What do dictators do, when they’re finally deposed? If, unlike Ceaușescu or Hussein, they’re lucky enough to escape mob justice, they usually go into pampered exile, leaving everyone else to deal with their dire legacies. Victoria’s ‘Dictator Dan’ is taking the latter path, while still hobnobbing with even bigger dictators and raking in a fortune on the quiet.
While ordinary Victorians wrestle with soaring power bills, an eviscerated treasury with the lingering social scars of world-record lockdowns, Daniel Andrews has retreated to the comfortable embrace of the billionaire class. Far from his former working-class constituency in Mulgrave, the former premier has taken up residence within a fortified, multimillion-dollar coastal retreat on the Mornington Peninsula.
Mr Andrews has been staying in the spectacular fortress-like home on Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula after it was purchased earlier this year by a property developer, who, alongside close family members, donated almost $30,000 to the Victorian Labor Party in the months before the 2022 state election.
The patriarchs and matriarchs of property development have always possessed a keen eye for a blue-chip investment. In this instance, the donor managed to steer thousands of dollars into the party machinery through a series of nicely calibrated donations via multiple entities. It represents precisely the sort of structural convenience that integrity watchdogs regularly regard with a weary, furrowed, and ultimately impotent, brow.
Meanwhile, back in the corridors of Spring Street, the current regime is furiously attempting to sandblast the Andrews patina off the furniture. Premier Ben Carroll has found himself in the unhappy position of defending a disintegrating political citadel against both a resurgent Liberal opposition and a potent swell for One Nation. Seeking to demonstrate that the era of imperial hubris is at an end, and depriving Melbourne’s pigeons and vandals of a tempting target, Carroll recently took the ceremonial axe to Andrews’ planned commemorative effigy.
Naturally, the taxpayer was still left to foot the bill. The statue was cancelled, yet Victorians were left holding the receipt for $134,000. For months, the machinery of government insisted this monument to Dear Leader had merely arrived by spontaneous administrative momentum. The paper trail, dragged kicking and screaming into daylight via freedom of information, tells a rather less modest tale of former premier Jacinta Allan and her inner circle.
The brief asked Allan to “approve DPC commencing work on commissioning a statue of the former premier” and “approve DPC directly engaging Meridian Sculpture”. She ticked “approved” beside both and added a handwritten instruction: “Please provide an update following initial discussion with Meridian Sculpture.”
It was the ultimate parting gift: a hundred-grand-plus effigy ordered within six days of his departure, signed off by his loyal deputy before the tea had even gone cold.
Yet Dan has never been one to concern himself with domestic scuffles once they cease to be politically useful. His gaze has invariably been cast much further afield. He built a machine out of pursuing deep-pocketed benefactors and foreign regimes that could afford him leverage. From the early days of the ‘Redshirts’ racket, where hundreds of thousands of public dollars were illicitly diverted to party foot-soldiers, to the secret hotel-room capitulations with union chieftains revealed by the anti-corruption commission’s Operation Richmond, the doctrine remained uniform: winning excused everything.
“For Daniel, electoral success and moral excellence are the same thing. But, of course, they are not. And when that approach comes with a complete lack of self-reflection, it can take you to places.”
Those places included Beijing. Having previously circumvented national security advice to tie his state to China’s Belt and Road initiative, Andrews felt perfectly comfortable gracing the red carpet alongside global authoritarians like Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un.
Now, having traded the political dispatch box for the private ledger, the former premier has moved briskly into the lucrative shadows. He operates a web of bespoke private entities, notably Glencairn Street and Wedgetail Partners, trading as Forty Eight & Partners alongside his longtime China whisperer Marty Mei. Unencumbered by public transparency registers, these quiet operations bridge the gap between influential domestic capital and Asian business interests.
While Victorians are left to navigate a ruined economy, broken public services and the administrative detritus of a decade-long reign, the architect of it all jogs on the sands and watches the waves roll in from a donor’s beachside redoubt. One can only marvel at the sheer, unblinking audacity of the man. The state may be bankrupt, but the regime’s supreme commander has retired with full honours, vast connections and very deep pockets.
