The best thing Allan has going for her is the ineptitude of her challengers

There are days when Jacinta Allan must wonder whether she was born under a bad sign.

If you are in politics long enough, you will live to see difficult times. In Allan’s quarter of a century as a Labor MP and minister, we’ve had 9/11, the Global Financial Crisis, the COVID pandemic, five years with Donald Trump in the White House and two Collingwood premierships.

Yet, even by these tumultuous standards, 2026 is shaping as the kind of election year when an incumbent premier could be forgiven for wishing they’d never got out of bed.

Already laden with the weight of Labor’s 11 years in office and a record debt inherited from a former premier and treasurer who shovelled billions of borrowed dollars into an electoral furnace, Allan is now saddled with, in no particular order:

• A rising cash rate which in the space of two months has boosted by $2400 the annual repayments of the average mortgage holder, with the RBA signalling more pain is probably on the way.
• A higher-than-expected inflation rise which, according to UBS economist George Tharenou, will send the CPI through the 5 per cent barrier in this financial quarter, a level not seen since Daniel Andrews’ last days as premier.
• The Iran war and resultant global fuel shock which International Energy Agency chief Fatih Birol has likened to the combined impact of the OPEC oil crisis and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Motorists are paying more than $150 to fill their tanks, and that is if they can find a bowser that hasn’t run dry. Energy Minister Lily D’Ambrosio informed us this week that as of 5pm on Tuesday, 92 servos in Victoria had run out of diesel and 115 were out of petrol.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Allan insist current fuel shortages are being caused by panic buying rather than disrupted supply, but if you can’t fill up your car or keep your truck on the road, it doesn’t really matter.

The most disturbing news of the week is that in Japan, they are partying like it is 2020 and hoarding toilet paper again. Nothing says anxious voter like a garage stuffed with dunny rolls.

The pattern here is these are all things which aggravate the cost of living and none of them are the state government’s fault, much less Allan’s. As the great bluesman Albert King sang, “If it wasn’t for bad luck, I wouldn’t have no luck at all”.

At a domestic level, destructive political winds are filling the sails of Pauline Hanson, our race-baiting Mother of Dragons whose One Nation party marauded through last Saturday’s South Australian election.

One Nation, depending on your view, could be the thing that gifts Labor seats, as we saw in parts of Adelaide, by devouring the Liberal and National parties in Melbourne’s eastern suburbs and regional Victoria, or the disruptive force that finally breaks Labor’s stranglehold on dead-red electorates in Melbourne’s west and north.

It may well end up doing both these things. Who this would leave in government is impossible to say.

In the meantime, Victorian school teachers weary of being the nation’s worst paid have taken to the city’s streets to vent their frustration at a government torn between giving them the rise they want and adding to a public sector wages bill already causing credit agencies to flash yellow. Fun fact: the last time teachers went on strike in Victoria, it took a change of premier – Ted Baillieu to Denis Napthine – to resolve the dispute.

Any of these things – rising inflation, interest rate increases, looming fuel shortages and teacher strikes – have the potential to sink a government. The convergence of all these things eight months out from an election is dead-set cruel.

But it may be that Allan has finally caught a break.

With the exception of Simon Crean’s comical non-challenge of Julia Gillard in 2013, when the late former Labor leader called for a spill meeting but couldn’t rustle up a candidate, it is difficult to recall a less convincing leadership play than the campaign currently being run against Allan from inside her party.

By this column’s count, if you gathered all the people working towards a change of leader – a couple of faceless men, a knot of MPs and a slouch of Herald Sun editors – they would comfortably fit on the same pickleball court. And none of them appears to be actually counting. They don’t know how.

Tellingly, neither of Allan’s purported leadership rivals, Deputy Premier Ben Carroll and Transport Infrastructure Minister Gabrielle Williams, is involved in the backroom discussions. There hasn’t been the slightest hint from either that they are willing to make a run. For now, Allan is facing a challenge without challengers and a coup without plotters.

The premier is indeed in a pickle, for the reasons we spelt out earlier and others which should be obvious to anyone who has followed this masthead’s revelations about organised crime infiltrating the government’s Big Build or read a recent opinion poll.

Within Labor, the concerns about Allan’s leadership are genuine and the fear of backbenchers losing their seats and parliamentary careers is real.

Does this mean the Victorian state caucus, a group of people who don’t trust themselves to order a coffee without instructions from the premier’s private office, is about to get crazy-brave and dump the party leader? This hasn’t happened since 1999 when Steve Bracks ousted John Brumby.

When inflation is eating people’s wages, mortgage stress is rising, bowsers are on the blink, 20 per cent of South Australians are voting for a Queenslander and the world seems to be lurching from one crisis to the next, one thing Labor can offer Victoria is political stability.

If the government ditches that, along with the woman it elected unopposed 2½ years ago to lead it to an election, it really has lost the plot.

Chip Le Grand is state political editor.

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