Well, William Bowe has all the delicious details on the great Victorian Saturday night massacre, and my colleague Bernard Keane has some of the main lines of argument, so let me go back to 1834, when the seeds of this victory were laid down.
The common observation is that Victoria is now a thoroughly progressive state, and that the Victorian Liberal Party did not even begin to perceive the degree to which this has occurred. How the Libs managed to do that is quite a thing. Victoria, and Melbourne, may have been a hidebound place for decades, but it was always a “social liberal” place keen on collective and statist solutions.
In 1982, the Cain Labor government refashioned the place by drawing culture and the arts deeper into the city’s branding and economy. Jeff Kennett’s ’90s government, crucially, did not reverse this process — instead, twinning it with right-wing economic measures. Through the ’90s and into the 2000s, Victoria’s ensemble of social and economic politics came to be markedly different from other states, especially NSW and Queensland. That was cemented by Kennett’s premature loss to Labor (thanks Jeff! That may have done more to dispel depression than anything you’ve done for Beyond Blue), the Bracks/Brumby stability, and the bizarre pointlessness of the Baillieu government.
But as Victoria was going on its merry way, Sydney was becoming an ever-tighter concentration of capital, power, media and right-wing politics. Across the Anglosphere, it was becoming clear that the Thatcher-Reagan-Howard formula of free markets and enforced traditional values wasn’t working anymore as class and cultures changed. The Murdoch/right bubble has been one area where it survived.
This coincided with a decline in the calibre of Liberal personnel. “Hamer liberalism” — the slogan dear Crikey founder Stephen Mayne will be losing under in 2019 — offered public service as a life path on the right. With that hollowed out, who would become a Liberal? There remain some decent people there, but the overwhelming perception is of a band of far-right Christians, and incompetent real estate agent types, which latter includes the still-current (amazingly) leader, Matthew Guy.
Thus was prepared a perfect storm. A state dominated to an absurd degree by its capital city (a capital city becoming a sort of Eurasian Copenhagen), a distant crazed reactionary media, and a right-wing leadership lacking the intelligence to see what was happening.
Though no one saw the landslide coming, everyone felt the rocks pinging down.
How much this stonking loss was due to the deep structure I’m talking about, and how much happened in the last week or two is hard to discern. Much of the turn away from the Liberals appears to be due to a perception that none of the problems of the Baillieu/Napthine government — lack of vision and leadership — had not been addressed.
But if there’s one moment which felt like the “killer”, it was in the Andrews-Guy leaders’ debate on Jon Faine’s 3LO Radio Melbourne morning show. Radios across the south-eastern burbs are tuned to Faine North Korean style, with no moveable dial, and Guy took that moment to double-down on his commitment to close the Richmond safe-injecting room “within days” of becoming premier in bizzarro altworld.
Guy stuck to this, even when Faine presented the incontrovertible evidence that many lives had been saved. Across the city, you could hear the disgust. Guy had taken the poll findings that people don’t necessarily want an injecting room in their own ‘burb, to mean they don’t want it to exist, or morally disapprove of the principle.
The commitment was, well, un-Victorian. Or un-current-Victorian. Some Bolte-era bourgeoisie was being conjured into air, and fused with Sydney-centric culture warriordom. Symbolic or real, that was the turn from loss to landslide.
But to be fair, there’s a degree of Monday captaining here. Everyone thought this would be a closer election, lineball in the bayside seats, Greens with balance of power. Culture warriordom was one angle worth trying — but only because no work had been done to give a genuine free market alternative path for state development. Instead, Guy’s Liberals offered equal measures of statism — such as building up regional cities, but with no commitment to the grunt work that would get it done.
What this election has done is tell us something about the transformation — not only of Victoria, but of Anglosphere polities. Arguably, this is the first such election in the post neocon-neoliberal era — in which appealing to that particular mix leads to an utterly disastrous result. Liberal leader-in-waiting John Pesutto, Schrodinger’s member, dead and alive in Hawthorn, says that there the party has to turn outward, bury differences etc.
But really, turning inward is exactly what remnant Hamer/moderate/business-oriented leaders need to do — a two-year factional war, blood, purges, the works, to reconstruct the party (after all, no one will give a damn what they say about anything else for ages). Presuming they’re still a force within it.
Yes, yes, Labor is scarcely wholly progressive. Yes, yes, they could stuff it up. More of that later. But most likely by 2026, no Victorian under 40 will have been much aware of anything except Labor governments. That prospect must be terrifying to Liberals, but prior to that it is simply extraordinary.
