Deeming-Pesutto saga proves Victorian Liberals are beyond help

Two recent media moments illustrate the depths to which the Victorian Liberal Party has sunk.

Today, the Nine newspapers have published two stories that together form a stark contrast. One explores the criminal links of companies courted by the Australian Workers’ Union (AWU) on a Victorian windfarm project, as part of its attempt to resist the expansion of the corrupt CFMEU. The Andrews government — and then infrastructure minister, now premier, Jacinta Allan — enabled that expansion, giving preference to the CFMEU over the AWU on Victorian Labor’s Big Build program.

The second story was the latest development in the Deeming-Pesutto saga, with Moira Deeming proposing to delay bankruptcy proceedings against Pesutto — which would force the former leader out of parliament — in exchange for her being guaranteed preselection. Jeff Kennett, a supporter of and contributor to Pesutto, called Deeming’s offer “tantamount to blackmail”.

The other media moment was last weekend when the Financial Review’s Sumeyya Ilanbey did a deep dive into what Victorian Liberals thought about their party. One MP said, “If I had a gun with a number of bullets in it, I’d be shooting a number of colleagues at the minute and just ridding the party of the cancer that they are inflicting on the place.” They then felt the need to add “political bullets, not actual bullets”.

While Victoria suffers the effects of rampant corruption enabled by a rotten, fiscally reckless state Labor government, the Victorian Liberals are focused entirely on their own internal wars, with the Deeming-Pesutto saga yet another proxy war for right-wing forces against moderates. The Victorian Liberals are not just unelectable but wholly unfit for government, so obsessed with themselves are they. However awful Victorian Labor might be, it at least keeps the place ticking over. You can only wonder at what chaos would erupt if the Liberals ever got near power.

None of this is new. After three terms in the post-Kennett wilderness, the Victorian Liberals stumbled into power in 2010 off the back of John Brumby’s political incompetence (if Steve Bracks, one of the finest political leaders Australia has produced, had still been leading Labor, 2010 would have been another rout of the Liberals). They proved unfit for government then, and deservedly lost in 2014 to Daniel Andrews. They’ve never recovered, and Andrews flogged them, mercilessly, over and over, no matter how much the Murdoch media machine hysterically harangued Victorians about Andrews.

The Victorian Liberals have put forward a cavalcade of dud leaders — they’re now up to their ninth since Kennett (himself a survivor of leadership silliness in the 1980s and early ’90s) lost to Bracks. None have been able to hold the party together, let alone offer a convincing alternative government.

The other problem has been an infestation of extremists — initially Christian fundamentalists who effortlessly signalled how badly out of touch the party was with ordinary Victorians, and in more recent years, Trump-inspired elements prone to peddling conspiracy theories about Andrews, threatening violence, abusing LGBTQIA+ people and Indigenous peoples, and attacking abortion rights.

The party has subsequently been shocked to discover that culture wars and extremism doom you to repeated, heavy election losses. Victoria has thus been a one-party state, barring a four-year aberration, for a quarter century. However bad Labor has been, the Liberals have been worse. Usually much worse.

Talk of new political parties usually stays just talk. Building a new party is hard, long-term work; the existing parties have enormous benefits of incumbency, both in terms of existing party structures and finances, and in the benefits bestowed by our electoral system. And new parties are no more free of extremism and factional and personal clashes than the old — look at the Greens, especially the extreme, faction-riddled Victorian Greens.

But the Victorian Liberals not merely have the look and stench of losers about them — they appear committed to maintaining and strengthening that status. A vote for the Liberals is a vote for infighting, lunatic right-wingers and dysfunction. If the party could be towed out to sea and sunk, it would do more good as a piece of marine ecology than in holding a terrible government to account or offering a plausible political alternative.

Victorian Liberals actually interested in being electorally competitive and offering a palatable set of policies to ordinary Victorians, centred around the economy, housing and better infrastructure and health and education services, may have to consider going elsewhere to seek office. Teal candidates and the Greens have demonstrated that it may take several elections to succeed and start supplanting the big parties in parliament, but it can be done. The alternative at the moment is endless brawling on a road to nowhere.