Daniel Andrews in gun as Matthew Guy takes second shot

Daniel Andrews’ negativity, scare tactics and policy failures during the pandemic will be at the heart of new Liberal leader Matthew Guy’s attempts to win office.

It hasn’t been a happy time in Victoria and Guy will be sold to the community as a revamped politician with a positive agenda to restore hope to a tired ­community.

Andrews, 49, has barely smiled – and who can blame him – since March last year and the Victorian Coalition believes the Premier’s demeanour and the effect of the six lockdowns line the path to victory at the state level on November 26 next year.

The party acknowledges it will have to be a very different Liberal leader during the next 14 months to have any chance of winning.

Guy, 47, is a former four-year opposition leader who is best known as the party’s attack dog, a personality type unlikely to be effective against Andrews during the pandemic with a community that is desperate for solutions and sunlight rather than hyped-up rhetoric.

To that end, the Liberals plan to soften Guy’s image, leaving the negative attacks to others, including outspoken frontbencher Tim Smith, who was the unofficial head of the “go harder” faction under deposed leader Michael O’Brien.

Guy had a dream on Tuesday for the Victorian electorate. “I want them to know there’s hope,” he said. “There is.”

The messaging was deliberate: the pain in the backside that long-term home schooling has become, the mental health harm inflicted on the young, the lack of a normal life for millions.

With three boys and a wife who worked for former federal treasurer Peter Costello, Guy is surrounded by the realities of pandemic and political life. He also on Tuesday backed a new economic vision to revive a state that has suffered some of the worst lockdowns anywhere in the world.

Softening a head-kicker’s image is no easy thing, especially one the community knows well, after he served as state leader between 2014 and 2018.

The party spent millions building a brand for Guy that delivered a flogging at the last election.

The reliance on crime, including African gangs, failed to ­resonate against a popular, can-do Labor leader.

The Coalition lost 10 of its 37 seats in 2018, leaving it with a very difficult task to win the 45 seats for a majority next year.

In 2022, Guy’s experience won’t harm his cause, given the desire for stability and a return to a more conservative normality. These are not the times for political radicalism.

It seems as if Guy has been around Victorian politics forever, which is, on the whole, a positive.

In 1999, aged 26, he was made chief of staff to former opposition leader Denis Napthine, probably wondering what he had done when he walked into the Parliament House offices that had been left a mess by Labor after Jeff Kennett’s election loss.

Earlier, he had worked on Kennett’s private staff as director of research and he also had a stint advising former federal minister Rod Kemp.

Labor believes Guy, whose Ukrainian grandparents fled the Soviet Union after World War II, will be most attractive to conservative Liberal voters and 2022 will still be dominated by the virus.

Which will mean that incumbency will hold significant value in an election year, particularly if there is a sense of ongoing crisis around the pandemic.

While Guy was a controversial planning minister in the last ­Coalition government, it will be eight years since he served in a cabinet in 2022 and the pandemic will almost certainly diminish the negatives of those government years.

Probably the most controversial incident was pre-election revelations of a dinner with alleged crime figure Tony Madafferi, although Guy maintained he did not know who he was when they sat at the same table with several others. It was a political dinner.

Several of his planning decisions also attracted scrutiny as he tried to grow the city.

Asked what he had learnt from the 2018 election drubbing, Guy said: “Well you learn a lot of things.”

“You don’t fail in front of 30 people, you fail in front of the country and that’s what a loss is.

“I think a lot of politicians are better politicians because they’ve had an election loss, they’ve experienced that humility,” he said.

Lazarus II?