Constructing a crisis: how Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews made meaning of COVID-19

ABSTRACT

The state of Victoria, Australia experienced some of the longest and strictest COVID-19 lockdowns in the world, and among the highest peaks of COVID-19 cases in the country. Despite this, the Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews has retained his leadership position, as well as public support in the polls and high compliance with COVID-19 restrictions which resulted in Victoria eliminating two waves of the virus over 2020. This article investigates how Andrews supported his government's policy response to COVID-19 by attempting to construct the reality of crisis in the public consciousness. Through a thematic analysis of Andrews’ press conferences, media releases, and social media posts, it is found that a campaign of language, imagery, metaphor and narrative framed the pandemic as a crisis that was urgent, but nonetheless familiar and manageable.

澳大利亚的维多利亚州经历了全世界最长时、最严格的新冠封控。即便如此，州长丹尼尔·安德鲁斯还是保住了州领导的地位，并得到民调的支持以及民众对疫情封控的配合，结果是2020年两波新冠病毒均被清零。本文考察了安德鲁斯如何通过在公共意识中构建危机的现实来助力其政府的新冠疫情对策。通过对安德鲁斯新闻发布会、媒体发布以及社交媒体公告的主题分析，笔者发现语言、形象、隐喻、叙事等等将疫情构建成为一种不陌生、可控制的燃眉之急。

KEYWORDS:

• COVID-19
• crisis leadership
• Daniel Andrews
• meaning-making

Introduction

The COVID-19 pandemic heralds a new frontier in the study of crisis leadership, given how unprecedented the crisis has been in terms of scale, worldwide impact, and endurance across time. The state of Victoria, in Australia, experienced among the highest peaks of COVID-19 cases in the country, as well as successive strict lockdowns imposed by the state government. Victoria's experience over the first year of the pandemic has been viewed by some as a model for how to successfully navigate COVID-19 and by others as a slide into authoritarianism (see Alcorn 2020). Despite criticism of his approach, Premier Andrews retained his leadership position as well as public support in the polls and high compliance with COVID-19 restrictions which resulted in Victoria seeing off two waves of the virus over the first year of the pandemic (Trauer 2021).

This article investigates one of the progenitors of Andrews’ apparent leadership success: the manner in which Andrews constructed the COVID-19 crisis in the public consciousness. It explores the way that Andrews ‘made meaning’ of the pandemic during the period from February 2020 to December 2020. A thematic analysis of Andrews’ addresses to the public – made via press conferences and social media – is used to draw out the Premier's rhetorical strategy. This article therefore contributes to debates about the part that leaders play in not just managing crises, but creating them in the eyes of the public. This contribution is made unique through a case study of Victoria, whose pandemic experience was exceptional around the world, as well as through demonstrating the value of applying constructionist methods to a crisis that – to many – was a matter of interpretation, rather than undisputed reality. The application of ‘meaning-making’ theory to a leader's construction of COVID-19 fleshes out our understanding of how and why nations, governments, and populations behaved the way they did during the height of the pandemic.

This article first undertakes a review of the literature on crisis leadership. It then explains the selection of the case study – Daniel Andrews’ leadership in Victoria, Australia over 2020 – and the methodology employed. The article goes on to analyse the primary themes identified in the data, applying the literature to investigate how Andrews constructed a sense of crisis. It finds that, as part of this constructive process, Andrews invoked uncertainty, threat, and urgency, and used Victorians’ experiences with bushfire to make the crisis appear more familiar. The findings underline the importance of understanding how leaders shape, and seek to shape, populations’ perceptions of reality.

Defining crises

COVID-19 pushes the boundaries of traditional understandings of ‘crisis’. Popular definitions of crisis (see Boin et al. 2016; Boin and ‘t Hart 2003; Rosenthal, ‘t Hart, and Charles 1989; ‘t Hart 1993) explain that crises are events that are:

• Threatening: Posing a risk or disturbance to a society and the status quo, the ‘core values or life-sustaining features of a system’ (Boin et al. 2016, 5);

• Uncertain: Generating high levels of ambiguity, conflict, and unpredictability relating to the nature of the threat itself and how to respond to it;

• Urgent: Accompanied by a sense of severe time pressure.

However, crises are also a matter of perspective (Coombs 2007; Ulmer, Sellnow, and Seeger 1998). Boin et al. (2016, 6) describe the ‘sense of urgency’ generated by crisis as ‘often socially constructed’ and dependent upon perception. COVID-19 provides a textbook example of where a situation may alternatively be constructed as a true crisis or as a more routine, non-threatening event that does not require urgent action. In the early weeks of the pandemic, while many government leaders were locking down their countries, the United States President Donald Trump publicly downplayed the threat (Costa and Rucker 2020). Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro refused to order a national lockdown amid rising case numbers and deaths, calling COVID-19 a ‘little flu’ (Phillips 2020). Claims that COVID-19 is a hoax or conspiracy ran rampant (Specia 2020). In Australia, federal politician Craig Kelly called claims about COVID-19's severity ‘lying and scaremongering’ (quoted in Barry and Sanchez-Urribarri 2022). Media commentators like Alan Jones questioned ‘the coronavirus “crisis”’ and warned against ‘alarmism’ (Jones 2020). The very act of labelling the pandemic a ‘crisis’ became political.

