A Daniel Andrews statue – or just a dead cat?

To understand the damage the growing list of Big Build outrages is doing to Labor’s re-election prospects, you only need to take a whiff of what the government just threw on the table.

At precisely the same time that Premier Jacinta Allan was being grilled in parliament about a company owned by awful men exploiting a program intended to promote women in the construction industry, one of her advisers texted through to say they’d found a sculptor to make Daniel Andrews’ statue.

This, my friends, is what is known in politics as a dead cat.

The idea is that, when you are in serious trouble, you distract everyone by announcing or leaking something so malodorous, it immediately changes the conversation.

It is difficult to think of a story that cuts deeper for Allan than Women in Construction, a labour-hire company founded and owned by a violent abuser of women and previously managed by a convicted drug trafficker, getting rich through a public scheme designed to address gender imbalance in a blokey industry.

It would also be difficult to confect an announcement more guaranteed to inflame public opinion than using $134,304 of taxpayers’ money to build a statue dedicated to Allan’s long-serving predecessor.

Be outraged, if you must, at this decision. Just know that this is precisely what the government wants you to feel.

What they don’t want you to do is think about the grubby and in some instances criminal details of what has been going on within the Big Build, a gargantuan infrastructure program which has transferred extraordinary wealth from the state’s coffers into the pockets of crooks, thugs, bikies, standover merchants and the foulest of union bovver boys.

The latest instalment in this putrid saga by this masthead’s indefatigable journalist Nick McKenzie, published on the front page of The Age on Thursday, should be essential reading for anyone who wants to know how this state lost its way.

It provides insight into not only the sordid characters who devised ways to skim millions of dollars off the top of the state’s inattentive and spendthrift approach to contracting and building major infrastructure, but the cynicism that drips from every pore of the CFMEU.

Allan, before she was sworn in as premier, was the minister responsible for major projects, transport infrastructure and the Suburban Rail Loop.

She says she is appalled and disgusted by the allegations surrounding Women in Construction but would not say under questioning when she first knew that scoundrels were rorting a well-intended government program to get more women working on construction sites.

Work has already begun on Andrews’ statue, we are told. Having served more than 3000 days as premier, he is the fourth state leader after Albert Dunstan, Henry Bolte, Rupert Hamer and John Cain Jr whose image will be commemorated in bronze and erected in the forecourt of 1 Treasury Place.

Andrews is unlikely to thank the government for the gesture – the obsession with Andrews by critics ranging from the mildly grumpy to dangerously fixated is sadly a permanent feature of his life post-politics. He will know not to click on any social media sites for the next three days.

But Andrews, a former ALP assistant state secretary who never entirely stopped acting in the role, would appreciate the political thinking behind the announcement. He is more than familiar with the strategy.

Lynton Crosby, a purveyor of political dark arts for conservative prime ministers in Australia and the UK, is credited with coining the dead cat phrase. He was not the first political adviser to understand that sometimes, the best way to distract people from a truly wretched something is to offer them something worse.

Apparently, the idea of Andrews coming back to forever haunt Spring Street in his North Face jacket is just the trick. For some, it is the very definition of Building Bad.

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