Bad news for the Victorian Liberal Party just keeps on coming. Two months ago was its shock defeat in the Aston by-election, which I whimsically compared with Nietzsche’s doctrine of the eternal recurrence. Now, also in Melbourne’s outer eastern suburbs, comes a state by-election: Ryan Smith, Liberal member for Warrandyte, announced on Wednesday that he would be resigning his seat next month, forcing a by-election.
Smith held the seat at last year’s Victorian election with a margin of 4.2% – not enough to withstand the 6.4% swing that Labor got in Aston. Labor has not yet revealed whether it will contest the by-election, but it would be foolish not to. Even if the Liberals end up winning well, forcing them onto the defensive is bound to work in Labor’s favor.
For Liberal leader John Pesutto there’s a silver lining, in that Smith was prominent among his internal opponents (he was at the Waubra dinner last month, and was one of the 11 MPs who voted against the expulsion of Moira Deeming). He won’t be sorry to see the back of him, and if he can get a sensible replacement up, so much the better. But there’s no hiding the fact that Smith has timed his resignation to do him the maximum damage – Pesutto told the media that “he learned of Smith’s resignation like the wider public, by reading his statement.”
If the Liberals lose the seat it will most probably mean the end of Pesutto’s leadership. And there’s no guarantee that the party will give him an electable candidate, since its record in that respect isn’t good and Pesutto’s standing in the branches is probably not what it should be.
And among the names being tossed around for preselection, one stands out, and not in a good way. Former member for Kew, Tim Smith, who bowed out at the last election after a widely-publicised drink-driving incident, has indicated an interest in running, despite the fact that he currently lives in London.
It’s most unlikely that the party would be so suicidal as to take him up on the offer, although similar things could have been said about a number of its recent decisions. Tim Smith, like his supporter Josh Frydenberg (who represented the area federally), is emblematic of everything that’s wrong with the Victorian Liberal Party: the apparently seamless melding of hard right politics with shameless self-promotion.
It’s been a long and unhappy road to get to this situation. Ryan Smith, then an unknown, won preselection for Warrandyte back in 2006 when the then sitting member, former deputy leader Phil Honeywood, dropped out shortly before the election. He beat a much more high-profile candidate, Peter Clarke, despite active support for the latter from then-leader Ted Baillieu: partly because Honeywood’s local machine backed him, but also with the support of what we then called the Kroger-Costello group.
The Kroger-Costello forces at that time controlled most of the organisation, and had done since Helen Kroger beat the same Peter Clarke for state president in 2003. Baillieu was their opponent, and they were energised against him at the time because he had helped engineer their defeat in the previous preselection, in neighboring Doncaster, which was won by Mary Wooldridge.
Wooldridge went on to be a minister in the Baillieu government, but her seat was abolished in the next redistribution and the Krogerites had their revenge in 2014 when they defeated her attempt to move to another lower house seat. It was a fatal turning point for the party, marking the failure of its attempt to broaden its base: as I said at the time, “trying to make a party more representative risks empowering more of the same unrepresentative people that you started with.”
The seat, of course, was Kew, and the man who beat her was Tim Smith. What goes around, comes around. Instead of Nietzsche, this time I thought of P.J. O’Rourke, on reading Flavius Josephus:
But in The Jewish War the shock of recognition is just a shock. Here, sixty generations ago, is nearly the same cast of characters engaged in exactly the same obsessive, vicious, and fatal behavior for the same terrifying reasons …
The World is Not Enough 
Having represented Warrandyte in the Legislative Council of Victoria for 8 years, might I suggest that it is the Teals and not Labor who have the best chance of replacing the Liberal Party in that seat? Warrandyte has a strong Liberal vote, but is one of the most environmentally aware, and sensitive electorates in Melbourne.
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Course the Federal Liberals are doing something that they would not do if there was *not* a risky bye-election.
Unfortunately, the reality that Lidia is a bush oven short of a damper will mitigate blowback against Van (there’s a man called Van, last seen in Iran, wearing a bad spray tan).
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That might have been the case before Dutton suspended Van from the Liberal Party Room, on the basis of further, undisclosed allegations made known to him.
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