The COVID-19 pandemic has undoubtedly been the most internationally disruptive event since World War II. It has been characterised as a ‘long wave event’ (Jong 2021) and a ‘creeping crisis’ (Boin, Ekengren, and Rhinard 2020, 118), due to the endurance of both the crisis itself and debates surrounding the severity of the risk. Such crises are difficult to recognise, much less to resolve. The prolonged, global nature of the COVID-19 crisis, high uncertainty around the level of the threat, and debates about how to resolve it all opened a void which world leaders sought to fill. To this end, this article explores ‘crisis’ as a label that is socially constructed and applied.

Crisis leadership

The study of crisis leadership has emerged as a broad array of literature crossing many disciplines, including politics, psychology, corporate management, organisation studies, and sociology (Deverell 2012). Crisis leadership is distinct from the ordinary routine of leadership in that the ‘stakes are much higher, the public is much more attentive, its mood more volatile, and institutional constraints on elite decision making are considerably looser’ (Ansell, Boin, and ‘t Hart 2014, 418–419). Leaders tend to assume more responsibility during crisis and this is mirrored by an increase in the public's expectations of their leaders, however there is often a gap between expectations and reality (Boin and ‘t Hart 2003). In these circumstances, a leader must work to maintain the legitimacy of their own office, their government, and the policies instituted in response to the crisis (Boin and Lagadec 2002).

Boin et al. (2016) describe that one of the core tasks for a leader in times of crisis is that of ‘meaning-making’: this requires leaders to construct a convincing narrative around the crisis and to communicate that narrative to the public. Meaning-making aims to shape the public's understanding of both a crisis situation and how the community should respond to that crisis (Boin, ‘t Hart, and McConnell 2009). It is similar to the concept of ‘framing’, although while meaning-making is specific to crisis management, the study of framing is scattered across various disciplines (Borah 2011). Both concepts describe the way that actors attempt to craft and disseminate a narrative about a state of affairs – attaching a particular meaning to those events, and functioning as a lens through which events are understood.

Meaning-making should be distinguished from the literature on ‘crisis communication’ which focuses primarily upon the operational and ostensibly apolitical effectiveness of message delivery during crisis (Boin et al. 2016), while meaning-making crosses into the realm of the political and dramaturgical, focusing on performance, rituals, symbols, and rhetoric (Masters and ‘t Hart 2012; ‘t Hart 1993). This shift allows for investigation of how crises are created, and not merely how governments respond to them.

Crises often involve a breakdown in the status quo and in public trust. The narrative expounded by a leader can fill a crucial void in times such as these. Meaning-making can make or break the leader and the community's passage through the crisis. Boin et al. (2016, 79) claim that ‘meaning making makes a crucial difference between obtaining and losing the “permissive consensus” that leaders need to make decisions and formulate policies’. The policies instituted in response to crises may require considerable trust and cooperation from citizens. In Victoria, these included strict limitations on movement, gatherings, and business operations. Citizens were restricted to only a few essential reasons to leave their homes. How did the meaning-making efforts of Victoria's Premier justify these policies?

Any leader hoping to successfully ‘frame’ a crisis faces significant obstacles. They need to not only formulate their message but successfully deliver it to the public. The meaning crafted by a leader does not exist in a vacuum, but must compete with other narratives put forth by other actors, including their political opposition (Boin et al. 2016). Meaning-making therefore requires navigating the ‘framing contests’ that arise. The role of the media is crucial in amplifying frames crafted by the government and other actors, but the media also crafts frames of their own (Carragee and Roefs 2004).

There are several accounts of what makes for effective meaning-making. Boin et al. (2016) argue that crucial elements are the persuasiveness of the narrative, the perceived credibility of the leader, and communication or message delivery. Effectiveness is also influenced by the willingness of the media to broadcast the leader's frame (Nord and Olsson 2013; Viorela and Ihlen 2011), the institution and management of official inquiries, the nature and politicisation of the crisis, and other contextual, institutional, and temporal factors (Boin, ‘t Hart, and McConnell 2009; Masters and ‘t Hart 2012). A successful frame will resonate with the underlying culture; the existing expectations and values of its audience (Viorela and Ihlen 2011), as has been observed in the COVID-19 policymaking context (see Botterill, Lake, and Walsh 2021; Clarke, Klas, and Dyos 2021; Lau et al. 2022).

