James Campbell: Victorian Liberals taking big risk in dumping Brad Battin for Jess Wilson as leader
The sudden move to replace Brad Battin with Jess Wilson blindsided and enraged senior Liberal MPs, with the secretive coup creating more friction in an already fractured party room.
Any way you cut it the Liberal Party is taking a risk dumping Brad Battin for Jess Wilson less than a year after he replaced John Pesutto.
Internally there will obviously be a transaction cost in the bad blood it will cause in an already riven party room.
As one MP said on Tuesday: “I thought we had hit rock bottom last December but this is worse.”
The secrecy with which the coup was executed may have been necessary for its success but the sudden move on Monday afternoon blindsided even MPs as senior as ex-leader Matthew Guy and health spokeswoman Georgie Crozier, who were both enraged by it.
The pair worked the phones on Monday night, trying to shore up support for Battin and to stop the veteran right-winger Bev McArthur from replacing almost equally veteran David Davis as leader in the upper house.
Unbeknown to them however, at some point before the 8.30am party room meeting, Davis entered into discussions with the plotters in an attempt to cut a deal that would see him stay in the job.
If that was his plan it backfired spectacularly.
When Davis stood up as one of the five MPs required to make the leadership ballot secret his supporters were shocked, incredulous and angry.
So when it then came to vote for upper house leader, in disgust the group decided, as one put it, “let’s give her Bev” and plumped for McArthur whom they loathe.
McArthur wasn’t the only beneficiary of a desire to make life uncomfortable for the incoming leader.
Sam Groth survived as deputy partly because some MPs were desperate not to reward his challenger David Southwick who theysuspected – perhaps unfairly – of being in league with the plotters. But Groth also benefitted because it is well known that Wilson is no fan of his.
So much for calming the internals.
Externally the party must now start from scratch, selling Wilson to a public that the opinion polls suggest had warmed to Battin.
Copper-turned-Baker’s Delight operator-turned-MP is an appealing life story surely even the Victorian Liberal Party could sell.
Ex-staffer-turned-industry-association-apparatchik-turned-MP?
It’s not necessarily a problem, but it’s unlikely to strike quite the same chord with the public is it?
That public will also be entitled to ask – just as it did after Labor dumped Kevin Rudd – why the change?
The problem for the new leader and her colleagues is they can’t say either of the reasons out loud.
Asked at her first press conference why she was there, Wilson could only blather meaningless phrases about the party “drawing a line in the sand” and in her staccato delivery what came across as “the Liberal Party room. Today. Said. It was. Time for a new direction”.
The reality is that, like Gillard before her, Wilson has been given the job because enough Liberal MPs decided the bloke she was replacing just wasn’t up to it.
Which out of deference to his and his supporters’ feelings will need to remain unstated, instead saying “Brad has done a terrific role” before repeating robot-like “the Liberal Party room as spoken”.
What must also remain unstated is that so many members of the room spoke in the way they did because they were either hoping for promotion or seeking revenge for the way Battin treated them in last month’s reshuffle.
In the latter category you can safely place James Newbury, who immediately began plotting to replace him with Wilson as soon as Battin dumped him as Shadow Treasurer.
It is a tribute to the Brighton MP’s ability at intrigue that this has come off in less than two months.
His enemies say Newbury will have reasoned that moving Wilson into the leadership will have the knock-on effect of bringing closer the happy day when James Newbury himself becomes leader.
The other author of the coup, most insiders say, was his fellow bayside MP Brad Rowswell.
When things start to go wrong, a leader’s staff and supporters often fixate upon one MP who becomes the bogey man to whom every leak and bad story can be attributed.
For months Rowswell had been assigned the villain role by Battin’s people.
It was only in recent weeks that it began to dawn on them that though Rowswell was no friend of the leader, they were blaming him for things of which others were guilty.
Some MPs say in the end the biggest hurdle Newbury and Rowswell had to overcome was Wilson’s reluctance to put herself forward.
Battin had lost the conservatives led by McArthur months earlier when he backed the deal brokered by party president Philip Davis that saw John Pesutto lent $1.5m to settle his debts to Moira Deeming’s lawyers arising from her defamation action against the then leader.
He also undermined his position through his cack-handed reshuffle, which not only lost him Newbury but angered others by the way he sacked from the shadow cabinet Roma Britnell who had been nothing but loyal to him.
Even so, MPs say that almost until last week Wilson was still reluctant to commit, telling MPs she didn’t think now was her time.
None of which is to say that Wilson won’t work.
She might.
Her colleagues say she is clever, with a strong grasp of policy.
But that is only one part of the job of party leader.
She will also have to work out quickly how she is going to heal the wounds of a party room embittered by two leadership changes in a year.
Managing a group of MPs who have shown themselves to be damn near unmanageable would test an MP with a decade’s experience.
But at 35-years-old not only is Wilson young for a leader, she has only been in parliament for three years.
And as we witnessed on Tuesday, not only are her public performances still a work-in-progress, it isn’t clear she has learnt when and how to play the political cards that fate deals her.
Her colleagues have bet she has the capacity to learn these skills, having reached the conclusion it wouldn’t matter how long Battin stayed there he was never going to get it.
What she needs now is time, which is short.
Originally published as James Campbell: Victorian Liberals taking big risk in dumping Brad Battin for Jess Wilson as leader
