How John Pesutto plans to coach the Victorian Libs to a political premiership
Victorian Liberal leader John Pesutto plans to draw on his modest, working class background and immigrant family values to deliver policies to shape the Victoria he believes voters want.
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John Pesutto still remembers the day his dad lost his job. He was playing with his siblings in the driveway of their Traralgon home when Gino, an electrician at Latrobe Valley power stations, returned from work.
“Dad comes home, gets out of the car and he looked a bit off, he didn’t look right,” Pesutto says. “We just kept playing, and then when he went out, we went inside and said to Mum, ‘What’s wrong with Dad?’, and Mum told us he lost his job.
“Dad went to the pub; he never went to the pub, but he went there because he knew he had to start looking for work. “That’s never left me, that memory, his face when he got out of the car.”
In 2018, when he was the Liberal member for Hawthorn and shadow Attorney-General, Pesutto lost his own job – on live TV.
As thousands of viewers and potential future voters watched, he masked his devastation and was recognised for conceding the seat with grace. Inwardly, Pesutto says the experience was “very painful”.
But instead of wallowing, he set about winning back voters who deserted him and his party.
“You have to come to terms with the fact that there was obviously something you didn’t do that you could have done better, so I started to think, what do I need to do?
“If I was successful in coming back, what sort of parliamentarian would I be? If I were to become leader, what would I do, and what would I focus on?”
Pesutto also needed a job, so got “back on the tools as a lawyer”.
“I was doing what people have to do every day. Politics is a job and sometimes you lose your job, and you can’t think you’re any different,” he says.
After winning back the seat of Hawthorn in November last year, Pesutto immediately sought the party leadership. He won by a single vote, and set about recasting the coalition in a way he thought would make it more electable.
“The reason we’re not in office is we don’t connect,” he says.
Setting up portfolios around home ownership and housing affordability, as well as promising a different economic vision and to tackle cost of living, he asked for his team to stay on message. This appeared to be missed by some, including first-time MP Moira Deeming.
During her maiden speech, the former teacher set out her priorities for the government, including to reinstate “sex-based rights in the law”, ban children from brothels, and order an inquiry into gender affirmation practices. Deeming’s propensity to veer off message continued until she attended a rally by a group that opposes trans rights, and which was gatecrashed by neo-Nazis.
Deciding to draw a line in the sand, Pesutto staked his leadership to a move to expel the MP from the Liberal Party room.
During a tense meeting, Deeming was the final speaker before a vote on her fate, and delivered a bombshell speech that left MPs in tears and destabilised Pesutto’s push.
She was instead suspended, effectively on a good behaviour bond.
After months of instability that included legal threats against the party leader by Deeming, an expulsion motion was moved again, and passed.
The drawn-out bid for discipline undermined Pesutto’s authority, and conservatives threatened war on Deeming’s behalf.
A by-election this month in the seat of Warrandyte, called after Liberal MP Ryan Smith resigned from parliament, has been marked as a major test of his leadership.
Pesutto doesn’t shirk from the issue, which he says has “occupied a lot of media” but was not what mattered to most Victorians.
“My focus just has to be on the issues people are going to vote on and are concerned about,” he says. “It’s cost of living, cost of living, cost of living.”
Pesutto says one of the challenges for his team was to explain why budget blowouts and corruption investigations swirling around the Andrews government “impact people’s lives directly”.
“When money is wasted, whether it’s because of major project … blowouts that have no proper basis or explanation, or whether it’s a friendly union getting millions of dollars to deliver a program it has no accreditation for, that matters to you because that’s money your school didn’t get,” he says.
The opposition has chalked up “wins” on housing, integrity, and the government’s controversial schools payroll tax that was introduced to repair Covid-19 debt but was watered down following widespread criticism, Pesutto says. Policy work will be vital to the job of winning government, he says, but so was maintaining unity and explaining key messages.
“The best way to unify is to build that focus and discipline around those messages, and that we build on those issues,” he says.
“There’s only one way we’ll win. And I’m confident we can and will win.”
Since securing the Liberal leadership late lastyear, Pesutto has been attending citizenship ceremonies across Melbourne every week.
It is part of his bid to “connect” to Victorians from all walks of life.
“This is important, it is the first experience as a citizen, we need to be there every single time,” he says.
At a ceremony in the traditional Labor stronghold of Maribyrnong last month, he gave a brief but impassioned speech about how Australia’s multicultural society was a “beacon for the rest of the world”.
“What you have achieved is not always well understood,” he told a packed civic centre.
A modest upbringing
His words came from experience; his parents left Calabria in Italy in the 1960s to make a fresh start in Australia. Gino was first to arrive by ship in 1961, before his fiance Antoinetta arrived in 1963 – ignoring family concerns about leaving with “no grasp of English and no money behind her” to marry a man they barely knew.
“She came out, they married nine days later and then had five kids, and here we are,” Pesutto says.
“We grew up very modestly, we weren’t poor but there were times when the family went through hardships, financially.
“Those stories of migrants making their way to a new country, that’s why I love those citizenship ceremonies, for many people it’s a long journey.”
As an electrician, Gino worked at power stations in the Latrobe Valley. Antoinette raised the family’s five children and worked as a machinist in a shoe factory in Traralgon. Pesutto says those experiences helped him understand the current predicament in the Valley, where industries are closing down and people are doing it “really tough”.
