Terry Barnes: How Liberal Party can step up its game

The Victorian Liberals must drop their permanent opposition mentality and start to be a real alternative to Labor if they stand a chance at beating the Andrews government.

Long-serving premier Sir Henry Bolte once described Victoria as the jewel in the Liberal crown.

Back then, the Liberal Party was solidly entrenched in seemingly perpetual government in Spring Street and Canberra, aided by a split and dysfunctional Australian Labor Party. No more.

The state Liberals’ trouncing by Daniel Andrews in November 2018 was bad enough, but 2020 was their nadir.

Despite everything that has gone wrong on the Premier’s watch since coronavirus first hit us, including the hotel quarantine-caused second wave, leaving death and lockdown misery in its wake, Michael O’Brien’s Opposition hasn’t laid a glove on the Andrews government.

As things stand, Labor is likely to win November 2022’s election in a canter.

The looming state electoral redistribution, likely favouring Labor in Melbourne’s west at the expense of Liberal seats in the east, makes the state, if not federal, Liberal plight even more dire.

No wonder Andrews thinks he leads a one-party state, dismissing the Opposition’s and parliament’s relevance to the extent that when O’Brien moved no-confidence in the government in October, the Premier didn’t even deign to speak in response.

Andrews was arrogant to reject initial offers of coronavirus bipartisanship. He dismissed the experience of the likes of O’Brien, former health minister David Davis and health spokeswoman and healthcare professional, Georgie Crozier.

But the Opposition largely misread the public mood that saw most Victorians comply, however reluctantly, with the government’s ever-changing, heavy-handed and often confusing COVID rules, deploring any perceived politicisation of the crisis.

Michael O’Brien’s Opposition hasn’t laid a glove on the Andrews government. Picture: Daniel Pockett

Social media jibes at “Dictator Dan” by some Liberal MPs baited the “I Stand with Dan” cheer squad but merely highlighted the Opposition’s impotence.

Worse, they drowned out attempts by O’Brien to promote constructive Liberal proposals to deal with COVID and Victoria’s economic crisis.

Yet the Andrews government is beatable: the Premier’s autocratic style; policy and leadership tensions in federal Labor; major governance failures highlighted by the hotel quarantine, contact tracing and testing fiascos; the economic destruction that will become fully apparent when federal COVID job subsidies end; and social and environmental progressivism that reflects the values of tertiary-educated Labor left and Green voters but leaves traditional Labor supporters behind, all give the Opposition opportunity.

To become competitive in 2022 and beyond, however, the state Liberals must drop their permanent Opposition mentality and start to be a real alternative to Labor.

This requires three things.

First, only select parliamentary candidates in safe and marginal seats who can make outstanding contributions to policy and good government, including unexpectedly defeated senior MP John Pesutto, who otherwise may have been Liberal leader now.

Candidates should be preselected, and MPs promoted to the Opposition frontbench, on merit: not factional or personal allegiances, nor ticking diversity boxes. That includes calling time on any MPs underperforming or unwilling to be loyal team players.

All MPs and candidates need to be high-calibre people who grassroots Liberal branch members and, above all, voters, can respect and support.

Second, end factional ego-tripping by a few self-entitled MPs and factional warlords, fighting each other instead of Labor.

While recent focus has been on hardline conservative powerbrokers cultivating the religious Right to get control of positions and agendas, some Liberal small-moderate figures, including MPs, use party and preselection games to promote their own.

With their number-counting, cabals and conspiracies, they’re as bad as each other.

The recent spate of resignations after media revelations of unsavoury internal activities (even though actually old news) and the consequent forensic audit of state Liberal membership rolls by insolvency firm KordaMentha help.

Labor is likely to win November 2022’s election in a canter. Picture: Ian Currie

But while senior and wannabe party figures still fancy themselves as factional warlords first and Liberals second, nothing much will change.

Most importantly, the state Liberals must again start being a party of government and release a comprehensive centre-right policy plan well ahead of the election.

A practical agenda not merely blasting Labor but demonstrating what they would do instead.

A pro-business agenda based on mainstream community values, not unelectable political, religious and environmental ideologies of the trendy left or the hard right.

An economically responsible agenda, assuming state debt is not a magic money tree.

And strong and decisive leadership that, like Jeff Kennett 30 years ago and Bolte before him, delivers efficient public administration, reliable essential services, and affordable infrastructure.

Victorian voters deserve a robust two-party contest but simply aren’t getting one. By November next year, Labor will have won eight of the past 11 state elections, and in power for 30 of the last 40 years. This dismal Liberal record can’t continue.

State Liberal MPs and party leaders must get their act together now if Victoria is to ever again be more than a one-party Labor state.

Terry Barnes is a former senior Howard government adviser, A policy consultant and long-time Liberal Party member