Methodology and case selection

COVID-19 in Victoria, Australia

On 9 January 2020, the World Health Organisation (WHO) reported that Chinese authorities had identified that an outbreak of pneumonia cases in Wuhan was caused by a novel coronavirus. The first death from the virus was reported days later (BBC News 2020). By the end of January, the novel coronavirus had spread across the world, including to Australia, and the WHO declared the outbreak to be a public emergency of international concern (WHO 2020a). The virus was officially named SARS-CoV-2, and the disease it caused was called COVID-19 (WHO 2020b). Many nations closed their borders and took measures to restrict spread within their populations. As global cases passed 100,000, the WHO called for all countries to take action to contain and control the impact of COVID-19 (WHO 2020c). On 11 March, COVID-19 was declared to be a pandemic (WHO 2020d).

The Australian response to COVID-19 was divided between the national and state governments. To begin with, the federal government outlawed large public gatherings and required overseas arrivals to self-isolate for 14 days. A State of Emergency was declared in Victoria, which allowed the state Chief Health Officer – an unelected public servant – to issue binding directives. Over March 2020, restrictions tightened: Australia's borders were closed, federal income support was doubled, and all non-essential activity was shut down state-wide. The outbreak was declared a national human biosecurity emergency (Maclean and Elphick 2020). On 31 March, the Victorian government banned gatherings of more than two people and restricted citizens to only four permissible reasons to leave their home. A federal wage subsidy was introduced to support the businesses and workers whose income suffered. Changes were being made in government, too. A ‘National Cabinet’ of the Prime Minister and the Premiers and Chief Ministers of the states and territories was formed to achieve consistency in COVID-19 responses. In Victoria, the Crisis Council of Cabinet was established as the primary COVID-19 decision-making forum, chaired by the Premier, and the public service was restructured accordingly.

Approximately 7000 COVID-19 cases and 100 deaths were recorded across Australia in the first wave (Our World in Data 2021). As April waned, case numbers fell across the country and restrictions were gradually eased over May and June – until a second outbreak hit Victoria. COVID-19 leaked from a hotel used to quarantine returning international travellers. Over the ensuing weeks, schools reverted to online learning and face coverings were made mandatory. Andrews announced on 2 August that Victoria would enter a ‘State of Disaster’. Victorians were placed under strict lockdowns, particularly those living in metropolitan Melbourne, Victoria's capital. From mid-September restrictions were slowly eased again after the number of active cases dropped to zero.

Australia's second wave hit Victoria almost exclusively, and in response Victoria instituted the longest and strictest lockdown of any Australian state. Victoria was exceptional on the international level, too. It was one of the only jurisdictions to successfully eliminate a second wave (Toole 2020), and experienced some of the harshest restrictions. Melbourne's second-wave lockdown continued for 112 consecutive days – this was the world's longest COVID-19 lockdown at the time, before Melbourne broke its own record in 2021 (Jose 2021).

Australia is in a global minority of federal systems of government, and the constitutional division of powers meant that the response to COVID-19 was primarily undertaken at the state level despite early efforts from the Australian federal government to establish a nationally consistent approach. The federal Parliament only has power on matters delineated in the federal Constitution, or matters granted to it by state parliaments. Power over all other matters falls to the states, like Victoria (Australian Constitutions 51; see also Weller 2004). The states therefore have primary responsibility for health policy and emergency response. Federal pressure notwithstanding, the Victorian government took control of crisis governance within the state.

This article confines its analysis to the period of February 2020 to December 2020. Since then, COVID-19 has evolved into new variants and case numbers have reached new heights. However, as more of the population became vaccinated and fatigue set in, the Victorian government's approach to the pandemic softened over 2021 and 2022 to the extent that, at the time of writing, any state COVID-19 policy is practically non-existent. Furthermore, the elimination of COVID-19 from the state at the end of 2020 marks a clear endpoint to the first year of the pandemic. The year 2020 therefore represents a discrete time period for analysis, as Andrews’ construction of the crisis during this period was particularly vivid, and had to support stringent policy measures restricting the daily lives of citizens and achieving COVID-zero, involving extreme tests of political leadership.

The meaning-maker

The case study focused on Premier Andrews as Victoria’s leader through COVID-19. The Hon. Daniel Andrews MP is a member of the Victorian Legislative Assembly for the Mulgrave electorate, the leader of the state Labor Party, and has been the Premier of Victoria since Labor won government in 2014. His leadership has been defined by his determination to push through infrastructure projects and a strong social reform agenda (Economou 2019, 2020; Tomazin 2016; Towell 2019), though this has been disrupted by factional disputes within his party (ABC News 2020a; Preiss 2019), an industrial dispute within Victoria's fire-fighting services (Economou 2017), and a scandal concerning misuse of taxpayer funds (Willingham 2019). Andrews has ‘styled himself as an assertive and activist Premier’ (Strangio 2018) who is decisive and ‘gets things done’ (Andrews 2017).

