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The Victorian Liberals’ ‘moderate’ fever dream may finally be coming to an end. Not a moment too soon, but still maybe too late to save them.
The once-mighty Victorian Liberal Party has hit rock bottom, with the lowest primary votes in living memory, despite competing against one of the most dire state governments in living memory, if not history: trounced in the polls by Pauline Hanson’s One Nation. A party that once represented mainstream centre-right Australia is reduced to a hollowed-out shell, captured by wishy-washy moderates who’d rather chase inner-city green votes than defend the suburban heartland.
Brian Loughnane sat at Jess Wilson’s kitchen table in Melbourne’s eastern suburbs, listening as the Victorian Liberal leader and her friend, federal senator James Paterson, made their pitch.
The reluctant return of battle-hardened campaign veteran Brian Loughnane as state president is a tacit admission: the moderate experiment has been an unmitigated disaster. Not only is Loughnane an old-school, hard-headed Liberal campaigner, but he’s also married to Sky News presenter and former Tony Abbott adviser Peta Credlin. Credlin has been excoriating of the Liberals’, both federally and at state levels, fatal fascination with ‘moderates’.
Wilson and Paterson are scrambling for someone who actually knows how to win, because the current crop clearly doesn’t.
For years, the party’s moderate faction, the CINO (Conservative In Name Only) set who talk and act like Greens with more expensive suits, have dominated the organisational wing. They’ve sneered at conservatives, purged anyone who dared question the rainbow agenda and treated the base like embarrassing relatives at a family function. Result? The party’s centre-right heartland has walked. Why vote for soggy watermelons when you can have the real fruitcakes, fresh off the green-left vine?
Davis ally and state director Stuart Smith had also recently resigned after leaked messages... mocking the party’s women’s council and 76-year-old [Bev McArthur].
The fault lines cracked wide open with the Moira Deeming saga. Deeming, a traditional centre-right Liberal, mother and staunch defender of real women’s rights (as opposed to the lunatic degeneracy of Third Wave ‘intersectional’ feminism), had the temerity to speak at a Let Women Speak rally. For that sin, then-leader John Pesutto branded her a “Nazi” and “white supremacist” on national media. She successfully sued him for defamation. A sitting Liberal leader dragged through the courts by one of his own MPs, all because he couldn’t stomach a conservative woman standing up for biological reality.
To make their degradation even more obvious, the Liberal party executive tried to raid party funds to pay Pesutto’s damages bill. Mostly because they were (probably rightly) terrified of a bankrupt Pesutto having to resign, triggering a by-election in a once blue ribbon Liberal seat that they’d probably lose.
That episode symbolised everything wrong with the moderate takeover. Deeming represents the traditional Liberal voter: concerned about crime, borders, energy costs and the erosion of women’s spaces. The moderates? More interested in parading their suicidal empathy, driving up voters’ power bills with demented ‘Net Zero’ policies and keeping their seats in leafy electorates (where they’re rarely troubled by the violent Third Worlders they dump by the millions in the outer suburbs), while the battlers desert them in droves.
One Nation now routinely outpolls the Liberals in Victoria. Think about that. A party that has long been consigned to the fringe, a party the establishment loves to sneer at as ‘populist’, is beating the official opposition. When your base prefers Hanson over your own candidates, smashing the Overton Window, you’ve lost the party faithful. Likely for good.
Wilson herself is still very much a moderate, but reaching for Loughnane, a proven winner from the Howard and Abbott eras, shows a glimmer of pragmatic realisation. The Liberals only thrive as a broad-church, centre-right conservative party. Not as teetering wannabe-Greens chasing urban hipsters who’ll never vote for them anyway.
Let’s be real: the kitchen-table pitch to Loughnane was almost certainly not some grand ideological shift. It was desperation. The organisational wing remains riven by lawsuits, leaks and factional knives. Moderates had to be talked down from their high horse. Even then, it took threats of federal intervention and backroom arm-twisting to get Loughnane unopposed.
This isn’t renewal: it’s damage control. The moderates spent years alienating the conservative base that built the party. They defended indefensible stances on gender ideology, net-zero fantasies and soft-on-crime policies, while suburban mums watched their daughters’ sports invaded, their power bills skyrocket and African thugs with machetes drench their shopping centres in blood.
True conservatives never left the Liberals. The Liberals left them.
Loughnane’s short-term gig might steady the ship for November. But unless Wilson and company actually listen to the base – secure borders, cheap reliable energy, women’s rights, law and order – they’ll be handing Jacinta Allan another term on a silver platter. Let that sink in: quite likely the most hated government in the state’s living memory will likely cruise to another election victory and a near-three-year death-grip on a dying state.
The Victorian Liberals don’t need more moderates. They need to remember who they are: the party of aspiration, not apology; of the forgotten people, not the fashionable ones; of Menzies’ broad church, not a narrow clique of inner-city poseurs.
Time to ditch the green-tinged delusions and fight for the Australia Australians actually want. Before One Nation does it for them.
