It’s unfair, but Dan could be re-elected in a landslide while Gladys gets the boot

Compare the pair.

Daniel Andrews. A brilliant, slimy, scheming, factional politician. A premier who presided over a hotel quarantine fiasco that directly or indirectly cost 800 lives.

Who has put his state into lockdown for almost six of the last sixteen months. Who imposed a curfew on Melbourne, set riot police on law-abiding citizens and had a young mother forcibly arrested, in her kitchen, in front of her screaming children.

Who, presumably getting the message from Labor focus groups, now suddenly advocates lockdowns must become a thing of the past.

Gladys Berejiklian. An unflamboyant, somewhat shy and gauche, but solidly competent politician. A premier whose government presided over early mistakes in the pandemic – the Ruby Princess – but did not shirk responsibility for them.

Who has kept NSW going without the blunt assaults on personal liberty that have been first resorts for Andrews and other state premiers.

Whose contact tracing network is the best in Australia, and whose government treats its people as adults capable of acting responsibly to prevent the spread of the virus.

But who is now presiding a moderate WuFlu outbreak with an extensive lockdown after resisting them for so long, and just as national fatigue with the whole Covid circus finally has set in.

Of the two, it is Andrews who has a record of pandemic incompetence, and Berejiklian who has kept her state functioning more normally than any other.

Yet it is Andrews who almost certainly will be re-elected in a landslide, and Berejiklian who is in sudden danger of electoral mortality.

Why?

Berejiklian’s successes set the bar so high that even a modest stumble from her ‘gold standard’ – which the Sydney outbreak is – is being hyped as a disaster of the first magnitude, with a backlash growing against the premier even from members of her own party room.

Whereas Victorians are so used to Andrews’s blundering, followed by self-exculpatory spin, that his bar is ridiculously low and the Victorian electorate’s tolerance ridiculously high.

Gladys Berejiklian deserves better than how she is being treated just now. But she needs to remember her own leadership lesson from the Ruby Princess fiasco: take responsibility for what went wrong, don’t play the blame game, and keep restrictive measures as brief, narrow and targeted as possible.

Berejiklian can do it. But thanks to this piffling outbreak, on a Victorian let alone an overseas scale, she is suddenly in an electoral red zone where Our Glad is in serious danger of being the victim of her own prior success and being rejected by her voters as Bad Glad.

It’s unfair, but politics is a cruel mistress.