Karina Okotel won’t criticise leakers of her Victorian election email

Victorian Liberal VP Karina Okotel refuses to criticise the leakers of an e-mail in which she accused the leadership of having “marched us all off a cliff”.

Liberal Party Vice-President Karina Okotel at the National Press Club in Canberra, Wednesday, September 13, 2017. (AAP Image/Mick Tsikas) NO ARCHIVING

Karina Okotel, the Liberal Party’s federal vice-president, has refused to criticise those responsible for the leaking of an e-mail in which she accused the Victorian branch’s leadership of having “marched us all off a cliff” in the wake of the weekend’s dire state election result.

The Liberal conservative acknowledged it was a “very emotional e-mail”, which accused state director Nick Demiris and party president Michael Kroger of ignoring warnings about looming defeat.

“It was an emotional time after the election and it was a private e-mail and certainly after the election I was feeling quite raw when I put my thoughts down on paper,” Ms Okotel told Sky News.

Asked if she was disappointed someone had leaked the e-mail to The Australian, Ms Okotel said: “It has been an emotional time so I understand that people might do things that are what they think is right at the time.

“I suppose there have been lots of Facebook posts going on that have then been published in the media by party members who are upset and rightly so. I’m upset, we’re all upset and we’re all hurting because we know the consequences of a Labor government that lies ahead.”

With 80.9 per cent of the vote counted, the ABC’s election analyst Antony Green has Labor on 53 seats, the Liberals and Nationals on 24 seats and independents picking up three seats.

There are eight seats still in doubt.

“The reality is we could’ve done a lot better when it came to the campaign. We had fantastic policies, many policies, but they were just never articulated to the electorate,” Ms Okotel said.

“We focused on crime very heavily and to our detriment the electorate didn’t know what we were doing in other areas. They didn’t know what we were doing in terms of support for small businesses, what we were doing in terms of reducing the impact of a big government, to support families and reduce cost of living pressures and that’s really sad because what the Liberal Party had to offer at the election was a fantastic policy platform.”

In the e-mail Ms Okotel accused former Victorian Liberal leader Matthew Guy of being a “puppet” of some of the party’s conservative forces following the Lobstergate affair, sparked by his dinner with Tony Madafferi, a controversial businessman who denies he has any links with the mafia.

“It was as if Guy now was a complete puppet, and this showed in his confidence,’’ she wrote.

“All this was against a backdrop of total division in the party.’’

Today Ms Okotel claimed there was a silver lining at a federal level ahead of next year’s election, as Victorians did not “tend to like having both a state government and federal government who are of the same party”.