Battin’s Liberals are soaring in the polls. They might just be the dog that caught the car

In the days before and after Christmas, at a time when the men and women who represent the Victorian Liberal Party in the state parliament were carving up the spoils of opposition like a normal family might a glazed ham, no one spared much thought for voters.

The idea that John Pesutto, after a hapless two years leading a party bludgeoned at the last state election, had somehow put his lot into a position to win the next one, didn’t stay the hands wielding the knife.

Victorian Opposition Leader Brad Battin is yet to outline his vision for the state’s futureCredit: Wayne Taylor/Marija Ercegovac

If anything, it sharpened the blade. As one party insider reflected this week, there are Liberal MPs who would have seen evidence of Pesutto’s electoral progress as all the more reason to cut him down quick.

Michael O’Brien, the last Liberal leader deposed just when the polls suggested voters were warming to him, could attest to this.

The question of whether Brad Battin, a political figure best known for having two previous cracks at becoming opposition leader, would boost the party’s standing with voters, wasn’t their front of mind consideration.

In the many conversations I had with Liberal MPs in those days, as a newbie political editor trying to fathom the personalities, loyalties and grudges that determine behaviour within their party, hardly anyone talked about whether a change of leader would help or hinder their prospects of forming government after the next election.

It just didn’t come up.

What might sound like an essential political motivation – maximising your party’s appeal to the electorate – appeared altogether missing from calculations. Perhaps, having spent only four years in government this century, the notion of actually running the state had become too remote to seriously contemplate.

Like long-term inmates plotting another jailhouse hit, the Liberals were more focused on the power balance within H-Block than gaining early release.

This changed six days ago, when the results of the latest Resolve Political Monitor published by this masthead splashed like a brick tossed into Victoria’s political pond.

The poll was horror reading for Jacinta Allan and those in charge of the Victorian ALP. Their party’s primary support of 22 per cent, a figure previously unthinkable for Labor in this state, or indeed any other, suggests the string has finally snapped between voters and a decade-old, debt-ridden government.

The only person who should be more worried than Allan is Brad Battin.

If he accepts what this poll is telling him and anyone else who follows Victorian politics, he knows he has less than two years to turn one of Australia’s most dysfunctional political organisations into an outfit capable of governing a state of nearly 7 million people.

Regardless of whether the Coalition is ready to take government, it looks as though government is coming to them. In November next year, Battin could well find himself as the dog who catches the car.

This is a confronting prospect, not only for a state which until recently was considered an unassailable Labor stronghold, but for an opposition party which stands to inherit all of Victoria’s problems and, so far, has offered few fully formed ideas about how to solve any of them.

Battin, for a politician who has served 14 years in parliament, is a curiously undeveloped project.

He has given voters an outline of his political persona – a suburban everyman who wants to reduce crime, spend less and make Melbourne an easier place to live for mortgage-laden families. He is yet to colour in the complexities, convictions and contradictions that complete any political picture.

The government’s latest budget update has state debt passing $187 billion in June 2028 on the way to an undetermined, eventual peak.

Battin is promising to ease the tax burden on Victorians, but how does he hope to make a dent in debt if he reduces the take from an already narrow revenue base? He is promising to cut spending, but which government programs, projects or services is he willing to jettison and what does he intend to keep?

Battin has described this year’s federal election as a referendum on nuclear power but given no indication of whether he is in the Yes camp or is a firm No. He can’t half-split an atom. Peter Dutton’s plan to transform the coal-fired Loy Yang power station near Traralgon into a small-scale nuclear reactor would require Victoria to lift the state’s moratorium on nuclear power.

Like Dutton, Battin is a former policeman whose natural political habitat is law and order. But he is not a zero-tolerance zealot. He wants to toughen bail laws and sentencing for some crimes, and take more edged weapons off the street. He also voted against raising the age of criminal responsibility.

Battin is not interested in prosecuting gender wars but within his party room there are MPs driven by this issue. Would a Battin government follow Queensland in reviewing paediatric treatments for gender dysphoria? He would rather not say. Politics abhors a vacuum. So do gender-critical MPs.

Whatever contradictions there are within, Battin will be ruthlessly exploited by a Labor machine which, in contrast to the Liberals, is hardwired to prioritise winning elections above all else.

For the Victorian Liberal Party, winning has become an abstract concept. For their sake and Victoria’s, the inmates of H-Block need to start thinking seriously about what they will do on the outside.

Chip Le Grand is state political editor.

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