In 2020, Andrews faced his biggest challenge yet: the arrival of COVID-19 in Victoria. However, he maintained relatively high public support, particularly prior to the second wave: on 28 April, Newspoll recorded 75 percent satisfaction with the Premier, and 85 percent thought he was handling coronavirus ‘well’ (Baxendale 2020). Polls on the government's response to COVID-19 recorded at least a 70 percent positive rating for the majority of 2020, though this dipped to 49 percent after the virus leaked from hotel quarantine and triggered a second wave (Essential Report 2020). Even at this time, the Premier himself maintained solid approval ratings, never dipping below 57 percent satisfaction (Benson 2020), and still receiving as high as 70 percent approval (Roy Morgan 2020).

Thematic analysis

The evidence base for this article includes Premier Andrews’ press conferences, public appearances, media releases, and social media postings over 2020. These were gathered from the Premier's website, Facebook and Twitter accounts. Recordings of Andrews’ almost daily media conferences were sourced from Facebook and Youtube pages for Daniel Andrews and news organisations including The Age, the Herald Sun, ABC News, ABC Melbourne, 7News Melbourne, and 10News Melbourne. The recordings were transcribed. Some press conferences were not published online, but 28 of the most pivotal were available for analysis, along with 131 media releases on the Premier's website (premier.vic.gov.au) and 227 of his Facebook posts related to COVID-19. These were the primary ways in which Andrews communicated with the public, and represented his attempts at shaping the COVID-19 narrative unmediated by journalists and other third parties.

A thematic analysis was then undertaken, per Braun and Clarke (2006) (see also Lochmiller 2021). The data was coded according to frequently recurring and/or salient words, phrases and imagery. This stage concentrated on verbal data to retain a manageable scope for study, but visual and contextual data was also compiled. The codes were assembled into themes: ‘broad overarching statements that describe what is happening in the underlying data’ (Lochmiller 2021, 2032). These were inductively developed and drawn from the data to reflect the narrative as constructed by Premier Andrews.

Three broad themes were identified: the construction of crisis, the construction of the policy response, and the construction of Andrews’ own leadership in this context. This article concentrates on the construction of crisis, and is structured according to the primary sub-themes identified in the data. Thematic analysis was chosen as part of a ‘constructionist method’ aiming to elucidate ‘the ways in which events, realities, meanings, [and] experiences’ are affected by discourses in a society (Braun and Clarke 2006, 81). During 2020, COVID-19 was a crisis of information, communication, and uncertainty as well as a pandemic, and as such a constructionist approach to thematic analysis offers unique insights (as demonstrated by Karyotis et al. 2021 and Botterill and Lewis 2023).

The high rates of compliance with COVID-19 restrictions over 2020, Andrews’ maintenance of public support, and the fact that the Premier remains Premier three years’ on, indicate that Andrews’ framing of the pandemic was largely successful. Some studies have judged leaders’ meaning-making against news reports and polling data (Masters and ‘t Hart 2012; Viorela and Ihlen 2011; You and Ju 2019), although such data is limited and frequently influenced by extraneous factors. There are significant issues in establishing causation between Andrews’ meaning-making and public sentiment. Instead, this article aims to explain how Andrews attempted to make meaning of the COVID-19 crisis and shape public behaviour.

Victoria's COVID-19 pandemic has been unlike any other crisis in living memory, and the measures the Andrews Government took in response to the crisis were similarly unprecedented: lockdowns which lasted months and required strict public compliance. The considerable uncertainty, ambiguity, and conspiracy surrounding COVID-19 has resulted in broad scope for political meaning-making, and the policies that governments have implemented in response to the crisis have meant there is a significant need for it. How did Daniel Andrews, as the state's leader, conjure this compliance and maintain the legitimacy of his government's policies? Media commentators have pondered this question in the absence of concrete explanations (Credlin 2021; Price 2020). This article aims to supply some answers by applying theories of crisis leadership and political rhetoric to investigate how Premier Daniel Andrews constructed a sense of crisis in the public eye.

Constructing a crisis

Any assessment of whether a crisis exists is not undertaken by a single individual or group, but by society at large (Boin, Ekengren, and Rhinard 2020), yet political leaders take a key role in this process. Prime Minister Kevin Rudd made the February 2009 Victorian bushfire crisis clear to the rest of Australia, and the world, when he said that ‘[h]ell and all its fury has visited the good people of Victoria’ in ‘an appalling tragedy’ (Moncrief 2009). President Joe Biden marked a post-Trump pivot in United States climate policy when he labelled climate change ‘the existential crisis of our times’ (Biden 2021). Although other actors, including opposition parties, the media, interest groups, and the public also participate in the process of constructing crisis, attention is often centred upon leaders, particularly in extreme and turbulent circumstances (Bigh and Schyns 2007).

A leader may similarly attempt to construct an absence of crisis, and downplay perceptions of risk instead of inflating them. Even amidst scores of injuries and deaths, damage, and destruction, leaders may still attempt to paint events as ordinary or routine, and not true crises. Short-term, visual, and televised events – such as natural disasters – may be readily accepted as being crises, but other, more ‘invisible’ and long-term emergencies – such as social inequality and climate change – tend to be contested. Not all political leaders framed the pandemic as a crisis. In the early months of COVID-19, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro repeatedly called COVID-19 a ‘little flu’ and dismissed rising deaths: ‘that's life’ (Charner et al. 2020). President Trump claimed the virus ‘affects virtually nobody’ (O’Kane 2020).

