TRANSCRIPT 🔗
00:00:03
Speaker 1: From The Australian, here's what's on the front. I'm Claire Harvey.
00:00:07
Speaker 2: It's Friday, October 9, 2026. He was Premier for nine years, a buddy to the billionaires and still a household name today. But Dan Andrews is toxic for his Victorian Labor Party and living in a giant house he doesn't own on the Mornington Peninsula. Today, the mystery of what's going on with Daniel Andrews.
00:00:41
Speaker 3: Other than a few solo walks on the beach, he really wasn't seen by any of the people that I spoke to. I spoke to neighbours, I spoke to cafe owners and restaurant owners and they hadn't seen him.
00:00:54
Speaker 1: They didn't know that he lived there.
00:00:57
Speaker 2: This is The Australian's roving reporter, Liam Mendes. He tracked Andrews down on Victoria's Mornington Peninsula where the memory of the world's longest lockdown has yet to fade.
00:01:10
Speaker 3: A lot of people in Mornington Peninsula don't actually like Mr Andrews. There's roadsides that have been scribbled FU Dan around the place. And a lot of that has to do with COVID. The Mornington Peninsula were no different to the Melbourne CBD. So a lot of those houses there are very close to the water. When you've got a five kilometre radius and you're living near the water, that limits where you can really go by about 50%. So you can understand why there's so much animosity.
00:01:44
Speaker 2: Dan Andrews resigned as Premier in 2023 after nearly nine years.
00:01:49
Speaker 1: His legacy endures.
00:01:50
Speaker 2: Victoria's COVID response, the giant big build infrastructure scheme and Australia's first state treaty with First People. And now a Royal Commission into allegations of construction corruption, a debt bomb, sky-high taxes and crumbling roads. Labor's still in government, just, and heading to an election on November 28.
00:02:12
Speaker 1: But Dan is well and truly on the outer.
00:02:16
Speaker 3: He's living in this beautiful multi, multi-million dollar home. And there's a lot of secrecy surrounding this. And the reason why it is sort of so interesting is that the people who own this home are pretty big labour donors and had a fair bit of involvement in the property construction sector in the time where Mr Andrews was the Premier of Victoria.
00:02:44
Speaker 2: The house's owners are labour donors, but some of those gifts were made as something called split donations, where various entities are used to hand over money.
00:02:55
Speaker 1: It's not illegal. But the practice does create a lack of transparency, according to the state's anti-corruption watchdog IBAC.
00:03:04
Speaker 3: Mr Andrews is receiving a pension in the hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. That's from Victorian taxpayers. It's not clear whether he's paying rent to be living in this property, which is owned by property developers who had a lot of business done. There was one large property that I found that during his tenure was received ministerial approval to go above the levels that they could build in the certain council that they were.
00:03:31
Speaker 1: Building this property in.
00:03:33
Speaker 3: Miss Andrews has come out and said that he had no dealings with that. That was the planning minister that had to do with those approvals at the time. But it just adds on to the murkiness of this. This is the longest running Labor premier in Victoria.
00:03:51
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:03:55
Speaker 2: Anthony Galloway is the Australian's Victorian political editor and he was involved with Liam in the reporting on Dan Andrews' mysterious new life. Anthony, I don't want to be too discriminatory about Victorian beaches, but this looks like an awfully kind of dystopian, bleak, windswept existence to me.
00:04:12
Speaker 1: What's the appeal of the Mornington Peninsula?
00:04:15
Speaker 4: Oh, the Mornington Peninsula is a lovely place.
00:04:17
Speaker 5: It just looks like Daniel Andrews wants to lead a very solitary life.
00:04:21
Speaker 4: Life these days.
