Breaking Brad: The anatomy of a Liberal coup

3 months ago 8

Tuesday’s spill nearly unfolded a month ago. Liberal MPs, furious at Brad Battin’s hamfisted reallocation of frontbench portfolios, hit the phones and started plotting to dump their leader. The only reason they didn’t is that Jess Wilson, the woman they wanted to take over, could not be convinced to run.

The fateful moment passed and another ragged week in parliament followed. At the end of it, Battin found himself in a private, unguarded conversation with Wilson. “If you had challenged, you would have had the numbers,” he told her. “Now it is time to settle down.”

Brad Battin in state parliament on Tuesday after losing the Liberal leadership to Jess Wilson.

That mid-October exchange, recounted to this masthead by three sources with knowledge of it, was still burning in Wilson’s ears as she began discreetly calling select colleagues and Liberal powerbrokers to tell them she was ready.

Breaking Brad was not a slow-moving coup of the kind we are witnessing in Canberra or the culmination of a long, torrid, destabilisation campaign. Its distinguishing features were how quickly it unfolded and how little work was needed in the final hours before Tuesday’s party room meeting to convince enough MPs to switch leaders.

When the spill was called, the mood within the party room was described as remarkably calm and free of rancour. “Mate, we had all been there before,” one MP said. Once the spill vote passed, Battin accepted his leadership was finished and stood aside so that Wilson could begin hers unopposed. The pair even embraced. “You have got an opportunity, have a crack at it,” he told her.

When this masthead messaged Battin a little after 2pm on Monday to ask whether he knew anything about a leadership spill planned for the next day, he was oblivious to the scheming well under way, although he reflected to a staffer that his phone had gone rather quiet.

Other experienced MPs, including those such as Matthew Guy – who would normally be hardwired into any move on the leadership – were also kept in the dark. “We deliberately kept it very tight,” one of Wilson’s backers said. “We just thought a clean and surgical execution was the way to do it.”

The principal executioners were Liberal senator and moderate powerbroker James Paterson, Wilson’s friend and numbers man Brad Rowswell, and two of Battin’s key supporters from his successful Christmas coup less than a year ago, moderate James Newbury and conservative Bev McArthur.

Newbury and McArthur, united by their dismay of where the party was heading under Battin, had formed an odd-couple alliance. With McArthur came the votes of conservative MPs Renee Heath, Joe McCracken and Chris Crewther who, 11 months earlier, had voted as a bloc for Battin but had since lost faith in his leadership.

Newbury’s decision not to bring Guy, a long-time ally, into the loop will severely test their relationship. As the pair sat next to each other in parliament hours after the spill, a deep frost was building on the shared arm rest between their green leather seats. But if a leadership vote was required on Tuesday, Guy would have voted for Wilson anyway. In a small party room, a shift of five or six votes from the Christmas spill was all that was needed to change the course of Victorian politics.

There is no single moment or decision in which Brad Battin lost his leadership. Rather, it was the cumulative outcome of misjudgments, missteps and an ill-considered withdrawal from the parliamentary colleagues who put him there in December. As one MP summed it up: “He forgot to dance with the one that brung him. That is death in politics.”

Battin angered McArthur and her conservative group by approving a party loan to John Pesutto to cover the legal bills the latter owed Moira Deeming after her successful defamation judgment. He angered them further, along with a fair whack of moderates, by how he conducted his frontbench reshuffle. He particularly raised McArthur’s ire with the forced exit of staffer Dominic Raff, who previously worked for her.

Battin frustrated some of his most influential backers, including Guy and Newbury, when he stopped taking counsel from a kitchen shadow cabinet he established early in his leadership, and tightened his circle of advisers to his most trusted consigliere, MP Richard Riordan, and chief of staff Sid Wynen.

He infuriated upper house MPs as recently as last week when he tried but failed to reverse a decision by the party’s governing board, the administrative committee, to keep Legislative Council preselections open for eight weeks. This extended period was interpreted by MPs as a gratuitous invitation to would-be challengers for their seats.

New Liberal leader Jess Wilson at a press conference with her leadership team of (from left) Bev McArthur, Sam Groth and Evan Mulholland.

He annoyed frontbench MPs by sidelining them from policy development and prioritising crime and law and order over all concerns.

Yet, some of these MPs were still appalled at the secretive nature of the coup. “Where is the build-up? What is the reason?” an exasperated frontbencher said the night before the vote. “I’ve already had one donor on the phone who has said, ‘I’m done, I’m putting the tools down, I am sick of you lot’. You can’t blame them.”

Had Battin remained leader, he would have been the key speaker at a “year to go” fundraising event at Crown casino that was expected to tip $300,000 into Liberal coffers. That event, if it is cancelled, will now come at a substantial cost.

Battin, like nearly everyone else in his party room, saw Wilson as parliamentary leader-in-waiting. Just last week, he told a meeting of former Young Liberal presidents that she was the party’s future. Is that future now? This doubt was plaguing Wilson, as much as anyone, in the weeks counting down to Tuesday’s spill.

McArthur’s most damning judgment on Battin, one she made early in his leadership, was that he didn’t have the intellectual capacity or policy bandwidth to lead the party.

McArthur, in the eyes of her detractors, is proof that the devil shops at Christine, her favourite Collins Street boutique not far from Parliament House. Those who know her better understand she is fiercely smart and very serious about the Liberal Party and its philosophical traditions.

“Bev realised quite quickly after she helped make Brad leader that he wasn’t up to it,” one of her political confidantes explained. “She had a number of conversations with him about policies and values and ideas and was completely shocked by his responses. She was not only concerned he wouldn’t win, she was concerned what would happen if he did.”

By contrast, McArthur likes the cut of Wilson’s jib.

She knew and conducted party business with Wilson’s father, former state MP Ron Wilson, and sees in Jess Wilson a Peter Costello-style liberal who is selective in her support of progressive causes and holds to old-fashioned ideals about balancing budgets and paying down debt.

“Jess has absolutely proven to be an absolute superstar in every policy area that she’s taken on,” McArthur enthused on Tuesday. “Actually, as a young girl, she came to our farm and hopped on a pony.”

Whether Wilson can still sit on a horse is less important to her colleagues than her capacity to loosen the reins on a political strategy which, under Battin, had become too narrowly focused on crime and law and order.

“We ran two election campaigns in 2018 and 2022 almost solely on law and order, and we failed,” a party insider reflected. “If we did it again we were going to fail again. For whatever reason, Brad didn’t heed that advice, and he really made no attempt to broaden his message.

“People became increasingly convinced he wasn’t going to win and this is too important an election to throw away.”

Instead, the Victorian Liberal Party has thrown away another parliamentary leader, its second discarded in less than a year. Battin joins Pesutto, Guy and Michael O’Brien as serving MPs who all know what it feels to be yesterday’s leader. They serve as a poignant reminder of what awaits Wilson if she can’t turn things around.