Victorian politics is a mess. Who on earth can you vote for in this state?

Whether or not Jacinta Allan emerges victorious from the leadership spasm now wracking her party, we Victorians will confront a serious question: who the hell can we vote for in four months time?

Under Allan’s leadership, Labor has overseen malfeasance of extraordinary proportions – direct links between ministerial offices and the CFMEU, and from there to standover men, bikies, and an estimated $15 billion in excess costs to the taxpayer.

Thanks primarily to reporting in The Age, everyone can see this steaming pile of scandal looming over Allan, no matter how hard she denies its existence. The proudest boast of the Andrews government – that it built things – is now hopelessly tainted by corruption.

Allan wants to “grind it out”, defying calls for a royal commission that she says will not bring about cultural change. Add another trailer-load to the heap, Jacinta. You don’t want a royal commission because either you know what it will dig up and it will implicate your government, or you don’t know, and what’s buried there terrifies you.

Meanwhile, this government has become so paranoid and centrally controlled that ministers are rarely let out to speak, and when they are, it’s with talking points crafted so narrowly by the premier’s private office that they end up saying nothing.

If Allan wins this leadership bout, or stares down her opponents, only the most rusted-on true believer could vote Labor in November, and even if she is replaced by her deputy, Ben Carroll, serious questions remain about the party that’s led us since 2014.

Only the immediate announcement of a royal commission with full powers and the opening of public hearings into the Big Build scandal before the election could, possibly, allow us to take another look.

Any other inquiry held under this state’s usual modus operandi (“trust us and shut up”) will fall short. Allan’s proposed solution of a crime commission is of this kind. Our current so-called anti-corruption commission, IBAC, shows why.

Eight years ago, in 2018, it launched a probe into a suspicious deal made between the firefighters’ union and Daniel Andrews. Andrews was interviewed, but in private – not for the only time during his premiership. Nothing of his evidence, or that of the man he allegedly did the deal with, union secretary Peter Marshall, has emerged publicly.

Operating under weak laws and a statewide culture of secrecy, IBAC took four years to reach its conclusions, and another four years fighting to release them. Eight years after voters could have benefited from a public airing of these allegations, we are still waiting to know what Labor did in our name. Meanwhile we re-elected them, in a landslide, and in ignorance.

IBAC is a Potemkin village of an anti-corruption commission – it looks like one at a glance but behind the facade there’s nothing.

For the $100 billion Big Build, this is not good enough. Only a credible royal commissioner with the power to demand documents, compel witnesses and air it all in public can do the Herculean work of mucking out Labor’s Augean stable.

The last time Victoria rejected Labor, we picked Ted Baillieu as premier. He served for a brief, indolent and scandal-plagued term (anyone remember MP Geoff Shaw?) before being replaced by Denis Napthine.

Their two main achievements in government were to legislate for a hollowed-out anti-corruption commission and allow Labor time to reset and appoint Daniel Andrews as leader.

This year there is a third choice – of sorts – One Nation, and 22 per cent of Victorians seem to be making it, according to The Age’s Resolve poll. It’s a party with no state leader, no candidates and who knows what policies except for “I don’t like it.”

Jess Wilson and Jacinta Allan are effectively campaigning against an empty chair and ceding more than one-fifth of the primary vote to it. Allan’s approval rating is minus 42, her likeability minus 36.

How have her party’s once-powerful factions tolerated it for so long?

This is shaping as a classic pox-on–both-your-houses election. But if the pox kills off all our genuine governing options, then what kind of zombies will be left holding power for the next four years?

That is what causes me to wake up in fright.

Michael Bachelard is a senior writer.

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