00:04:23
Speaker 5: I guess people in Labor, when they saw the story, kind of questioned, you know, why do you have to live in this huge fortress-like mansion that's worth, I think, over $ 6 million? Why can't you just live in a normal house? There's plenty of normal houses on the Morningston Peninsula, right? So as with everything with Daniel Andrews, it's where the optics and the judgment are really called into question. You know, I think the average Victorian, the average Australian has nothing wrong with a billionaire living living in a house like that. But Daniel Andrews probably can't afford a house like that. So why does he feel the need to live in that kind of mansion? And it really kind of underscores this extent to which Andrews, as soon as he started kind of going up the Labor ladder and then becoming opposition leader, really ingratiated himself with the top end of town in Melbourne, you know, your Lindsay Foxes and the like. He seemed to really be obsessed with billionaires in a way that we haven't quite seen any previous labour. So while he had this very strained relationship with the business community more generally, he had a really close relationship with the absolute top end of town.
00:05:33
Speaker 2: Yeah, he's most famous, I suppose, throughout the rest of Australia for his very censorious and bossy press conferences in which he lectured Victorians about not enjoying themselves too much or at all while working under the world's longest lockdown.
00:05:48
Speaker 1: You won't be able to go to the pub because the pub is shut.
00:05:51
Speaker 2: That doesn't mean you can have all your mates round to home and get on the beers. That must have surely annoyed the business community. I mean, it was business who wanted things to get back to normal, certainly small business. Why has, in his post-political life, do you think the business community or property developers embraced Dan Andrews?
00:06:12
Speaker 5: Well, like I said, it's that
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really upper end of the business community. It's your billionaires that Daniel was always close to, not your millionaires. So it's the people that are so rich that it didn't really, you know, it wasn't existential for them in any way like it was for so many small and medium business owners in Victoria when you're talking about the world's longest lockdown.
00:06:34
Speaker 6: Melbourne is today in its 235th day of shutdown since the pandemic began, officially making it the city to have endured lockdowns the world's longest lockdown.
00:06:45
Speaker 5: I mean, the other thing to say is, you know, in defence of Andrews, he probably doesn't care what people think about him. He doesn't seem to be interested in legacy building in the way that pretty much all former leaders are. You know, he's currently having his legacy dismantled by the current Premier Ben Carroll, whether it's scaling back the suburban railway, whether it's cancelling a statue of Andrews.
00:07:09
Speaker 4: Whether it's Carroll really being scathing.
00:07:11
Speaker 5: Of Andrew's conduct when he was doing a pay deal with the United Firefighters Union, which was subject of quite a critical IBAC report at the anti-corruption body a few months ago.
00:07:23
Speaker 4: So, you know, he doesn't seem to, you know, at least.
00:07:26
Speaker 5: Publicly, he's not entering the debate in any way like you see former leaders normally do if their legacy is being tarnished or dismantled.
00:07:35
Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean, there's nothing as X as an ex-premier.
00:07:38
Speaker 2: Usually the people who are left behind to either clean up the mess or to try and rebuild their own power base, I suppose, don't want to have anything to do with the former leader.
00:07:47
Speaker 4: But Jacinta Allen did. I mean, we know they spoke, my understanding is basically weekly. They were very close friends.
00:07:55
Speaker 5: And Jacinta Allen was advised by Victorian Labor that Andrews since he had left the premiership, was toxic among Victorians. There was kind of this lag in terms of, you know, a lot of what he did during COVID and a lot of those kinds of questions around integrity. She was advised time and time again, differentiate yourself from Andrews, which because she was close to the guys, she was incapable of doing. And Ben Carroll's now trying to do that with a few months till the election. So he's really doing what Jacinta Allen should have done two, three years ago.
00:08:29
Speaker 4: Even when Daniel.
00:08:30
Speaker 5: Andrews went to China to the military parade and got a class photo with the world's despots, including Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un, she couldn't bring herself to just say that was a bit off, where Carol, then Deputy Premier, was quite critical of that and basically alleged that Daniel Andrews was doing that for his current business purposes, which he said was quite off.
00:08:56
Speaker 4: So, yeah, you have to.
