James Campbell: Plenty to learn from a tale of two presidents

THERE’S a great deal to be learnt from comparing the profiles of the Victorian presidents of our two major parties, writes James Campbell.

President of the Victorian division of the Liberal Party Michael Kroger. Picture: Stuart McEvoy

WHO is the president of the ALP in Victoria? Having trouble answering? I don’t blame you. I couldn’t answer and I talk about politics all day for a living.

Who was the previous president of the Victorian division of the Liberal Party? Having trouble reaching for that name too? I’m sure you’re dying to know, so I’ll put you out of your misery. It was Tony Snell. Tony who? Exactly.

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Now for an easier one — who is the current president of the Victorian division of the Liberal Party? The answer of course is Michael Kroger, as anyone with even a passing interest in politics could tell you.

Incidentally, thanks to the wonders of Google I can now tell you that in answer to my first question, the current president of the Victorian ALP is Hutch Hussein, the business development manager at the Northern Migrant Resource Centre, who is described as a “feminist, refugee advocate, writer”.

The difference between the way Michael and Hutch have chosen to interpret their roles is fascinating. Michael can be seen regularly on Sky News sharing his wisdom with the viewers, whereas if Hutch has been on TV any time in the four months she has been in the job, I’ve missed it.

Actually, you don’t need to have Foxtel to get Michael’s opinions. Once or twice a week they can found attributed to a “senior Victorian Liberal” nestling in the pages of The Australian. They used to bill him as a “Liberal powerbroker” but that one was getting a bit obvious.

In contrast, if Hutch has given an anonymous quote to a newspaper in the past few months, it has stayed anonymous, because anonymous is what she is. And, really, that is how it should be. Party office holders are meant to be dull invisible people who go about their work quietly. The usual rule in politics is if you crave the limelight in politics, you should man up and stand for parliament.

But for the past two years, the Liberal Party has, in Kroger, conducted a weird experiment with a hybrid apparatchik-commentator as president. How well the experiment has gone can be judged by the fact he is being challenged for the job by former Howard government minister Peter Reith.

Michael Kroger is being challenged for his role as president of the Victorian division of the Liberal Party by former Howard government minister Peter Reith.

To get an idea of how much trouble the president is in can be judged from the merits of the arguments being used against Reith by Kroger’s supporters. The first one I heard was that having an IR warrior in the job was a bad look. You’d have thought that, given the usual criticism of the Liberal Party is that it is made up of a bunch of trimmers who don’t stand for anything, having a guy who was prepared to stand up for something when he was in office would be regarded as a good thing. But whatever.

Obviously these are weird times in conservative politics, when the way to victory at a Liberal state council is to run as the industrial relations moderate. It would be funny if it weren’t so desperate. Especially as Kroger first came to public attention in the most famous union-busting case of the 1980s — the Dollar Sweets dispute — in which he and his then bestie, Peter Costello, took on and won a common law case in the Supreme Court of Victoria against the Federated Confectioners Association.

Even funnier than that has been whispered talk that as Reith has been earning his bread as a lobbyist, his presidency could be embarrassing for the Liberal Party. Obviously having a lobbyist as a party official can be problematic, as they have found out in NSW, which is why Reith has sought legal advice on how to overhaul his business interests to avoid conflicts of interest.

THE funny thing about these conflict-of-interest concerns is that for some reason they only seem to apply to Reith. Kroger’s emails — I’ve had a few complaining ones over the years — come from an address at JT Campbell, which according to its website “advises companies on such issues as listing prospects, capital structures, capital raisings, appropriate debt levels, acquisition opportunities, growth opportunities and the like” with experience in a “a large number of sectors including media, mining, retail, banking, biotechnology, property, childcare, gaming, medical devices and numerous other sectors”. No potential conflicts of interest in that lot, are there?

Kroger’s problem is that as a bloke he has always preferred a fight to a feed. It’s as though he finds it impossible to operate without a list of enemies made up mostly of his former friends. The idea that he would unite the party when he got the presidency two years ago was always laughable but even so, he has surprised even his bitterest enemies by managing to fall out with the Cormack Foundation, which holds tens of millions of dollars in trust for the Liberals. That really takes some doing.

James Campbell is national politics editor

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