Victorian Labor’s collapse is not only about debt, crime or infrastructure blowouts, but a delayed reckoning from communities that felt broken by lockdowns and ignored by the recovery.

They broke us, our kids’ mental health, and went back to their high vis vest.

That is how one participant in a recent RedBridge focus group described the Victorian government. She was not asked about the pandemic. She was asked about the state she lives in.

It is worth sitting with the sentence, because it contains an entire theory of what went wrong. There is her injury and there is a second injury done to her children. A set of injuries that are a manifestation of grief turning into resentment, which is the return to normal by a government that decided the recovery would be built out of concrete and not by wrapping their arms around a bruised community.

Melbourne holds a record no city wanted. Two hundred and sixty-two days of lockdown across six separate closures, the longest cumulative total in the world. That number has been argued over for five years, almost always as a question of whether it was justified. That is the wrong argument because the lockdowns are over. What matters now is what the state did with the people it had asked to endure them, and it’s within this world where we can clearly see why the Victorian Labor government is firmly up against the ropes, in round two against Mike Tyson in his prime.

It’s up against the ropes because of what it chose to build versus rebuild and what it selected to ignore. What it did? Level crossings, tunnels, rail loops, road duplications. A pipeline measured in the tens of billions and a workforce in high-visibility clothing. It was legible, it was announceable, and it was the thing the government already knew how to do. What it was not, was a response to what had actually happened to Victorians. The rebuilding of the social fabric of the state.

Almost every explanation offered for this Victorian Labor government’s predicament has been an explanation of the obvious. Debt. Crime. The Suburban Rail Loop. The Commonwealth Games. The CFMEU. Each of these is real and each of them is a symptom. The disease is older, the polling shows when it presented, and the demographic breakdowns show who is carrying it straight to the ballot box in November, with determination and anger.

Labor did not begin bleeding after the 2022 election. It held the line through all of 2023 and then lost almost everything in a single year.

In December 2023, 13 months into the term and two months after Daniel Andrews resigned, RedBridge had Victorian Labor on 37 per cent, roughly its election result. There is no decay in that data. Whatever Victorians felt about the pandemic in 2023, it had not yet reached vote intention and there is a clear reason why (more of that later).

Then suddenly everything changed. Thirty-six in March 2024, 35 in June, 31 by August, 30 by spring. It never returns to the mid-thirties. In June 2026 it sits at 26, level with the Coalition on 26 and behind One Nation on 27, in a sample of more than 5,500 Victorians. This week, it has collapsed to 23, a historic low.

The two-party numbers underneath are worse than the primaries suggest. The Coalition leads Labor 54 to 46. Labor leads One Nation by only 52 to 48. A party that governed Victoria for 11 of the last 12 years is now within four points of losing a two-party contest to Pauline Hanson, almost running third on primaries and, on a very bad November day, could end up with as little as 20 MPs in the lower house.

Why 2024, and not 2022

Two things happened in the window, and neither of them is a scandal.

The first is that Daniel Andrews left. This is not a point about competence and it is not a point about his successor. It is a point about psychology. Andrews had been the single human container for everything Victorians felt about the pandemic, the loyalty and the rage in equal measure. While he remained, the feeling stayed attached to a person and to a period. When he went, it detached and went looking for the........

© Pearls and Irritations