00:08:57
Speaker 5: The question for Ben Carroll is, is it far too late? And the Victorians look at this as quite a cynical exercise.
00:09:05
Speaker 1: Let me make one thing very clear.
00:09:09
Speaker 4: I am not Daniel Andrews. I am not Jacinta Rowland.
00:09:15
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, that appearance of the Victory Parade in Beijing in 2025 was one of the only times we've seen Dan Andrews in public, apart from Liam's photographs of him wandering around on the Mornington Peninsula. Does that give us some clues as to what he's actually up to and what do we know about what his life involves in terms of making money?
00:09:32
Speaker 1: Like how is he making a living?
00:09:34
Speaker 5: Yeah, so he started two businesses since he left the premiership. One of them is he's co-owned with his former chief China advisor, Marty May.
00:09:44
Speaker 4: So we know that a lot of.
00:09:45
Speaker 5: His business activities involve getting market access into China for Australian companies and vice versa. representing Chinese business interests in Australia. We know two of his clients Andrew Forrest or Fortescue, as well as Anthony Pratt. But other than that, we don't know much about these businesses. They don't have any kind of public-facing websites or anything of that. So there's not much to be said because we just don't know. But, I mean, to go back to that question about optics before, I mean, Daniel Andrews visited China so many times as Premier, never took the media. And he always said it was, you know, he was doing it in Victoria's interest. But his internal critics always suspected, are you just setting yourself up for post-politics?
00:10:34
Speaker 4: Now, most leaders might, you know, wait a little.
00:10:36
Speaker 5: While before setting up a business that's all about representing Chinese business interests.
00:10:41
Speaker 4: He didn't wait long at all. He did it immediately.
00:10:44
Speaker 5: So like everything with Andrews, he kind of raises these questions about people's kind of worst fears about him. So, you know, we can't necessarily prove any nefarious wrongdoing here, but he just doesn't do himself any favours with the way he conducts himself.
00:11:08
Speaker 2: This is an absolute gift for the Victorian Liberals and for One Nation who are coming very hard after seats in Victoria. Have they been able to use the Dan Andrews factor to their gain?
00:11:18
Speaker 5: Oh, I mean, the research of both Liberals and Labor say that any mention of Dan Andrews now is not helpful for Victorian Labor. You know, Victorian Labor has confirmed to me that Andrews will have no role in the upcoming state election campaign, but neither would Andrews want to have a role And a One Nation candidate controversially said at a campaign launch on the weekend that if One Nation win, Daniel Andrews and Jacinta Allen would be in jail by Christmas. And that got a thunderous applause from the One Nation supporters in the room.
00:11:52
Speaker 1: It's very lock her up, isn't it? Yeah, it is. Hillary Clinton vibes. Yeah.
00:11:56
Speaker 4: And, you know, I find that quite problematic.
00:11:59
Speaker 5: I don't think Australia should be moving to a democracy where, you know, you not only lose the election but you get chucked in jail.
00:12:06
Speaker 4: Afterwards for good measure.
00:12:08
Speaker 5: So Jess Wilson isn't going that far because she's kind of running as the serious alternative Premier. But, yeah, she mentions Jacinta Allen and Daniel Andrews whenever she can as well and reminds voters of that legacy just because, yeah, it.
00:12:24
Speaker 4: Is helpful for them.
00:12:25
Speaker 5: The polls are showing Ben Carroll is a lot more popular than Jacinta Allen, but he hasn't managed to lift that primary vote in any way. So the more that the Liberals kind of remind voters that, of Alan and Andrews, the better, I think.
00:12:38
Speaker 1: Thanks, Anthony.
00:12:39
Speaker 4: Thank you.
00:12:49
Speaker 2: Anthony Galloway is The Australian's Victorian political editor and Leah Mendez is our reporter at large. You can read all the action from the run-up to Victoria's state election anytime at theaustralian.com.au.