James Campbell: Get set for the Victorian blame game when Labor wins the federal election

Whatever happens elsewhere in the country, the Liberal Party looks set to be crushed in Victoria on Saturday, and there will be plenty of finger pointing when it happens, writes James Campbell.

With only two days left to the end of the election circus, Labor folk seem increasingly confident that their man will get the chocolates. Opinions differ wildly on the size of the majority Bill Shorten will get on Saturday, ranging from a best-case scenario of 85 seats down to Labor just falling into office with the support of Greens and independents.

From what we can see at the moment, too many things need to go right for Scott Morrison to bet on the government being returned. Wherever you look, the published polls show a drop in the Coalition’s primary vote and an increase in Labor’s.

And although 17 per cent of people in the most recent Newspoll say they are yet to make up their minds, it is possible that so many of them decide to vote for the Coalition that it reverses this trend. But that is looking unlikely.

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Moreover, if what I have been hearing from MPs on both sides who have been on pre-poll stations around Melbourne is correct, there is a decent chance Victorians are going to give the Liberal Party another belting to go with the one handed it last November.

There is a decent chance Victorians are going to give the Liberal Party another belting to go with the one handed it last November. Picture: AAP

Ominously for the government, the primary votes in this week’s statewide Newspoll are eerily similar to the actual primary votes that emerged at the state election — and we all know how that turned out. Newspoll currently has the Coalition on a primary vote of 36 per cent in Victoria. At the state election, it got 35.9 per cent. The Labor vote at the state election was almost 42.9 per cent. Newspoll has it at 41 per cent.

Last November, those primary votes translated to a two-party preferred vote of 57.3 per cent to 42.7 per cent in the ALP’s favour. It goes without saying that if anything like that emerges on Saturday, it will be a slaughter.

Seat by seat polling through the campaign has been a bit better for the government but in recent years, those polls have tended to over-estimate the Liberal primary and undercook the Labor vote.

The fact is, however, that neither side really knows precisely what is going on in any individual seat. According to a senior Labor source, on one night recently the party made 5000 robo-calls looking for answers to a survey. They got 16 responses. And not one of them completed the survey, which according to my source “wasn’t very long”.

Opinions differ wildly on the size of the majority Bill Shorten will get on Saturday. Picture: Kym Smith

I have heard similar stories from pollsters. Clearly, there are large numbers of people nowadays who are not interested in revealing how they plan to vote. What both sides seem to agree is that the swing against the Liberal Part in Victoria gets bigger the closer you get to the CBD. According to a senior Labor source in Victoria, “they’re looking at a double-digit drop in their primary vote” in the inner city. In other words, even if the Liberals hold Kooyong, Goldstein and Higgins, they will be marginal seats at the next election. Indeed, I’ll predict that after Saturday, there won’t be a single “safe” seat in Melbourne.

ONE thing is for certain: the recriminations will start even before the final votes are counted. So, why has Victoria gone so bad for the Liberals? As in most things, there are short- and long-run causes. The long-run causes include its significant failure to attract the votes of migrants and the children of migrants and its failure to even present itself to the voters in western and northern Melbourne, the fastest-growing areas in Australia. To that can be added its failure to address the long-term decline in its membership, it’s failure to recruit members of ethnic minorities, its failure to anticipate the decline of the mass media and direct mail as campaign tools and to put in place strategies that might ameliorate that decline.

Those are the long-term problems which sooner or later were going to cause a crisis. What has made it worse, however, has been the way the party has allowed factional hacks to recruit people whose social views are wildly at variance with mainstream Victorian society.

Whether the people doing the recruiting actually sincerely hold the views of the people they were bringing in is a question for the historians.

Former Victorian Liberal Party leader Michael Kroger. Picture: David Caird

What is absolutely clear is that in attempting to turn the Liberal Party in Victoria from a party of members into a party of Right-wing numbers who won’t lift a finger to actually do any work, many of the members who have been the backbone of the Victorian Liberal Party have simply walked away in disgust. And at this election, it has cost them dearly as from one end of the state to the other, the cry has gone out “where have all the volunteers gone?”

Add to that the incredible stupidity of the same-sex marriage survey which politicised thousands of young people and you have a recipe for a perfect storm.

But wait, there’s more! No list of the short-term things that have gone wrong with the Liberal Party in Victoria would be complete without a special shout-out to the Administration Committee that permitted the then president Michael Kroger to sue the party’s biggest donor, the Cormack Foundation, an act that cost the party millions in lost donations.

Yes, there’ll be plenty of material for people to work with when the recriminations start on Saturday night.

James Campbell is national politics editor

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