Jacinta Allan’s resignation is more than just another leadership change: it signals the end of the Daniel Andrews era and leaves Victorian Labor confronting the political cost of its own lofty ambitions. Allan helped oversee one of the largest infrastructure programs in Australian history, including the Metro Tunnel, West Gate Tunnel, Suburban Rail Loop and the Big Build, while advancing housing and planning reforms, cost-of-living measures and Australia’s first Treaty with Indigenous peoples.
These projects were designed for a Melbourne rapidly becoming Australia’s largest city, but delays, cost overruns and state debt heading towards $200 billion allowed Labor’s nation-building narrative to be replaced by questions about financial management, integrity and public trust. Allegations of CFMEU corruption, criminal infiltration and questionable labour-hire practices – many originating during the Andrews years – were never politically contained, while Allan’s resistance to a royal commission allowed the crisis to overwhelm her government’s broader achievements.
She also struggled to escape the shadow of Daniel Andrews: voters increasingly viewed her premiership as a continuation of the past rather than the beginning of a new political agenda, while sections of the Victorian media applied relentless pressure and gave little space to the government’s longer-term case for infrastructure investment.
Ben Carroll now inherits the premiership, a divided Victorian Labor Party, deteriorating polling and an election only months away. His immediate announcement of a royal commission into the construction sector may neutralise the controversy over the Big Build, but it also confirms the seriousness of the problem Labor previously resisted investigating. Yet a Liberal victory is hardly assured: Opposition Leader Jess Wilson presides over an inexperienced and internally divided Victorian Liberal Party still contending with religious factionalism and ideological extremism.
The 2026 Victorian election will be a test of whether changing leaders can restore Labor’s credibility – or whether the political and financial legacy of the Andrews–Allan era has finally become too heavy to carry.
