As I wrote yesterday, Victorian premier Dan Andrews has delivered a masterclass in the sorry-not-sorry insincerity stakes common to petulant teenagers and politicians. In the same breath that he supposedly “takes full responsibility”, he’s also not going to do a damn thing that will actually make a difference.
NSW premier Barry O’Farrell resigned because of an undeclared bottle of wine, even though that state’s ICAC explicitly ruled that he’d done nothing wrong. Last year, another NSW premier resigned because she didn’t tell everyone she was dating a shonky colleague.
Dan is made of stronger Teflon than that.
The wrongdoing exposed and articulated in Operation Watts is not unprecedented; it’s not even rare.
Anyone with working knowledge – even shallow working knowledge – of the Victorian ALP knows that for decades it has been run like a suburban cock-fighting operation […]
To that end, it’s entirely disingenuous for the Premier to suggest the Adem Somyurek sting was any worse than what’s happened in the past.
It’s also disingenuous for Andrews to adopt a that-was-then, this-is-now political strategy.
Decades of Labor rule in Victoria have also allowed them to quietly adjust the rules so that they won’t even get punished when they get caught.
Despite all this evidence, Somyurek’s misdemeanours have largely been boiled down to political parking tickets because of the legislative framework in Victoria.
Being whacked by the state parliament is hardly analogous to doing hard time in Port Phillip prison for political corruption.
Andrews’s plan to tie some of the integrity reforms to political donations for rival parties is spectacularly cheeky, given the dysfunction that is the Victorian ALP.
It has been so bloodied by its failures it is being run federally.
Which, as I also wrote yesterday, means that the stink in Victoria reaches all the way to Canberra. So, how does PM Anthony Albanese react? He’s fully backing Andrews for re-election in November, of course.
You’ve got to admire this lot’s pure bloody chutzpah if nothing else.
Now Andrews wants to force the other major parties to sign up to integrity measures or risk not receiving campaign funding.
The Australian
Nothing says “Victorian Labor” quite like being caught out as the most systemically corrupt political machine this side of the Obeids (also Labor), and finger-wagging everyone else to behave themselves.
And, Victoria being Victoria, he’s almost certainly going to get away with it. A decade of Dan and three years of Covid has turned the entire state into giant, open-air cult compound. If the premier made drinking cyanide-laced cordial mandatory, Victorians would happily chirp, “IStandWithDan!” as they guzzled it down.
Oh, well, let’s look at the bright side: as I’ve written before, at least Tommy Bent can rest easy now, in the knowledge that he’s no longer the most corrupt premier in Victoria’s history.
