Jess Wilson becomes leader at the exact time people are mulling the death of the Vic Liberals

Liberal MP Jess Wilson with her husband Aaron and son Patrick outside Victorian Parliament . Picture: Aaron Francis

This leadership ballot could well be about the future of the entire Victorian Liberal Party.

For many months there have been very quiet, maybe even slightly wayward, discussions about the possibility of setting up another conservative force outside the Liberal organisation in Victoria.

Put simply, if Simon Holmes-a-Court can do it with the teals, the question has been why can’t there be a big disrupter in Victoria with the national repercussions that would follow?

Any new entity would involve some key Liberals defecting.

The Victorian Liberals have been handed arguably the easiest political landscape upon which to fight Labor.

An unelected, unpopular premier who inherited a government that imposed Australia’s worst pandemic lockdowns, blew the budget, lost control of policing and botched the spending and timing of every major project it started.

Oh, and let’s not forget the Commonwealth Games.

The big end of town has watched on in bewilderment and even members of the Liberal establishment have wondered how to end the Labor era amid the manifest incompetence of the state Opposition.

To that end, there is enormous pressure on Jess Wilson to deliver.

The Liberals federally had three leaders in quick succession when John Howard took over in early 1995, to great effect.

Ms Wilson with her son Patrick at Balwyn North Primary with Josh Frydenberg, left. Picture: Jake Nowakowski

Wilson does not have Howard’s skills but she has things going for her. At 35, she can build a bridge to young people.

She is also progressive in the areas where many young people generally are, but this could have its own internal challenges.

She should also have fiscal acumen, having worked for former federal treasurer Josh Frydenberg and the Business Council of Australia.

But she also has to pick up a whopping 17 Coalition seats to gain a majority and after the last rout in 2022, the pendulum is really favourable to Labor, even though the government is on the nose.

This is possibly Wilson’s biggest challenge.

Her best parallel is Labor’s Steve Bracks in 1999, who took over the leadership in the March and by year’s end, narrowly won office.

This was from a worse position than Wilson will be in, Jeff Kennett having won 58 lower house seats in 1996, four more than Labor currently holds in 2025, although there are two ALP independents.

The difference was that despite the late leadership change in 1999, Labor was a much more cohesive unit; it looked like it wanted to win and with Bracks, it had a likeable leader with very strong political skills.

There is nothing to say that Wilson can’t do it, but the task is vast.

Maybe her best option is to try to mirror Bracks’s small target strategy.

There will be enormous internal pressure on her to dump the Suburban Rail Loop project, slash the life out of the public service numbers and try to deal with the state debt.

These things will be difficult given the manner in which the public service has grown under Labor in Victoria in both a state and federal sense.

Wilson will lose if she makes herself unelectable among these people. In fact, she couldn’t win if she were to go to the polls promising to sack and dismantle the public service in the manner of Kennett in the early 1990s.

There is plenty of room, however, to move on issues like treaty, Labor’s hopeless record on the budget, major project waste and housing, especially affordability for the young.

She will, however, have to resist the pressure from within to make herself a big target.

There is tremendous political opportunity in the regions, where Labor has sought to entrench itself since 1999 and has done a pretty amazing job of doing so.

But there is a real sense that these voters, many of whom were looking forward to the Commonwealth Games, have tired of the perception that all the infrastructure money has gone into the city. Most of it has.

There is also the fact that Labor will go to the polls 12 years after Andrews was elected. Andrews perfected the art of throwing cash down voters’ throats and they rewarded him for it.

It is much harder for Allan to do the same because she has inherited record debt.

Allan is a very experienced politician and will know that Wilson will present as a much more difficult opponent, but only if she can chart a course of Liberal unity.

Any sign of disunity in the Liberal Party and voters will find it hard to dump Allan.

If I were to put a bet on the next election, I’d say it is still Labor’s to lose.

If the Liberals lose again, it could well herald the beginning of the end of the organisation in Victoria.

Sure, there is plenty of cash there via the Cormack Foundation and the sale of the old Liberal HQ at 104 Exhibition Street, but how long will traditional Liberals put up with this incompetence?

The answer is not long.

Wilson has a very, very big job ahead of her.