I generally agree with what you say, but where did you get the idea that John Cain got the arts going? The Arts Centre plan was originally approved in 1960 (remember Henry Bolte?) and building started in 1973 (Hamer’s first year) and was finished in 1982 (Hamer’s last year). There’s a reason why Hamer Hall has that name.
John Cain contributed the tennis centre (wonderfully re-named Melbourne Park by Jeff K) and re-vamped MCC membership. He was much more into sport than the arts.
Correct. Guy’s simplistic and anachronistic left-right way of viewing the world obscures the complex story of which Victorian government’s have and haven’t been ‘progressive’. Bolte was certainly a private development man, and overly remembered for the Ryan hanging, but in addition to the Arts Centre his government built two universities in working class areas, commenced a 10-fold increase in the size of the national park system, built the Westgate Bridge to the industrial suburbs, as well as Tullamarine airport and the natural gas network, and kicked off the underground rail loop. The early 1900s conservative government of the notorious Tommy Bent – land speculator and builder of rail and tram routes to his own properties – created great State institutions for conserving and managing public water resources and forests.
It isn’t just about economic determinism, Guy. It’s also about culture. Or rather, multiculture. Whatever Kennett’s other flaws, he was never a bigot. He slammed Howard for his racism. As far as I can tell, Kennett’s style of pluralism hasn’t gone out of fashion among Liberal voters, many of whom couldn’t stomach the idea of “African gangs” etc.
You left off the ‘pin dropping’ moment when the far right xians represented by Guy promised to force Chaplains back into state schools against wishes of 75% voters and most principals. Unlike Qld, these xians haven’t managed to stack state school principals and teachers with their members who then work against wishes of parents.
I think the Liberals these days desperately fail to understand how much of politics, at least at State level, is decided in talks between parents at school pickups and dropoffs.
You have one side doing free dental for kids and big school investments, and the other side promising to shove chaplains and Christian-sponsored religious ed back into schools.
I don’t think you can claim this is a specifically Victorian rebuttal of the extreme right wing and neoLiberalism. Didn’t you notice the Longman result in Queensland? Or the Wagga Wagga by-election in conservative rural NSW or Wentworth?
The change in mood is more complex and more interesting than you imply.
It’s worthwhile considering this result in the context of the Liberal wipe out in WA when an admittedly tired and desperate Liberal party betrayed its alliance with the Nats and teamed up with the Phonies. They lost most of their seats.
“Everyone thought this would be a closer election…” In fairness, and for the historical record, I was listening to Jon Faine on ABC 774 (unhappily 3LO hasn’t existed for many years) early on Saturday before any results had come in and he predicted an Andrews landslide. Not only do the suburbs listen to him. He listens to them as well, apparently.
Yes. This was never going to be ‘close’. Except, perhaps, for the Greens gaining the balance. Up until a few months ago, one might have forseen large swathes of the electorate decamping from the other bastards in order to teach them a damned lesson or to experiment with what the Greens might be able to do with a LITTLE bit of horsepower. But the latter option was demolished by the immature, millennial antics of some of their candidates. So at that point the danslide became inevitable.
But it’s SOOOO indignificaceous, so utterly frustrating (even, bizarrely, for someone who has no interest whatsoever in the perpetuation of the Liberal movement) to be able to see the collapse coming from so far back—through the obsolete and witless policies (or lack thereof) of Abbott, Turnbull, Barnett, Berejiklian, Newman, and Guy, et al—and their infuriating media-learnt strategies of staying ‘on-song’ instead of answering questions and discussing matters. Governing just for themselves… for the big end of town… is now a discredited political objective. The demography has changed, and with it the definition of ‘opposition’. It no longer means to OPPOSE relentlessly, without rationale. Who, apart from ‘them’, cannot see that?
Well said, Gumshoe. I absolutely agree with the 2nd para and with a stodgy ‘old’ Liberal party and a ‘predictable’ Labor party I’m extremely disappointed with the lacklustre performance of the Greens. Where’s the edgy, progressive and courageous forward looking party the young (and some of us older ones) can vote for.
The Black W(r)iggler is doing his best to eradicate what was the main appeal of the Greens.
He just wants to play with the bigboys and if it means leading a party of indistinguishavble grey gloop, hey that’s just dunky-hory, he has au-pairs to pay.
THE Robert Manne?
Jon Faine is a Melbourne icon.
Exactly what I was thinking Keith1. If it is, Crikey should give him
a free subscription and encourage him to contribute more often.