VOTE ONE NATION VICTORIA PUT DAN ANDREWS & ALLAN IN JAIL (CFMEC & 800 COVID DEATHS AGE CARE) ROYAL COMMISSION
VOTE ONE NATION VICTORIA PUT DAN ANDREWS & ALLAN IN JAIL (CFMEC & 800 COVID DEATHS AGE CARE) ROYAL COMMISSION
ROYAL COMMISSION NOW Victoria under Dan Andrews ran the longest, hardest COVID lockdowns in Australia. The second wave that forced them was largely his government’s own hotel-quarantine failure.
Melbourne spent 112 days in lockdown in the second wave of 2020, then further long lockdowns in 2021. The city is often cited at roughly 260-plus days of lockdown across the pandemic, more than any other Australian capital. Rules included a 5 km travel limit, a nightly curfew, playground closures, and mask rules that at times covered primary-school children. Police enforced them heavily. Protests were broken up; some fines were later thrown out.
The trigger was hotel quarantine. National cabinet agreed in late March 2020 that returned travellers would quarantine in hotels. Victoria used private security guards instead of police or the defence force. Infection control was poor. The virus escaped the Rydges and Stamford Plaza hotels in May–June 2020. Genomic work linked about 99 per cent of the second wave to those leaks: more than 18,000 infections and roughly 800 deaths, mostly in aged care. Counsel assisting the inquiry put the death toll tied to the failure at 768 as of late September 2020.
Retired judge Jennifer Coate’s inquiry found the decision to use private security was an “orphan”: no minister or official owned it. She found Andrews and his ministers had no active role in, and no real oversight of, how enforcement would work — which she said sat badly with Westminster responsibility. Health minister Jenny Mikakos and the health department secretary resigned. Andrews apologised for “very clear errors” and said he would have preferred police. He was not found to have personally ordered the guards.
Later material undercut the claim that every restriction was pure health advice. A 2025 freedom-of-information release showed the August 2020 curfew was announced before Chief Health Officer Brett Sutton’s office had a written health assessment of it. The 2024 Commonwealth COVID inquiry said lockdowns had lost public credibility, especially in Victoria, and noted the last stretch of the 2020 Melbourne lockdown ran with single-digit or zero daily cases, many of them already in quarantine or aged care. It also recorded harms, including higher infection rates in masked older primary children than in younger unmasked ones, and a rise in neglect-linked deaths of very young children.
Andrews defended the lockdowns as the price of saving lives after the second wave, and Victoria did eventually suppress that wave before vaccines. The political label “Dictator Dan” stuck because the rules were extreme, lasted long after cases collapsed, and the quarantine collapse that made them necessary was never pinned on a named decision-maker. He was re-elected in 2022 and resigned in 2023. No criminal finding was made against him over the lockdowns or hotel quarantine. __________________________________ Neither Dan Andrews nor Jacinta Allan has been charged or convicted of corruption. The case against them is political failure and alleged wilful blindness, not a proven personal payoff.
Andrews built the Big Build and kept the CFMEU close. His government shifted major civil work toward Setka’s branch, treated the union as a factional ally, and did not seriously confront years of public reporting about standover tactics and underworld links. There is no public evidence he personally took money.
Allan ran the program as infrastructure minister, then as premier. In June 2023 her own officials warned her in writing that a lawless CFMEU, bikies and criminals were on taxpayer sites and could blow out cost and schedule. She wrote to the police commissioner, then the problem continued until media exposure in 2024. She denies her office forced contractors into CFMEU deals, says she never acted corruptly, and says there is no evidence of government corruption. Geoffrey Watson’s administrator report said the government knew, had a duty to know, and did nothing effective — and put a rough cost near $15 billion. That figure is an estimate, not an audit.
The scandal cost Allan the premiership in July 2026. A royal commission is now testing what she and the government knew and whether Big Build money was transferred to organised crime. Until it reports, the bottom line is: they empowered the union, were warned, and failed to stop it. Personal corruption has been alleged in politics and not proven in court. _______________________
