His bronze statue has been scrapped but Daniel Andrews remains monumental

September 3, 2026 — 5:00am

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The Victorian government set something of a record last week. Where normally it takes decades of agitation to remove from public view a statue of a contentious historical figure, Daniel Andrews went from bust to dust in a matter of months.

Call it progress, if you like. Our reflex to cancel means sculptors barely hardly have time to finish a wax cast before the mob is calling for the abolition of their work. This saves on the cost of ceremonial unveilings and expensive foundry bronze.

At some point, however, we should reflect on the hazards of trying to capture in hard metal the essence of still living public figures who might have done great things but, like everyone else, remain humanly flawed and fallible.

Ben Carroll’s reasons for decommissioning the Andrews statue are as disingenuous as Jacinta Allan’s reasons for announcing she’d found a sculptor to immortalise her predecessor.

Back in May, when the Building Bad scandal was threatening to devour her leadership, Allan made public her plans for the statue as a dead cat distraction from the near daily revelations about the crooks and thugs who’d grown rich off the state’s major infrastructure projects.

A dead cat, as pointed out at the time, is the strategy of drawing attention away from one political problem by offering up something more malodorous.

Last week, when Carroll needed to change the conversation from the........

© The Age