Daniel Andrews(1972–)

Daniel Michael Andrews was born at the Williamstown community hospital in inner-western Melbourne on 6 July 1972, second son of Robert Andrews, a Williamstown-port stevedore and senior Maritime Union of Australia organiser of the Hawke-Keating Labor decades, and Joan Andrews. The household was inner-Melbourne working-class Labor of the post-war kind: small terrace house in Williamstown, the father a union official on the Williamstown docks, the family Catholic-Labor by tradition and Williamstown-Football-Club by Saturday-afternoon culture. The family moved to the small farming country of Wangaratta in north-east Victoria when Daniel was ten on the father's career change to small-business management; he was schooled at the Galen Catholic College Wangaratta from 1985 to 1989, took the Victorian Higher School Certificate in 1989, and went on to Monash University at twenty to read for the BA in classics and politics.

He took the Monash degree in 1996, joined the Victorian Australian Labor Party at twenty-four on the Stephen Conroy parliamentary-staffer recommendation, and worked across the next six years as an electorate staffer for two senior Victorian Labor MPs (Alan Griffin the federal MP for Bruce from 1996 to 1998, and Lindsay Tanner the federal MP for Melbourne from 1998 to 2002). The small Victorian-ALP-staffer apprenticeship gave him the knowledge of the Victorian electoral-machine politics that ran across the post-1992 reform period: the Steve Bracks state-Labor leadership team had been pulling the Victorian Labor Party out of the post-Cain-Kirner electoral collapse of the early 1990s, and the ALP organisational reformation across the 1996 to 2002 period was the foundational politics of the Andrews career.

He was preselected for the state Labor seat of Mulgrave in the suburban-Melbourne south-eastern country at the 2002 Victorian general election, won the seat at the November 2002 general election in the Bracks Labor government's second-term landslide, and held the Mulgrave seat through the six subsequent state elections to his September 2023 retirement. The Andrews political career across the 2002 to 2010 period was the successive ministerial apprenticeship under the Bracks and Brumby Labor governments: he served as Minister for Health from 2007 to 2010, Minister for Gaming from 2008 to 2010, and Minister for the Arts from 2009 to 2010, before the Brumby Labor government lost the November 2010 state election to the Ted Baillieu Liberal opposition by a single-seat margin. He was elected Leader of the Victorian Parliamentary Labor Party at the post-election Labor-caucus ballot of 3 December 2010 against the Tim Pallas challenge by 41 votes to 9.

He led the Victorian ALP through the four-year opposition period across 2010 to 2014 and won the November 2014 Victorian general election with a 47-seat to 38-seat majority over the Denis Napthine Liberal-Coalition government. The first term (December 2014 to November 2018) ran the Murray Basin Rail Project, the Level Crossing Removal Programme (the 50-crossing infrastructure project that the Andrews government had run as the centrepiece of the 2014 campaign), and the education-and-health portfolio reforms of the first-term period. The second term (November 2018 to November 2022) ran the West Gate Tunnel, the North-East Link, the Suburban Rail Loop, and the controversial small construction-sector tax-and-cost overruns of the Big Build period. The third term (November 2022 to September 2023) was the post-COVID-19 fiscal-recovery period of the Victorian state budget.

The senior international political-and-public-health attention of the Andrews career was the Victorian COVID-19 response across the 2020 and 2021 pandemic period. The small Andrews government was the principal Australian state political authority across the 2020 March-to-June first-wave lockdown, the 2020 July-to-October second-wave Melbourne-only lockdown (the 112-day continuous lockdown of metropolitan Melbourne that ran from 9 July to 27 October 2020 and was, on the international comparative pandemic-policy assessment, the longest single continuous lockdown of any major Western city across the pandemic), and the 2021 August-to-October fourth-wave lockdown. The senior public-political response to the lockdown policies was sharply divided: senior public-health epidemiological assessment supported the lockdown-and-elimination approach as effective on the case-and-mortality numbers, and senior small-business-and-civil-liberties opposition characterised the approach as authoritarian. The Andrews government won the November 2022 state election by a landslide majority on the strength of the pandemic-management public-approval; the third term ran across the post-pandemic recovery period through to his unexpected announcement of retirement on 26 September 2023. He has been married to Catherine Kezelman since 1998, has three adult children, was made a Companion of the Order of Australia in the 2024 King's Birthday Honours, and lives at the Mulgrave family home from his post-political-retirement small post-political career in international corporate consultancy. The Andrews name in the English-side catalogue is the patronymic of Andrew (the apostle); he carries the Williamstown-Wangaratta-Melbourne-Labor variant of it alongside the actress Julie Andrews as the two contemporary heads of the surname.