Victorian election 2022

The Village Green Hotel, a pokies barn in suburban Mulgrave, is an unlikely place of Labor legend.

Yet it is here, in cavernous space where chicken parmas the size of tabloid newspapers are served beneath faux Greco-Roman columns, that a statue of Daniel Andrews could well be erected.

Labor supporters gathered at the Village Green Hotel on Saturday night.Credit:Joe Armao

It was here, in 2014, that a 42-year-old Andrews, his once dour political persona reframed by Giorgio Armani glasses and a sharp new wardrobe chosen by image consultants, strode to the stage as the first Victorian leader in 60 years to wrest back government after just one term in opposition.

Four years later, Andrews’ wardrobe hadn’t changed, but his grip on power had become a chokehold. In the fabled “Danslide” victory of 2018, won against the backdrop of Scott Morrison replacing Malcolm Turnbull as prime minister, Labor reduced the Liberal party to a rump. As the counting unfolded, a red shirt cheer of “four more years” became “eight more years.”

By the end of that night four years ago, Andrews walked out into the Village Green parking lot with an 18-seat majority and the Liberals deep in crisis.

Labor won’t have the same majority after the counting is done in this election, but Andrews has claimed something even more rare in Victorian politics: a third term as premier. At 8.20pm on Saturday night, the red-shirt volunteers erupted in lusty celebration when the ABC’s election analyst Antony Green announced that Labor would again form government.

As for the Liberals, having returned to Matthew Guy, the leader who took them to crushing defeat four years ago, they remain a political movement in deep crisis. The party’s expectation leading into this poll was that it could regain much of the ground lost four years ago and potentially push Labor into minority government.

Instead, it appears the Liberals have gone backwards. Guy on Saturday returned to familiar surrounds at the Veneto Club in Bulleen, the scene of his 2018 defeat. He told colleagues after that night that he never wanted to again call Andrews to concede an election.

Voters gave him no choice.

This night, the Village Green had a very different feel. Labor insiders were nervous about whether residual anger from the pandemic – and against Andrews in particular – would reshape the electoral map.

Premier Daniel Andrews on the campaign trail on Saturday.Credit:AAP

Former ALP state secretary Nicholas Reece said the main takeaway from this night was that the anger, as fierce as it was, was confined to people who were probably never going to back Andrews.

He said the noise from that loud minority obscured the true mood of voters: to continue with a party which, by the time the next election is held, will have governed Victoria for 23 of 27 years.

“There is obviously a group of people in the electorate who have been very angry,” Reece said. They probably were never going to vote Labor and they have been very loud.

“That has created, I think, a distorted picture in the media and the broader community that this election was going to be close.”

The other point Reece made was about the Victorian Liberals. This election must mean a wholesale re-examination of what they stand for and who they are trying to represent.

In another way, an element of Victoria’s electoral map has been dramatically redrawn. The Greens had talked openly for weeks about winning back Northcote and finally clinching Richmond, where Labor’s popular MP Richard Wynne is retiring. The Greens not only won those seats, they may well take Footscray – a seat held by Labor before Saturday with a staggering margin of 28.7 per cent.

There was another element of this election that, hopefully, will never be repeated. ALP volunteers who had spent the day at polling booths reported there was an edge to the day that’s not normally seen in Australian politics. In Andrews’ seat of Mulgrave, an electorate that has become a magnet for discontent about Victoria’s pandemic response, it bordered on ugly.

The possibility of a “Dancapitation” in Mulgrave, although always unlikely, energised a motley crew of independents, agitators and Liberal supporters who throughout the two weeks of pre-poll voting, set up camp outside the seat’s only early voting centre.

Nevertheless, Andrews won about half of the primary vote.

On Saturday, Labor’s campaign headquarters received reports of aggressive behaviour by Freedom Party supporters and a level of vitriol that long-serving volunteers had never encountered at a polling place.

Liberal deputy leader David Southwick, whose grip on Caulfield remained precarious on Saturday night, told ABC TV that the campaign in his electorate was the dirtiest he had seen.

The best that can be hoped for is this was a one-off reaction to the unprecedented public health crisis of the past three years.

In the meantime, the ALP faithful were again awaiting the arrival of Andrews at the Village Green to claim another famous victory.

Check out the live results in our data centre here.

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