“That’s why they do need a lot of government support, because it’s not easy just to say to someone who’s grown up with a trade, ‘Oh now you’re going to be doing this’,” he says.
“It sounds very easy to do behind a desk, but it’s very hard.”
He has slammed the government’s approach to the native timber industry, which it recently announced would end next year despite previous assurances of a 2030 phase-out.
“It’s not unlike what they’ve done with the Commonwealth Games, where they just abruptly said, ‘It’s over’,” he says.
“They had a transition plan, people banked on it, they took out loans as operators, and the government left them with stranded assets.
“That’s just not the way to go about it fairly. You don’t treat people like that.”
Pesutto says regional areas will be critical for Victoria’s future as it grows, and is building on predecessor Matthew Guy’s decentralisation policies.
“We think that if you want to achieve liveability and affordability you do need to start looking at developing up regions, and all of Victoria,” he says. “You’re not going to be able to do it if you just say we’re just going to jam everybody in and go up and up and up.”
This clashes with the Andrews government’s plan to create an extra one million homes in established Melbourne suburbs, which is partly tied to its controversial $35bn underground train line from Cheltenham to Box Hill.
While ruling out tearing up contracts – a practice Andrews has used for the East West Link toll road and his own Commonwealth Games agreement – Pesutto questions why the government is overlooking other achievable projects such as the Airport Rail Link and Geelong fast rail. Pesutto says the opposition will look at build-to-rent and rent-to-buy models to help solve the state’s housing woes but “you can’t just look at Melbourne”.
“We don’t give up on that aspiration that you can own your own property, but we’re going to have to think about the state as a whole to address the issue,” he says.
“If you want to maintain liveability and amenity you do have to look beyond Melbourne, that’s the key for me.”
The decision to dump the regional Commonwealth Games has given Pesutto new ammunition, declaring that “regional Victoria has been conned and betrayed” and honing broader financial management messages.
“How can you rely on anything that they put forward by way of costings or business cases?” he says.
He says it was a “turning point for Victorians and how they view the Andrews Government”.
A snap Morgan poll in the aftermath of the cancellation showed a net disapproval of the premier’s performance for the first time since Labor won government in 2014.
“The Premier has been able to survive a number of scandals over eight and half years, hence the term Teflon Dan,” he says.
“But Victorians don’t like it when you suddenly pull the plug on a major sporting event that you promised. Particularly when it will cost so much taxpayers’ money to cancel it at a time when Victorian families are doing it tough.”
One of the biggest challenges for any future government, he says, will be the “long march back to what I call financial viability”.
“The debt situation, as outlined in the budget, I suspect is not going to hold, because I just don’t see the assumptions being met around growth and jobs,” he says.
“Daniel will probably be long gone by then and won’t care.”
Exactly when Andrews calls time on his career is not a priority, Pesutto says.
“I think it will happen (this term), but it’s not affecting our course and our focus.”
Chemistry and history lessons at LourdesCollege in Traralgon helped fire Pesutto’s interest in politics in the late 1980s.
“I remember I went through a phase where I was really interested in the Cold War … I couldn’t read enough about it,” he says.
“I started to get fascinated with it through my chemistry classes; when you start on that, reading about nuclear energy got you into the arms race, and then all of a sudden you’re reading on democracy versus authoritarianism.
“All of it started opening my mind up to this world of philosophy and political debate, and eventually I started drifting towards federal politics.”
After a school trip to Canberra he “was just hooked”, and Pesutto “worked my tail off” to get into a law degree at the University of Melbourne as a base for a career in public life.
After initially embracing the social side of university he volunteered for the Liberals in 1992.
“I kind of knew that ultimately it was a Liberal Party that best reflected what I felt was my parents’ work ethic,” he says.
In 1994 he went back to Traralgon to complete his articles, which would also allow him to run for the federal seat of McMillan, which took in his home patch.
“It was coming together so well, this plan,” he says. “But I came second out of seven candidates. Russell Broadbent beat me … he went on to win in ’96 and he asked me to come work for him.”
The same year he started with Broadbent, Pesutto began dating his future wife, Betty.
They married in 2001 and went on to have three daughters, Chiara, Aurelia and Claudia, who Pesutto says “keep you grounded” but preferred to stay out of the political spotlight.
A challenge for families in the public eye, he says, is personal attacks online.
“It’s just the vehemence and malice on social media that draws people away,” he says.
“They see it all.”
Pesutto lost a handful of other party contests before finally securing Hawthorn preselection in 2014, following the retirement of his former boss and state premier, Ted Baillieu.
Baillieu, the last Liberal leader to take the party out of the wilderness and into office, describes Pesutto as articulate, thoughtful and “incredibly determined”.
“In a way he’s got the demeanour of some of those AFL coaches who have taken a team from down the ladder and made the finals, and gone on to win the Premiership, and I think that stands him in pretty good stead,” Baillieu says.
“He’s able to talk in depth about just about any policy issue, and he can talk with empathy and understanding.
“When he’s been subjected to pressure, he’s maintained his calm.”
This included during the Deeming saga when Pesutto made demands for discipline that Baillieu says “99 per cent of people would have shied away from”.
“He knows where the party’s got to be if it’s going to have a chance, and he knows it’s going to take time and you’ve got to set some ground rules,” Baillieu says.
“Working as a team is part of the ground rules, and he’s set that standard.” ■
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