A crisis is a ‘claim of urgency’ backed by power and interest (Spector 2020), and any claim to crisis then awaits interpretation and judgement by government actors, the public, and the media. In times of disaster and emergency, leaders are called upon to explain what has happened, why it happened, and repercussions for the public. An effective campaign will influence ‘a common and widely supported understanding of what the crisis is about’ (Boin et al. 2016, 79), and of course whether that crisis exists at all. A government is only able to orchestrate a crisis response – to respond to a problem – if it is first established that a problem exists. This article discusses the way in which Premier Daniel Andrews constructed the nature, scope and severity of the COVID-19 threat over 2020.

Boin, McConnell, and ‘t Hart (2021) describe three layers of crisis rhetoric. The first layer incorporates technical or factual description, the second layer ventures into interpretation of these facts, and the third layer is the point at which a situation is judged to be a crisis. These layers of understanding are useful to structure an investigation of how the Victorian Premier made meaning of the pandemic, casting it as a crisis.

The facts

The first layer of crisis rhetoric encompasses straightforward technical descriptors of what is going on. Andrews was relatively late to commit to making meaning of COVID-19 in Victoria; the air was largely occupied by the federal government in February and early March as borders were closed to arrivals from China, Italy, Iran, and South Korea (Singhal 2020; Worthington 2020). It wasn't until multiple Victorian cases had been recorded, as well as the first death from COVID-19 in Australia, that Andrews released his first press briefing on the issue. From 3 March, he began to regularly discuss COVID-19 in press conferences, media releases, and social media posts, and pointed to facts on which to build his claim that this situation was urgent and serious. These facts included information about the nature of COVID-19, symptoms, case numbers, and deaths, as well as the news from China, Italy, New York, and other jurisdictions that were first hit by COVID-19 – Andrews told Victorians, ‘If you need further evidence, turn on your TV.’

Interpretive labels

It is not until the second layer of crisis rhetoric comes into play that an audience is induced to pass any judgement upon the facts. Andrews accordingly built upon technical descriptions of what was happening with more subjective descriptors that influenced the population's perception of threat. The most prominent of these interpretive labels was ‘pandemic’. Further common descriptors were ‘public health emergency’, ‘really significant challenge’, ‘dangerous’, and ‘wildly’ or ‘highly infectious disease’. The primary themes drawn from Andrews’ interpretative framing of the situation accorded with the three key components of crisis: uncertainty, threat, and urgency (Boin et al. 2016).

Uncertainty

Andrews stressed the ‘unprecedented’ and ‘extraordinary’ nature of events. The virus was ‘something that our state and our nation has not faced in our lifetimes’; a ‘one in one-hundred-year event’. This unprecedented character made the situation, according to Andrews, unpredictable and uncertain. The ‘crisis’ was ‘rapidly changing’, and response agencies were ‘always on the back foot’.

Notably, however, while Andrews emphasised this uncertainty he also endeavoured to send the somewhat conflicting message that the health system and the government had the capacity to sufficiently respond to the threat. Andrews assured the public that ‘our health system has dealt with multiple outbreaks in the past’ and would therefore be able to successfully respond to COVID-19. Responses to infectious disease were ‘all standard practice’ and authorities were working to ‘contain the situation’. Andrews said that ‘while this is a new virus, we have plenty of experience with similar viruses – and our health system is prepared for disease outbreaks just like this one.’

The Premier crafted the idea of a routine disaster: a crisis that, while unprecedented and unique, was nonetheless one that could be dealt with and contained. Crisis management scholars warn against ‘the temptation to convert uncertainty into certainty or to oversell problem solutions for the sake of reassuring the public’ (Ansell and Boin 2019, 1098), and advise that ‘[t]here is no sin in telling the media the crisis team does not know something’ (Coombs 2007, 141). Adopting this strategy, uncertainty – albeit manageable uncertainty – formed a vital part of Andrews’ messaging. Andrews went to efforts to acknowledge that ‘uncertainty is inherent to crisis’, and is ‘the nature of a public health emergency’. Andrews endeavoured to control the story by explicitly discussing the government's lack of control, and portraying the crisis as manageable in spite of it.

Threat

In their study of policy responses to COVID-19, Narlikar and Sottilotta (2021) found support for their hypothesis that, in the early days of the pandemic, government responses to COVID-19 were less stringent when political leaders framed the threat narrowly as only affecting certain sub-groups, rather than society as a whole. It is therefore notable that Andrews stressed the immediacy and universality of the risk COVID-19 posed. Early in the pandemic response there was some inconsistency in this messaging, with Andrews saying on 23 March 2020: ‘ … you know who dies? The most vulnerable people in our Victorian community.’ This was soon adjusted when, a week later, Andrews emphasised that COVID-19 could affect ‘someone in your family, your best mate, your work colleague – or you’. Andrews explicitly outlined the risks to groups who might not otherwise be viewed as in jeopardy, including young people. He painted the stark image of ‘burying an elderly relative, or your best mate, or your parents’.

