As I wrote recently, the Victorian Liberal Party have apparently learned nothing from John Pesutto and Matthew Guy. Instead of ditching the wet, woke ‘moderates’, they’ve installed yet another. Brad Battin, the new leader of the ostensibly centre-right conservative party in Victoria openly and flatly denies being a conservative at all. One of his first announcements as leader was that he would duly bow at the altar of wokeness and ponce around at Melbourne’s ‘Pride’ festival.
No word yet on whether he’ll don a sequined g-string and gimp mask and jump in the melee at the ‘NUTT’ sex dungeon event.
Like Christopher Luxon, though, it seems likely that Battin will fall into government despite himself – solely because of Victorians’ new-found depth of hatred for the Labor incumbents.
The Allan government is facing a historic collapse in public support, as a new poll shows Labor’s primary vote slumping to a record low 22 per cent, down 6 points in two months.
If replicated at next year’s state election, the results of the latest Resolve Political Monitor survey would bring to an end 12 years of Labor rule and deliver a Coalition government in Victoria for just the second time this century.
As the adage goes, voters rarely vote a new government in: they chuck the old government out. This was as true in New Zealand in 2023 as it was in the UK in 2024 and Australia in 2022. Even last year’s US election was as much about ditching the loathed Joe Biden/Kamala Harris/Barack Obama administration as it was a massive wave of enthusiasm for Donald Trump.
Of course, the only poll that matters is the ballot box. We’ll see how that’s going for Vic Labor in a couple of weeks, at the Werribee by-election. Werribee, a formerly rural outskirt west of Melbourne, is now a chock-a-block outer suburb, crammed with first homebuyers and recent migrants. The highway linking it to the rest of the city turns into a carpark twice a day.
As such, it’s a microcosm of the issues facing Victoria: mass-immigration-fuelled overcrowding, collapsing infrastructure and grandiose government projects (the West Gate Tunnel) years behind and tens of billions over budget.
More immediately, they point to a previously unthinkable challenge for the ALP before a looming byelection in Werribee, a nominally safe western suburbs seat it has held since 1979.
On Thursday, the Victorian and federal governments announced a jointly funded package of $333.5 million in road upgrades for major arterials in and around Werribee aimed at addressing traffic complaints plaguing the outer suburban area.
It’s Brad Battin’s good fortune to have fallen into the leadership of the opposition, courtesy of Pesutto’s self-induced pratfall over Moira Deeming, just as Victorians are shrugging off the spell of Dictator Dan Andrews’s cult of personality. By way of context, even a clueless wet twit like Pesutto was able to surge ahead of the hapless Jacinta Allan, late last year, right in the middle of his high-profile court battle with Deeming.
The new poll shows that former Liberal leader John Pesutto had boosted his party’s vote and was in an election-winning position at the time he was dumped by his party room colleagues.
The downward spiral for Labor has only got worse, though.
To put this into a national political context, Victorian Labor’s primary vote is tracking well below the 32.6 per cent recorded by Queensland Labor in last year’s state election, when it lost government after nine years in power, and below the 25.3 per cent primary vote recorded by the West Australian Coalition in its 2021 electoral wipe-out.
It’s also even lower than Anthony Albanese’s equal-record national low of 32.6 per cent.
But it’s not all good news for Battin. Only half of the voters who’ve deserted Victorian Labor since 2022 have switched to the Libs. If Battin wants to win back those disaffected voters, then he’s going to have to demonstrate that he’s not just another of the ‘moderate’ lettuce leaves who’ve done so much damage to the party’s standing, in every state and federally, for the past decade.
Voters don’t want a Green in a more expensive suit: they want an actual, centre-right, small-c conservative.
