Get ready to hear ‘Kmart Ben’ over and over again, just like ‘Albo is the son of a single mum from the housos’. It’s a maddening tactic after Labor caused such a mess in Victoria… but it just might work: PVO

Ben Carroll’s first full day as Victorian Premier began in the basement of a Melbourne Kmart, where the television signal promptly failed.

As metaphors go, it was perfect. Victorian Labor’s message of renewal couldn’t even make it to the ground floor without something going wrong.

‘I can’t wait to get into Kmart, where my working career first began,’ Carroll declared. I wonder how many taxpayer-funded spin doctors it took to come up with that line.

Carroll started at Kmart Airport West at 14 and stayed there for eight years. Victorians should brace themselves for the Kmart story playing on repeat.

It is plainly being workshopped as Carroll’s version of Anthony Albanese’s housing commission boilerplate.

The more audacious reinvention is Carroll’s day one declaration: ‘I am not Daniel Andrews. I am not Jacinta Allan.’ 

Literally true, obviously. But it’s politically absurd. Carroll has sat in cabinet since 2017 and spent nearly three years as Allan’s deputy. 

He did not wander in this week to discover the government in disarray. He helped run it for nearly a decade and, before that, worked as a political staffer.

If Victoria’s construction sector is now so compromised that it requires a royal commission, a special prosecutor and a beefed up anti-corruption watchdog, that reflects damningly on a government in which Carroll was the second most senior figure.

Yet that’s what he announced yesterday.

A royal commission is the right call. But it exposes a cynical truth: it became government policy only when Allan was removed.

What kind of patsy was Carroll in recent years if the shift is genuine and not merely about saving his political skin?

The circumstances of Allan’s exit make this ‘new era’ even harder to swallow. She did not pass the baton with grace. She had to be blasted from her office. 

Even then, after publicly promising Carroll her ‘unqualified support’, she backed Attorney General Sonya Kilkenny in a doomed rearguard action against him.

In the end, Carroll had the numbers 50 to 15. Kilkenny had no plausible prospect of success, but her candidacy threatened to force a rank-and-file ballot that could have left the government drifting for six weeks while it was resolved, just four months before an election.

Coming from the woman who had only just promised Carroll her unqualified support, it was difficult to interpret it as anything other than a final attempt to wreck the succession on her way out the door.

Kilkenny eventually folded, allowing Labor to emerge and announce with a straight face that Carroll had been elected unanimously.

Now comes the breathtaking sales pitch: Labor admits it has made an almighty mess of Victoria, and therefore Victorians should trust Labor to investigate Labor and repair the damage Labor caused.

The maddening thing is it just might work.

With a chronically unimpressive Liberal opposition and a fractured right, Labor may yet persuade exhausted voters that the best way to achieve change is to re-elect the woeful incumbents.

That possibility does not make the proposition any less ridiculous, mind you. Carroll is entitled to his Kmart nostalgia.

But no number of media conferences among the air fryers and discounted bath towels can transform a nine-year cabinet veteran into an insurgent outsider who has suddenly arrived to fix a mess left by others.