A common phrase in Andrews’ press conferences was ‘this virus does not discriminate’. The virus was characterised as a sweeping and indiscriminate force: ‘It rips through workplaces, sweeps through aged care settings, cuts through communities – and tragically, takes lives with it as it goes.’ Every citizen was under threat:

But although today it's someone else – tomorrow it could be you, or me. I know a lot of people aren't scared because this feels like something happening to other people in other parts of the world. But you should be scared of this. I’m scared of this. We all should be.

As part of his strategy to universalise the COVID-19 threat to all Victorians, Andrews shared videos of individuals recounting their experiences as part of the Stories from Coronavirus Survivors campaign. These put names and faces to people who had experienced the virus, as well as healthcare workers, and told ‘a story to as many Victorians as possible that this virus does not discriminate based on age, based on otherwise healthy status … ’

Descriptions of who and what is impacted by a particular threat have implications for the audience's sense of in-group solidarity (Boin, McConnell, and ‘t Hart 2021). Andrews’ emphasis on a risk to the entire population banded Victorians together against a common enemy – the virus – intending to minimise internal conflict. While some other leaders assigned COVID-19 a role that was more benign, for example national leaders Jair Bolsonaro and Donald Trump, Andrews termed the virus ‘an invisible enemy’, setting the scene for a story where every Victorian had to battle against the villain that was COVID-19.

Urgency

Various threats are accepted in our everyday, without being perceived as urgent crises – this was the case, for some, with COVID-19. The Victorian Premier, though, constructed COVID-19 as something that should be taken seriously, arguing that the ‘cost’ to life was not one that the state should be willing to bear. Not only was COVID-19 a threat; it was an urgent threat. Andrews took this as self-evident, stating that ‘obviously the more we are able to reduce the spread of COVID-19, the better for everyone.’ In reality, this was not so obvious: it was an act of meaning-making, imposing a bespoke interpretation of events.

The bulk of Andrews’ meaning-making communications was directed at emphasising ‘what's at stake here’ and pleading with Victorians to ‘take it seriously’. Loaded language characterised the virus’ unmitigated effects as causing ‘quite amazing tragedy’. Andrews warned Victorians that if COVID-19 were to run rampant, ‘[w]e will have thousands of people who will only survive if they can breathe with the assistance of a machine, and we will not have enough machines, nurses and doctors to provide that care.’ When the second outbreak set in, Andrews’ tone shifted. This was an opportunity to re-construct the crisis; Andrews’ framing became much more vivid, personal, explicit – even morbid. He spoke about death in stark terms at press conferences, on the evening news, and on people's Facebook timelines – making apparent the risk of ‘people … having to plan funerals for those they love’. He upped the scale of his rhetoric, stating that COVID-19 ‘will kill thousands of people if it gets completely away from us. That's more than inconvenient, it's tragic.’

It wasn't merely the scale of the threat that was concerning. In Andrews’ framing. ‘[E]ven one death is one death too many’, and he encouraged Victorians to think of these deaths as ‘not numbers … [but] people's parents and grandparents’. In this story, COVID-19 was ‘wicked’ and ‘silent’; ‘an enemy you can't see’. This was ‘not a common cold you shake in a week’, but a formidable villain to be urgently addressed.

Calling a crisis a crisis

The third layer of crisis rhetoric incorporates explicit crisis language (Boin, McConnell, and ‘t Hart 2021), where the ‘crisis’ label is assigned to a collection of facts and interpretive values. The crisis label has power, and it prompts certain responses. It is a ‘claim of urgency’ which is applied by particular powers and for particular interests (Spector 2020, 307), and is rooted in perception (Coombs 2007). Boin, McConnell, and ‘t Hart (2021, 71) explain that the term:

… provides language that can be used to convey the existence of threats to the common cause. It also offers a semantic platform for launching appeals to reconfirm, repair, reform or repudiate the systemic status quo.

From the early days of the pandemic, Andrews frequently labelled the situation a ‘public health crisis’. On 16 March 2020, he declared a State of Emergency in Victoria. This declaration had legal implications, but as a framing device it shifted events into ‘crisis’ territory. On 2 August 2020, Andrews declared a State of Disaster, marking a clear escalation in crisis talk.

