Victoria’s Liberal Party was invaded by the margins, and now it lies in ruins

It’s a measure of how interesting the Victorian election is getting that your correspondent is watching it from Rome, where actual post-neo-quasi-fascism has taken hold. But Italy appears relatively sane as far as I can tell, and the place is full of jabbering foreigners, so who can really tell what’s going on? 

What appears to be happening in Victoria, though, is of genuine significance beyond our wedgy borders, because, well, one side of mainstream politics appears to have entirely collapsed — politically, organisationally and morally.

The Liberal Party of Victoria is absolutely and in every way unfit to take power and hold office. 

This seems to me to be the obvious and key point to have emerged from this campaign, and one which precedes any other judgment. Yet it has been barely stated explicitly, despite the fact that it is clearly widely held.

The Liberal opposition is not simply a party in poor shape, less than match fit, needing a bit of luck, etc, etc. In fact it is a destroyed organisation, midway through an internal party struggle, under investigation for numerous electoral breaches, studded with numerous unvetted candidates, honeycombed with weirdos, and preferencing neo-Nazis.

Furthermore, it has nothing resembling a consistent program for the state, merely a mixed grab-bag of immediate spending promises, no clear alternative longer-term strategy for the state, and no approach consistent either internally or with liberal principles. 

Its second-time round leader, having started by trying to restyle himself with a name-cucking — “Hi, Matt Guy” — appears to have sagged in the middle, and now in press conferences seems to just hang there, like an undercard boxer, clinging to the ropes long enough to earn the appearance fee. I liked him better when he dined with colourful cement-industry identities, even if he did accompany lobster with Grange, for God’s sake (the real reason James Newbury almost lost Brighton in ‘18, surely).

This would all be said more explicitly if the two main news groups were not the ropes he was clinging to. Nothing the Herald Sun did was ever going to surprise, although the expose of the “naughty step(s)” wot dun Dan down — or did they? — was a journey deeper into US-style schlock than ever before. 

Sky had Peta Credlin’s characteristically vacuous Dan doco, and in The Australian John Ferguson, the world’s oldest Catholic copy-boy, still filing the Sandown greyhounds results to the Sporting Globe copytaker, has taken time to produce a series of portentous takes veering weekly from the suggestion that Dictator Dan’s arrogance has lost a sure bet, to warning that we are on the verge of being a one-party state. 

Meanwhile, in the Nein papers, around some good single electorate work is some hard spinning for the Coalition, as evidenced by this morning’s “neck and neck!” story, which goes on to reveal that Labor is leading by 53-47 2PP. To call that number neck-and-neck in 2PP takes some neck. 

These prevarications are required to avoid thinking about structural political change, and the central question of the collapse of Victorian liberalism. There is no party centre; the margins have invaded it, and now determine its form. 

This event is perhaps less astounding to those under a certain age, because Victoria seems to be a “natural” Labor state, after a quarter-century of dominance. 

To anyone else it’s hard to get used to, and for good reason. Victoria has not only been the intellectual and command section of Australian liberalism, it is really the first place in the world where a certain type of social-classical-liberalism came together in a stable and lasting fashion, albeit after a bit of founding barbarism. 

From the mid-19th century onwards, it was seen as a place where an ideal incorporating social protection and the guarantee of positive freedom could be fought for and won, without needing a man named Bismarck with a spike on his head to guarantee it. The Harvester judgment, originated here in 1907, and drawing on the Vatican’s Rerum Novarum of 1891, is in that tradition, rather than a radical socialist one, and it really continued through the whole long chain of Deakin, Menzies, Bolte — yes, even the turnip was of that ilk — Hamer, Cain/Kirner and urrrggghhh Malcolm Fraser (who falsely believed himself to be a follower of Ayn Rand). 

This was something achieved with difficulty, over generations, and had global influence. But the spinning centre of it slowed, and in so doing became a dead weight and plunged, taking the whole edifice down with it. Kennett turned the party into a spiv machine, breaking the alliance between principles and machine politics, which had proved so successful (and in so sundering, created the conditions for this publication), and persuading a whole generation of the liberal elite that this was not the place to put your efforts to create a better world, in a liberal framework. 

The Age was lost to Fairfax, and then Fairfax was lost to a bunch of half-bright burrheads willing to see the organisation destroyed rather than continue as a progressive social liberal voice, men driven as much by their basic resentment of genuine journalism, writing and ideas as by any positive vision of an alternative that wasn’t evisceration. (If, as is said, ScoMo did in fact deny Greg Hywood an interview for the ABC top job, I will say a prayer for ScoMo. If a spider recently bit Greg Hywood, the spider gets the prayer.) 

