Desperate measures for the Victorian Liberals

Only the older generation can now remember the time when Victoria was known as “the jewel in the Liberal Party’s crown.” Yet it was a real thing: the party held a majority in the Victorian parliament (in its own right, not in coalition) for 27 years straight, and its performance there often anchored federal victories. In 1969, for example, when John Gorton narrowly held power (the “Don’s Party” election), the Coalition had only 49.8% of the two-party-preferred vote nationwide but won 55.1% in Victoria.

But then things started to go downhill, and since the 1980s they’ve been almost uniformly bad. Come next March the Liberal Party will have been out of office in the state for 33 of the last 44 years. Its last five state leaders – six if Matthew Guy’s two terms are counted separately – have fought only three elections between them and lost all of them, two (Guy’s two) by landslide margins.

That’s not yet in quite the same league as the New South Wales Liberal Party, which at one point had had 18 leaders of whom only two had ever won an election. But it’s still plenty bad enough for the party to start thinking that drastic remedies might be needed. And so yesterday morning, leader Brad Battin, in the job for less than 11 months, was removed in a quickly and cleanly executed coup with a vote of 19-13, and Jess Wilson installed in his place.

There are certainly signs of desperation there. Wilson is not only the party’s first female leader but also, at 35, its second youngest (Jeff Kennett became leader at 34 but took ten years from then to win an election). She is still in her first term in parliament, having been appointed shadow treasurer just last month. And in a party that has been trying to pitch itself to the outer suburbs, she represents cosmopolitan inner-suburban Kew.

In other words, the party has taken quite a radical leap into the unknown. But Wilson has been a strong performer, and Battin’s tenure has been so underwhelming that she was able to unite leaders of both factions – the sane and the insane – behind her. She can hardly be called a progressive, having once worked for Josh Frydenberg, but she is about as close to it as the party will now tolerate. Coming less than a year after the disposal of John Pesutto, that’s a remarkable turnaround.

Now she has twelve months to try to get the party in shape to fight next year’s election against Jacinta Allen’s rather tired-looking Labor government. Victory would require a uniform swing of 7.6%: not entirely beyond the bounds of possibility, but a mammoth task. And given the way the last Coalition government was hamstrung by its narrow majority, she would very much want to have a few extra seats as a safety margin.

Stranger things have happened. But the reversal in the Liberals’ fortunes that has happened over the last half century in Victoria is unlikely to be undone. With hindsight their period of ascendancy looks like an accident of history produced mainly by the great Labor split of 1955: when that split was healed in the 1980s the ALP became much more electable, and it has mostly held the advantage ever since.

The Liberal Party, however, hasn’t helped itself by moving sharply to the right in recent years, as we’ve noted here a number of times. Yesterday’s transition could be a signal that its MPs recognise the damage and are committed to doing something about it, or it could be just a momentary bump on the downward slope. Time will tell.

And if you’re interested in the woes of the Liberal Party nationwide, don’t miss an op-ed piece this week by Jane Buncle, one of its transitional administrators in New South Wales. As she says in her first sentence, what’s happening “is a struggle over what the party stands for,” and she calls on it to embrace renewable energy, women’s rights and immigration and to “resist the lure of culture-war populism.”

All very sensible advice, but she must know that the chance of it being listened to is remote, to say the least. (Buncle was the left’s candidate for the Warringah preselection in 2022 that ultimately went to Katherine Deves.) And as with the slightly less explicit George Brandis last week, there is no sign of a fallback strategy if the party’s war on common sense continues.