A key technique used by Andrews to drill his framing of the crisis into his audience was the notion that his narrative alone constituted ‘reality’. Anyone who did not accept this definition of the situation was merely ‘pretending that this is over because we want it to be over’. Andrews’ claims to reality had to compete with the view that COVID-19 was not a serious threat; a view evident in the anti-lockdown protests that took place over 2020, growing conspiracy theories around COVID-19, and the fuel that several politicians and media commentators threw onto the fire of misinformation and discontent (BBC News 2021; Karp 2021; Visentin 2021). In response, Andrews, by telling audiences to stick to ‘the facts’ and ‘the experts’, attempted to place the construction of crisis outside the realm of public debate. It was ‘not an option’ to ‘simply wish that [reality] away,’ or ‘pretend that the virus is gone.’ Andrews’ framing therefore presented only one legitimate view of the situation: the ‘reality’ of crisis as constructed by him.

Bushfire

Andrews’ construction of crisis relied heavily upon a comparison between COVID-19 and bushfire. This metaphor was central to Andrews’ attempts to frame the pandemic as unprecedented yet also able to be sufficiently managed by Victorian authorities. This contrast is difficult to reconcile, however, the metaphor allowed Andrews to stress COVID-19's seriousness while also reassuring Victorians that their government was capable of adequately responding. Metaphor is an effective tool in adjusting the perceived salience of particular facts (Edelman 1971). By comparing COVID-19 to bushfire, Andrews attempted to draw attention to the degree and scope of the threat of COVID-19.

A metaphor can be useful in influencing audiences’ perceptions of what is otherwise unfamiliar. Through metaphor, ‘the unknown, the new, the unclear, and the remote are apprehended by one's perceptions of identities with the familiar’ (Edelman 1971, 67). Metaphors are often used in news and politics to discuss topics which are novel, complex, or abstract (Burgers, Konijn, and Steen 2010). The mapping of a bushfire metaphor onto COVID-19 was recommended by Semino (2021), as the imagery conjured can easily instil a perception of serious, immediate threat, and bushfire also appropriately evokes the way in which COVID-19 spreads. Compared to COVID-19, bushfires are more closely aligned with popular conceptions of crisis, being events that are typically sudden and short-term.

The use of this metaphor was also an attempt at ‘localising’ the policy narrative: narratives which connect to pre-existing cultures, beliefs, values, and tropes are more likely to be accepted by the public (Mintrom et al. 2021). Bushfire is a crisis familiar to Victorians. The Black Saturday fires of 2009 were Victoria's deadliest bushfire event on record (BBC News 2019), and bushfires have been a common, close threat in the summers since. Severe bushfires over the 2019/2020 summer resulted in areas of eastern Victoria entering a ‘State of Disaster’ (Ryan 2020). As the pandemic set in two months later, Andrews made a point of recalling the recent bushfires:

… let's not forget how we came together just a few short months ago. How we opened our hearts and made sure everyone in our state was taken care of. How we looked after others – not just ourselves. If we did it then, we can do it now.

The bushfire comparison allowed Andrews to emphasise the way that COVID-19 spreads. COVID-19 had to be taken ‘as seriously as we take bushfire’ – it was just as ‘life or death’. The virus ‘spread like fire’ as well. Victorians were reminded of the vivid, traumatic images that hit newspapers every bushfire season – walls of fire, once-lush forests turned to blackened sticks, burned-out cars, buildings reduced to rubble (Yell 2010). Yell (2010) observes that media reporting of the Black Saturday bushfires was unprecedented in intensity, saturation, and emotional affect. As a result, the broader public shared in the experience of grief, shock, anxiety, anger, and blame. Andrews drew upon this wealth of emotion and imagery to frame COVID-19. Andrews began to more explicitly parallel the virus with bushfire as Victoria entered the second wave of COVID-19, saying that ‘[t]his is no less serious than a bushfire’ and describing COVID-19 as a ‘a public health bushfire.’ The metaphor thus built upon Andrews’ emphasis on threat and urgency.

Somewhat conflictingly, the metaphor also attempted to make Victorians feel reassured. Andrews announced that the State Control Centre would be involved in coordinating the response to COVID-19, noting that the Centre's role was similar to what ‘we saw during the bushfires.’ When Victoria entered a State of Disaster for just the second time since the legislative framework for declaring States of Disaster was introduced in 2019, Andrews said that ‘[w]e used this same provision over summer, and as we step-up our fight against this public health bushfire, we need to use it again’.

Andrews sought to make the uncertain and evolving crisis familiar and understandable, even manageable, by comparing it to the more ‘routine’ crises that are summer bushfires: ‘just as advice and response in bushfires changes, so to it will change in this COVID-19 emergency as well.’ COVID-19 was a crisis that Victorians would see through to the other side:

In order to put this public health bushfire out, we need to know where the frontline is, we need to know where it's spotting as well, where it's moving. It is no different to all the challenges that we were equal to in summer.

While this was a crisis, it was one that Victorians could rise to and overcome, ‘[j]ust like every summer’. The bushfire metaphor thus underlined Andrews’ framing of COVID-19 that combined the seriousness of the threat with a sense that this threat could be contained.