Then Act III: along came Michael Kroger, the smartly tailored, rock-jawed omnishambles — a man whose sole ability, it sometimes seems, is to make cheap shots on TV panels for elections his party is losing. Whatever benefits Kroger had brought to the Victorian party first time round were, arguably, gone when he re-took the party presidency, started a stupid losing fight with the Cormack Foundation, and took his eye off the party infrastructure, as Evangelicals, Mormons, and the Brighton crew under the improbably named Marcus Bastiaan (one tries to think of analogues: Kingman Bridgespikes? Lorenzo Tongueslitter?) took over the whole apparatus. Interim leader Michael O’Brien never really had much of a chance to reverse the damage, having the unfortunate air of a lieutenant who knows it is only a matter of time before he is shot by his own men, and is thus unwilling to buy new winter trousers.

The Liberal Party of any type would have struggled against the political sophistication of Victorian Labor, which has had two decades to tune its politics to the contradictory demands of modern Victoria, a mix of muscular social progressivism combined with state-led economic vibrancy, a whiff of soft falangism (“Anzac” metro station, “police memorial tram stop”), neoliberal asset management (privatising the roads corporation — I mean, respect) and a determination not to be outflanked outside of Melbourne (by chopping all the trees down, so no one can sneak up).

The Liberals would have been back in the game by doing the mirror of Labor’s left-right crossover — i.e. accepting and continuing level crossings stuff, supporting social measures, and then standing for the individual and family on things like overdevelopment, the health system, Labor’s blundering land taxes, heritage, rural neglect, bad/rip-off suburban development, ministerial incompetence (i.e. the recycling disaster) and so on. But by then such audacity — recombining Hamerism with 21st century social and cultural values — was out of reach. The Church of England was once described as the Conservative Party at worship. The Victorian Liberal Party equivalent is now the Tarneit Dan Murphy Car Park Jesus is Awesome Ministry. 

So it was in the worst possible situation when COVID came along, the world’s longest continuous lockdown was imposed, and vast anger — much of it reasonable in itself — surfaced. Now was a time to really act like Menzies — rather than more of the endless death-frotting of his political corpse — and run an iron wall down between the party and elements to the right of it. Now it needed a leader willing to wage brutal internal war, close whole branches, vacate positions, purge stack members. This is what Labor was doing at the same time, in order to seal Adem Somyurek, the sultan of Springvale, back in his sarcophagus (he’s there now; it’s called the DLP, laid inside a tomb called the Legislative Council).

Once again, the nerve failed, and it failed, where it did not in Labor, because, unlike Labor, Victoria’s Liberals could no longer feel they had anything worth fighting hard to keep. The party stood for nothing consistent and binding, not even the idea of a sort of middle-class commonsense retail politics; its offers have been erratic, poorly costed, contradictory and off the pace throughout. Its most energetic internal agents were loyal to other forces; the whole thing involuted, the extremes becoming the centre, and the former party centre becoming a series of exile camps. There is now so much former Liberal expertise and talent outside the party that another viable party could have been made of it. 

Leaving the hilarious gags aside for a moment, the decision to preference malign cookers such as the Angry Victorians is probably the Victorian Liberal Party’s greatest betrayal of itself, its history, its own members and the community as a whole. Matt Guy’s sagging indolence, his Mogadon-ish schlep-through, like a man on a Woman’s Weekly tour through the killing fields is the most pathetic failure to take a stab at getting the double — reaffirming principle and taking political advantage from it — of recent times. 

The right knew what it was doing in following this trajectory, and that there were risks in doing it. But it seems unlikely it understood quite how close the right, as a whole edifice, was to a sudden centre-periphery reversal. Look, it may pay off in spades; we should now presume that every election is only provisionally forecast by the polls; angry people don’t give an account of themselves to pollsters. As one commentator remarked in the US midterms, response rates to polling are now at “trace homeopathic” levels.

This long Labor reign (preferable on balance, but boy, sometimes …) began with the shock of 1999, from which the Liberal Party and much of its base never really recovered. Should its mirror occur, well, then the whole state has come off its perch and we’re all in trouble. But if it doesn’t, well, I don’t really see how one could say that the Victorian Liberal Party continues to exist in any real sense other than a letterhead. 

There is no History in Africa, Hegel said. He didn’t even bother to mention Australia. Yet it’s here that one version of his civil state-society unfolded with more success, longevity and eventual overall benefit than anywhere else — with a ways to go. You don’t have to like its economics or a lot else to admit its value. Let the foreigners jabber over their coffee beneath the pediments (although, Mussolini, gotta say: those railway stations, maaaan. Respect), we made in Victoria a society where life was worth living for an ever-widening circle of people, a project to be continued.

Matt Guy could have been part of that. Instead, it’s the boiling pot for him, the true and just fate for all those who commit that gravest of sins in the Melbourne Liberal firmament, drinking red wine with seafood.