John Howard once said, ‘love me or loathe me, the Australian people know where I stand on all the major issues.’ I hate to admit this, but loathe him or love him (and I’m very much a member of the former), the Victorian people knew where Daniel Andrews stood on all the major issues, and clearly most Victorians had no idea what the Liberal party and Matthew Guy stood for at last Saturday’s state election.
Typically, Malcolm Turnbull weighed in, arguing on Twitter the Victorian Liberals had been taken over by the ‘hard right’. This man is possibly more delusional than even I realised. The Victorian Liberals supported a higher emissions target by 2030 than federal Labor, supported legislation to start negotiating a treaty between the Victorian government and the state’s Aboriginals and had no real alternative plans for paying off Victoria’s debt. The only major point of difference between the Liberals and Labor was the suburban rail loop which the Liberals would not build but rather take the money set aside for it and spend on health. Heavens above, the Liberals even preferenced the Greens above Labor, and attempted to sack a female candidate for going to church!
The Coalition spent most of 2022 talking about hospitals and health infrastructure. One commentator went to great pains to tell me the Liberals had ‘neutralised’ health as an issue. Yeah, right. By announcing a new hospital virtually on a fortnightly rotation over the last couple of months all the Liberals did was ensure the conversation was about health, a Labor brand equity. Everyone knew that the only issue in town is cost of living, so why on earth did the Coalition not have a cost-of-living package ready to go straight after the federal election?
I will tell you why, policy laziness.
Ted Baillieu has been out and about arguing essentially the Liberal Party in Victoria doesn’t look right – not enough women, young people, or MPs from ethnic and racial minorities. He is right by the way – the parliamentary Liberal party in Victoria has been full to the brim of rather talentless old blokes for years, but that’s not the most important issue – the lack of serious policy work for decades is the major reason we keep losing, and Ted Bailleu’s woeful government proves my point.
When Baillieu won in 2010, he arrived in government with a plan for an anti-corruption commission and to have police officers patrolling railway stations. He certainly attempted to get the state’s budget in order, but that was about it. So funnily enough, after about 18 months his government started to fall apart because it was directionless. Baillieu had no agenda and stood for nothing because the policy work hadn’t been done in opposition. The Victorian people remember the last Liberal government that Daniel Andrews defeated in one term as four wasted years.
Yet the Liberal party still thinks of an election rather like an auction, a bunch of unrelated spending announcements with no policy narrative and no forward vision.
The obsession with holding the inner urban seats of Sandringham, Brighton, Caulfield, Malvern, Kew and Hawthorn to counter the ‘Teals’ ensured disproportionate resources were directed into these seats as the party positioned itself to save these seats to the detriment of all others. The Liberals lost seats in the middle and outer suburbs because of the opportunity cost of prioritising the woke concerns of inner-urban elites over the issues facing working families in the suburbs and regional Victoria. Only the National party has to date picked up seats in the bush.
To win a seat as an urban independent, name recognition is vital, and the only way to get that is to spend a lot of money. The simple fact is that the Teals couldn’t spend the obscene amount of money they did at the federal election because of Victoria’s highly restrictive campaign finance laws. Time will tell if the Teals are a structural change in federal politics.
Melbourne was always regarded as Australia’s most liveable city. Not anymore – it’s been ruined by the world’s longest lockdown. Don’t forget the Liberals have won, at time of writing, only two seats off Labor after Daniel Andrews locked us down six times for a total of 263 days in 18 months. The Liberal slogan is ‘don’t let him get away with it’. The tragedy is that Daniel Andrews has got away with the most brutal, unjustified, and longest pandemic lockdown in the world and has been re-elected for four more years.
The Liberals could have won last Saturday’s election at the end of 2020 when we had been locked down for months. But where were the Liberals under former leader Michael O’Brien? Hiding under the doona, hoping no one would notice they supported most of the craziness that was enforced on Victorians, which has turned out not to be based on health advice after all.
That was the time to start to articulate a different and alternate vision for the state through the prism of a different approach to managing the pandemic. Unfortunately the former Liberal prime minister and his treasurer funded every single day of Victoria’s lockdown and that paradox remains present in many voters minds – there was no primary vote swing to the Liberals at the state election, and six per cent of voters supported parties to the Liberals’ right flank.
In 1993 the federal Coalition took the policy manifesto called ‘Fightback’ (otherwise known as the ‘longest suicide note’ in Australian political history) to the people. It obviously was a failure in 1993 but throughout the almost twelve years of the Howard government most of it was implemented. Throughout the thirteen years spent in opposition to the Hawke and Keating governments there were huge debates and tensions within the Liberal party as to what it stood for. The resolution of those debates resulted in the Howard then Abbott governments.
A genuine policy debate must now happen within the Victorian Liberals, they must work out what they stand for.