Crisis storytelling

Andrews took eagerly to the role of a storyteller. Crisis communication scholarship establishes that it is not just the message itself that matters but also how that message is communicated (Boin et al. 2016; ‘t Hart 1993). Often, this delivery occurred through near daily press conferences fronted by Andrews. The conferences often went for over an hour. Andrews used extensive questioning to re-emphasise the central points of his messaging (Simons 2020). In response to a questioning journalist, he said, ‘We’ve not walked out of these without answering every question for a long time now.’ During the second outbreak, Andrews appeared before the media for 120 consecutive days (ABC News 2020b). The federal government was not holding daily press conferences, and so Andrews could saturate media time.

The press conferences formed a central ritual in the COVID-19 crisis, held at approximately the same time each day. The ritual of the press conferences exemplifies politics as ‘institutionalised drama’ (‘t Hart 1993, 38): providing stability and legitimacy to a time defined by uncertainty. The press conferences were frequently streamed on free-to-air television channels, radio, social media, and news sites, and just one platform might attain close to one million viewers.¹

Andrews’ social media had wide reach – at the time of writing his Facebook page had over a million followers. Meanwhile, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has approximately 381,000. Andrews demonstrated a distinct style of social media posting involving common catchphrases and long-form post formats, popularly parodied by social media users (Bruce-Smith 2020). He bypassed the news media by linking directly with audiences over Facebook and Twitter. ‘Just about to make a major announcement – but I wanted you to hear it here first’, Andrews said, as if his social media followers were more of a priority than the press pack. Even if he had already ‘briefed the media’ on an issue, he took to social media because he ‘wanted to explain it to you directly’. Thousands of hours at press conferences, and thousands of social media posts allowed him to present his own framing of the crisis, unmediated by others.

Conclusion

This article investigated the question of how Andrews constructed the COVID-19 pandemic in the eyes of the public. Andrews’ framing of the COVID-19 crisis attempted to reconcile two, apparently conflicting, ideas: first, the notion that this was a serious, uncertain and urgent crisis and, second, that the crisis could nonetheless be sufficiently managed by the Premier and his government. This conflict was contained within the idea of a ‘routine crisis’ and Andrews’ use of the metaphor of bushfire – a crisis familiar to Victorians, by contrast to the unfamiliar and unprecedented pandemic. In order for decisions to be made and policies implemented in response to any crisis, that crisis must be established to exist in the first place. The public's acceptance of a crisis narrative was crucial for Andrews to lead the imposition of disruptive policy measures that required widespread public compliance, and this article therefore takes an initial step into investigating how Victoria endured the COVID-19 pandemic. In doing so, it demonstrates the capacity for thematic analysis and meaning-making theory to draw out the rhetorical methods used by leaders to construct the reality of crisis.

This narrative was illuminated through the application of theories of crisis leadership, most notably the task of meaning-making outlined by Boin et al. (2016). Meaning-making is a developing field in the study of crisis management and remains under-studied in comparison to more traditional foci of analysis, such as decision-making, coordination, and policy implementation (Masters and ‘t Hart 2012). Future directions for research might incorporate more of the visual and stylistic dimensions of Andrews’ COVID-19 communication. More broadly, there is scope to compare how different leaders and jurisdictions made meaning of the pandemic, and speculate as to the effect of different styles of crisis communication. Further investigation of distinct mechanisms which might establish a direct causal relationship in meaning-making campaigns would be useful for the overall study of crisis leadership, including the impact of partisanship and social identity (e.g. Botterill, Lake, and Walsh 2021; Clarke, Klas, and Dyos 2021; Lau et al. 2022).

While debates about the empirical versus constructed nature of crisis – including the COVID-19 crisis – continue, this article undertakes a timely examination of the role of a prominent leader in crafting a crisis. This article demonstrates that thematic analysis, grounded in an understanding of meaning-making, can draw out leaders’ communicative strategies and their function in constructing an audience's reality. Leaders and policymakers can therefore begin to learn from the COVID-19 pandemic by reflecting upon the instrumentality of leadership and communication to ultimate success and failure in crisis governance.

Acknowledgements

This article has been modified from part of my Honours thesis submitted to Monash University in November 2021, under the supervision of Paul Strangio. My thanks go to Paul for all his advice and assistance in the writing of my original thesis. Further thanks go to Jack Corbett for his comments on a draft of this article. I received no funding for the research or writing of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Laura Woodbridge

Laura Woodbridge is a Research Officer at Monash University and Australian Catholic University. She completed her Honours thesis, titled “Constructing a Crisis: An Exploration of Premier Daniel Andrews' Framing of COVID-19”, at Monash University in 2021. Her research focuses on public policy, political leadership, and crisis response.

Notes

1 A view count of 921,040 was recorded for a 6 September 2020 press conference streamed on 7News Melbourne Facebook page. This number includes views after the streaming date, up until 12 October 2023. 7NEWS Melbourne, ‘Coronavirus: Announcement from Victoria's Premier Daniel Andrews,’ Facebook, 6 September 2020, https://www.facebook.com/7NEWSMelbourne/videos/635065577152232/.