to the Andrews government. She said, without their firm handedness during the pandemic, she was worried she might’ve died. Now, I think she was wrong about that, but let’s remember, he won three elections in a row. [email protected].
This transcript with Morgan Begg talking on Mornings with Tom Elliott 3AW from 11 December 2025 has been edited for clarity.
