Ben Carroll’s first full day as Victorian Premier opened in the basement of a Melbourne Kmart — and, almost on cue, the television feed cut out.
As political symbolism goes, it was hard to miss. Victorian Labor was trying to sell a fresh start, yet its carefully staged message of renewal struggled to make it past the lower level without a hitch.
“I can’t wait to get into Kmart, where my working career first began,” Carroll said. One can only imagine how many taxpayer-funded communications advisers helped polish that line.
Carroll began working at Kmart Airport West when he was 14 and remained there for eight years. Victorians should probably prepare to hear that Kmart origin story again and again.
It is already being shaped into Carroll’s answer to Anthony Albanese’s well-worn housing commission narrative — a relatable backstory designed to signal humble beginnings.
The bolder act of political reinvention came with Carroll’s day-one insistence: “I am not Daniel Andrews. I am not Jacinta Allan.”
Strictly speaking, that is true. Politically, it is far harder to swallow. Carroll has been in the Victorian cabinet since 2017 and spent almost three years serving as Allan’s deputy.
He did not arrive this week as an outsider suddenly confronted by a government in chaos. He was part of the leadership team that helped steer it for close to a decade, after earlier working inside politics as a staffer.
Ben Carroll says he’s different to former Premier Jacinta Allan but Victoria may disagree after he spent almost a decade in the cabinet
Carroll announced a royal commission into Victoria’s construction sector on Tuesday
Carroll has sat in cabinet since 2017 and spent nearly three years as Jacinta Allan’s deputy
If Victoria’s construction sector is now so compromised that it requires a royal commission, a special prosecutor and a beefed up anti-corruption watchdog, that reflects damningly on a government in which Carroll was the second most senior figure.
Yet that’s what he announced yesterday.
A royal commission is the right call. But it exposes a cynical truth: it became government policy only when Allan was removed.
What kind of patsy was Carroll in recent years if the shift is genuine and not merely about saving his political skin?
The circumstances of Allan’s exit make this ‘new era’ even harder to swallow. She did not pass the baton with grace. She had to be blasted from her office.
Even then, after publicly promising Carroll her ‘unqualified support’, she backed Attorney General Sonya Kilkenny in a doomed rearguard action against him.
In the end, Carroll had the numbers 50 to 15. Kilkenny had no plausible prospect of success, but her candidacy threatened to force a rank-and-file ballot that could have left the government drifting for six weeks while it was resolved, just four months before an election.
Coming from the woman who had only just promised Carroll her unqualified support, it was difficult to interpret it as anything other than a final attempt to wreck the succession on her way out the door.
Carroll’s first full day as Victorian Premier began in the basement of a Melbourne Kmart, where the television signal promptly failed
Attorney General Sonya Kilkenny’s brief suggestion that she might be a candidate for Premier threatened to force a rank-and-file ballot that could have left the government drifting for six weeks while it was resolved, just four months before an election
Kilkenny eventually folded, allowing Labor to emerge and announce with a straight face that Carroll had been elected unanimously.
Now comes the breathtaking sales pitch: Labor admits it has made an almighty mess of Victoria, and therefore Victorians should trust Labor to investigate Labor and repair the damage Labor caused.
The maddening thing is it just might work.
With a chronically unimpressive Liberal opposition and a fractured right, Labor may yet persuade exhausted voters that the best way to achieve change is to re-elect the woeful incumbents.
That possibility does not make the proposition any less ridiculous, mind you. Carroll is entitled to his Kmart nostalgia.
But no number of media conferences among the air fryers and discounted bath towels can transform a nine-year cabinet veteran into an insurgent outsider who has suddenly arrived to fix a mess left by others.
