Daniel Andrews(1972–)

Daniel Michael Andrews was born at Williamstown in inner-western Melbourne on 6 July 1972, second son of a Williamstown stevedore and Maritime Union organiser. The family moved to the farming country of Wangaratta in north-east Victoria when he was ten; he was schooled at Galen Catholic College and went on to Monash University to read classics and politics.

He took his Monash degree in 1996, joined the Victorian Labor Party, and worked across six years as an electorate staffer for two senior Victorian Labor MPs, the apprenticeship in Victorian electoral-machine politics through the post-Cain-Kirner ALP reformation that the Bracks leadership team was running.

He won the state seat of Mulgrave in suburban south-east Melbourne at the 2002 election and held it through to his 2023 retirement. Under the Bracks and Brumby governments he served as Minister for Health, for Gaming and for the Arts from 2007 to 2010, and was elected Leader of the Victorian Parliamentary Labor Party in December 2010.

He led the party through four years of opposition and won the 2014 Victorian general election. As Premier he ran the Level Crossing Removal Programme, the centrepiece of the 2014 campaign, and across the second and third terms the Big Build infrastructure programme: the West Gate Tunnel, the North-East Link and the Suburban Rail Loop.

He led the Victorian government's COVID-19 response across the 2020 and 2021 pandemic, the principal Australian state authority through the first-wave, second-wave and 2021 lockdowns, an elimination-and-suppression approach that the public-health assessment supported on the case-and-mortality numbers and on which the government won the 2022 state election by a landslide. He announced his retirement on 26 September 2023, was made a Companion of the Order of Australia in 2024, and moved into international corporate consultancy. The Andrews name, the Christian patronymic of the apostle Andrew, he carries in its Williamstown-Melbourne-Labor variant alongside the actress Julie Andrews as the two contemporary heads of the surname.