As Victoria nudges closer and closer to election day, the outcome is still very much in play, but the most probable result looks to be a Labor defeat, with the Liberals likely having to govern in minority with One Nation support. But this is Victoria we’re talking about: never forget Jeff Kennett’s surprise drubbing in 1999.
Labor’s last-minute switcheroo, dumping Jacinta Allan for Ben Carroll, has done nothing to salvage the government’s underwater vote. Yet, while Jess Wilson’s Liberals have made advances, the respective primary votes remain close: Liberals on 28 per cent, Labor on 25 and One Nation on 23. The Greens trail distantly on 15 per cent. Labor has, in short, shed about a third of its 2022 election-winning vote, with little hope of clawing it back. While Labor might be able to cobble a ‘left-bloc’, its combined vote would remain under 40 per cent.
But it’s not an assured victory for the Libs, unless they join forces with One Nation to bring their combined primary vote to just over 50 per cent.
So, the obvious thing would be for the Libs to start talking turkey with One Nation. But that is exactly what they’re not doing. Instead, the Victorian Liberals have elected to play a high-minded game of political hide-and-seek, apparently terrified of catching the populist contagion:
The Victorian Liberals will hold off on preference negotiations with One Nation until nominations close next month, as Jess Wilson seeks to sideline Pauline Hanson’s party and make the election a straight contest between the coalition and Labor.
It is a classic display of the Liberal Party’s chronic timidity. Controlled by the lettuce-leaf ‘moderates’, while confronted with a massive uprising of alienated outer-suburban and regional voters who have abandoned both establishment machines in disgust, the patrician strategists in Spring Street pretend that the elephant in the room is merely a mirage. They cling to the quaint delusion that this can still be fought as a tidy, vintage-1990s contest between two polite major parties, while nearly a quarter of the electorate has demonstrably taken its business elsewhere.
Premier Ben Carroll, smelling desperation and watching his own primary vote swirling down the U-bend, has naturally seized upon the Liberals’ squeamishness. Sensing a rare opportunity to distract from 12 years of economic vandalism, catastrophic debt and infrastructure botch-ups, Carroll is attempting to mount a shrill scare campaign, accusing the Liberals of sleeping with the enemy, whilst frantically demanding a three-way leaders’ brawl.
“She does not want to debate the leader of One Nation because she is working with him, she is going to do a preference deal with him,” Mr Carroll said. “I am prepared to debate One Nation, I am prepared to debate any leader. Unlike the Liberal leader who is playing hide and seek.”
When a Labor premier begins hyperventilating about a “battle for the soul of the state”, you know the internal polling must look utterly terminal. And, true to form, when left-wing apparatchiks face an existential rout by working-class voters, they immediately reach for the progressive culture-war emergency brake. Hence Carroll’s sudden announcement of taxpayer-funded abortions on demand across the state, designed specifically to manufacture moral outrage against One Nation’s Victorian leader, Warren Pickering, and his modest suggestion that the gestational limits on terminating unborn life ought to be reined in.
One Nation’s supporters are, as usual, cast as the wicked bogeymen of polite society and given no quarter to articulate why their revolt exists in the first place: namely, a justifiable fury at skyrocketing living costs, unchecked immigration, crumbling public services and the relentless march of managerial wokeism.
Liberal insiders, meanwhile, insist that their gutlessness is really tactical brilliance. A senior Liberal figure dismissed Labor’s strategy:
“Labor is trying to build One Nation into a force far bigger than its presence on the ground warrants,” the source said. “It suits Labor to talk up One Nation because every day spent talking about Pauline Hanson is a day it doesn’t have to defend its own record.”
There is, of course, a grain of truth in that. But pretending One Nation does not exist will not make their votes vanish into the ether on election night. One Nation’s James Ashby has already made the sensible and straightforward pledge that his party will put Labor and the Greens stone-cold last. The blueprint exists: seen earlier this year in the Nepean by-election, where both parties pragmatically put each other ahead of everyone else capable of winning.
Yet Jess Wilson continues to tiptoe around the reality of preference mathematics like a nervous schoolgirl at a debutante ball.
If the Liberals believe they can casually cruise to an outright majority in the deeply fractured ruins of post-Dan Andrews’ Victoria without coming to an accommodation with conservative, patriotic voters, they’re dreaming. The maths is simple, brutal and entirely unconcerned with Liberal squeamishness: either Wilson engages with the reality of One Nation’s surge, or she risks waking up on November 29 discovering that snobbery has handed the remnants of Victoria right back to the wrecking crew.
