Farewell speeches are supposed to be gracious. Jacinta Allan’s, in Jeremy Cordeaux’s telling on this week’s Court of Public Opinion, was something else — a complete rewrite of history. He simply couldn’t fathom how anyone could see reality so differently from the way it actually is.
Neither Elected Nor Ejected
Allan’s premiership was an unusual one, Jeremy noted: she wasn’t voted into the top job, and she wasn’t voted out of it. She rose to it, then stepped down, her time as leader relatively brief. Yet the speech brimmed with pride — pride Jeremy found impossible to square with the state of Victoria. She seemed, he said, to want an award for her premiership.
Proud Of The Debt
What astonished him most was the object of that pride. He pointed to Victoria’s debt — around $200 billion, the biggest in the country — and to the spending behind it. Set against carjackings, home invasions, potholes, the highest taxes and, in his account, the highest unemployment in the nation, the celebratory tone struck him as detached from reality. Lie after lie, was how he described the roll-call of accomplishments.
A Collective That Can’t Duck
Crucially, Jeremy argued the mess can’t be pinned on Allan alone. Labor operates as a collective — cabinet decisions, group decisions, cabinet solidarity. The party can’t now offload everything onto one departing leader and declare itself under fresh management. The whole cabinet, he insisted, should own the debt, the potholes and the crime. He reminded listeners Allan was minister for the “big build” — tying her to the CFMEU concerns and the Commonwealth Games that cost nearly a billion dollars and never happened.
Credit Where It’s Due
Not all of it was criticism. Jeremy gave Allan credit for one thing: she hung on. She didn’t read the polls and the media and quietly slip away — which tells him she’s a fighter, and he meant it kindly. It was only when her own colleagues, the “comrades” she thanked, told her the party was over that she went. As he put it, you can’t stab somebody in the back while you’re standing in front of them.
Into The Dustbin
Jeremy expects Allan to disappear into the dustbin of history, leaving the mess she and Dan Andrews created behind her. He anticipates a royal commission into union corruption — while noting pointedly that the government will pick the commissioner and write the terms of reference. And the pension, he added, will be generous. For Jeremy, it captured everything maddening about modern politics: a record of debt and dysfunction, recast on the way out as a tale of triumph.
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