Victorian election: Back to basics for devastated Liberals

Leader of the Victorian Liberal party Matthew Guy and wife Renae announce defeat in the Victorian state election on Saturday night.

By any measure, the Victorian election result was a thumping win for Labor and, in particular, for Premier Daniel Andrews.

Not only did Labor improve its margin in the seats it held, it ­appears to have picked up seats it could only have dreamt about, and has significantly laid waste to the Greens.

For the Liberals, it was much more than a disappointing loss, it was catastrophic and likely to mean the party is out of the game for at least two terms.

So what happened?

Only those who have never campaigned would put a loss of this magnitude down to a single factor. When you’re smashed from one side of the state to the other, the factors are fundamental, whole-of-campaign, and institutional.

On the fundamentals, as John Howard famously said time and time again, “you can’t fatten a pig on market day”, yet this is precisely what the Liberals tried.

With a four-year fixed term, there’s no excuse for oppositions to leave the hard-scrabble of campaigning to the end, but even on Saturday most Victorians would have failed to pick the Liberal leader out of a line up and have no hope with his frontbench.

The hunger to get out and prosecute what they stood for, (even if they knew what that was, and I’m not so sure they did), just wasn’t evident. Like him or not, Andrews exhibits a clearly defined political persona. He’s a man of Labor’s Left and he’s unapologetic. He’s a “known quantity” to Victorians, and he set the agenda.

All politics is local and in a state race this is fundamental. By the time voters put pen to paper, most Victorians could see a local example of an Andrews project done or under way.

People are more cynical than ever about politics, so the electoral cachet in delivering cannot be ­underestimated. Better transport, new schools and an end to railway crossings; this is much more what people rewarded than Safe Schools or renewables. Even if people had reservations, Labor was the default option.

On the Left flank, Andrews gave the Greens nowhere to go. Much will be made of their internal strife but the anti-authoritarian Greens bake in organisational dysfunction to their electoral choices; chaos is a given.

What was more fundamental here was Labor didn’t go soft on the Greens voter. It hunted them down and implored them to return “home” with policies that garnered support. This will be how Labor tackles the Greens federally, and in states like NSW which goes to the polls in March. It also presents a serious risk for Richard Di Natale, a Victorian invisible in this state contest.

Campaign-wise, the Liberals were out-run, out-spent and outclassed.

Labor’s machine is formidable, particularly in Victoria. It invests in its professional team, which is a lesson for Liberals who treat their campaign backroom as cannon fodder when the result doesn’t go their way. The best campaigners are made over successive contests, with losses as much as wins proving instructive. This is why a genuine review into the weekend’s loss will be critical to how the Liberals recover, and build.

Institutionally, my message to cocky Liberal young bucks, who know the price of everything but the value of nothing, is to respect your opponent. For too long, Liberal Party politics has been driven by a small cabal still playing out their battles from university politics.

If you go through the names of state and federal Victorian MPs, most of them display as much animus against each other as directed to their opponents. This is deadly and consigns them to the losing side, almost in perpetuity.

Throughout the campaign, I knew what Labor stood for, and while there was a lot I could argue against, I failed to see where the opposition was taking up this fight, or worse, what it stood for itself. And as likeable as he might be, and as decent as he is, Matthew Guy and his team just didn’t cut through.

State politics is so much about the stature of the leader, and ­Andrews got in first and kept his elbows out for the whole term.

For the Liberals, there’s no quick fix or a new campaign ­gimmick that will dig them out of this hole; it’s back to basics and starting today on work for the next election.