For Victoria, Allan's bounce back is anything but healthy

The Age

a day ago

The old gag about Melbourne's weather is that if you don't like it, just wait five minutes. The same might be said about the Allan government and opinion polls.
The latest Resolve Political Monitor survey shows that in a reverse of Newton's law of gravity, the collapse of popular support for Victorian Labor at the end of last year is matched only by the startling recovery of the past six months.
A primary vote of just 22 per cent is now 32 per cent and rising. A looming electoral cataclysm has been replaced by the likelihood of a fourth consecutive win.
The volatility in voter sentiment is extraordinary but then, so is the situation in Victoria, where a Labor administration which, by any conventional measure or norm, has governed beyond its natural lifespan, yet remains the only viable choice before electors to run the state.
This is not healthy.
I recently interviewed Melbourne Law School associate professor William Partlett, a fellow at the Centre for Public Integrity. He sees Victorian Labor as an example of a cartel party, a concept the late Irish political scientist Peter Mair coined to describe how political parties co-opt the resources of the state to create electoral monopolies.
In Victoria, it is seen in the blurring of boundaries between the Labor Party, the public service and an expanding public sector that embeds a not-so-virtuous cycle of self-sustaining incumbency.
It is the passage of electoral funding laws, with the support of a gormless Liberal Party, that bake in an advantage for sitting MPs against challengers and established parties against new entrants.
It is constraint of the state's anti-corruption agency with a jurisdiction so narrow it rarely holds public hearings and must be convinced of the commission of a crime before it launches an investigation.