1 day ago
8
Jess Wilson’s arrival as Victorian Liberal leader was this week proclaimed by an all-too familiar ritual: a procession of tight-lipped MPs disappearing behind the heavy wooden doors of the party room, a puff of white smoke via text message, a new leader promising unity and an old one vowing to keep working for the benefit of the party.
Across the road from state parliament, within the faded, Victorian-era splendour of the Windsor Hotel, a different kind of reception took place. It is here that Ron and Jo Wilson, jokingly referred to by old party friends as the father and mother of the bride, accepted on their daughter’s behalf the endorsement of a Liberal establishment aching for a change in political script.
The occasion was the annual Sir Robert Menzies Lecture delivered by federal Liberal leader Sussan Ley. Ron Wilson – a member of the Kennett government – was there as chairman of the trust which puts on the event. Gathered in the room, having each paid $60 a head for pre-speech canapés and drinks, were former and current senators, ageing and emerging powerbrokers, influential party figures and aspiring ones.
These are people who, having long endured Liberal politics and lamented the party’s malaise in Victoria, understand that superficially, the party’s decision to put its faith in a 35-year-old woman serving her first parliamentary term is a radical change. Jess Wilson is the first woman to lead the Victorian Liberals and the youngest person since the party, in the aftermath of its crushing defeat to Labor in 1982, turned to a brash 34-year-old named Jeff Kennett.
Jess Wilson, with Bev McArthur, after being elected as the new leader of the Victorian Liberals.Credit: Jason South
They also know and trust the Wilson family, know and like Jess Wilson and understand that at a much deeper level, the party has returned home. Jess Wilson, in a way that Brad Battin could never be and John Pesutto never was, is a creature of the party. She was born of it. She married into it. Her life and closest friends and defining beliefs are inseparable from it. As Jo Wilson, a woman instantly recognisable in a crowded room as Jess’ mother, says: “She has got it in her.”
Within the Victorian Liberal Party’s new-look leadership team, she is not the only one.
A little over an hour after Ley delivers her speech, Bev McArthur is sitting in her parliamentary office, explaining the affinity she feels towards Wilson, a woman less than half her age and a self-described “classical, small-l liberal” with starkly different views about climate change and some social policies.
“Jess has grown up in it, I have been in for a very long time, we are first and foremost Liberal women,” McArthur says. “When you have that sort of deep connection to a philosophy and a party, it just means an awful lot.”
McArthur, as the nominal head of a conservative group of MPs within a predominantly moderate party room, was the queen maker in Tuesday’s leadership spill. Liberals chafe at the idea of voting along factional lines but as McArthur voted, so enough like-minded MPs ticked the same box and ended the Battin leadership.
For the first time that anyone could remember, the new Liberal leader was elected unopposed.
McArthur’s reward, agreed to by Wilson in a swift and deftly managed coup, was the party leadership in the upper house.
Jess Wilson with her new leadership team, Bev McArthur, Sam Groth and Evan Mulholland.Credit: Jason South
Evan Mulholland, who has known Wilson since their days in university politics together, will serve as McArthur’s deputy, while Sam Groth, an MP who is not close to Wilson and confined his studies to the professional tennis circuit, will need to quickly learn to work with her after keeping his place as deputy leader in the lower house.
The idea of putting McArthur in charge of opposition business in the Legislative Council and the additional influence a leadership role will give her over preselections, policy and other internal party matters, is alarming for some Liberal MPs. “The question is, what will Bev now do?” one MP fretted. “Bev is someone who has played hard factional politics for some time. She has been at the centre of a lot of the big internal tussles.”
It is also the thing that distinguishes this leadership change from others. Where previous leaders and their backers have adopted a winner-takes-all mentality in party room struggles, the architects of Tuesday’s spill – Senator James Paterson and state MPs James Newbury, Brad Rowswell and McArthur – reached an accommodation which seeks to share power rather than monopolise it by one group.
“In the former leadership group there were no women,” McArthur says. “There was nobody from the country. Now you’ve got two women. She is a wonderful mother, I’m a grandmother. She’s from inner-city Melbourne, I’m from the bush. I bring a different viewpoint from out there, and I totally respect her viewpoint.”
It sounds terrific, until it is pointed out that McArthur, according to party figures who have been on the other side of policy debates with her, is notoriously difficult to work it. “Where did you get that from?” she says, her eyes crinkling with mischief. “If I thought about all the people who’d tried to garrot me over the years, I’d be curled in a fetal position in the corner.”
On the face of it, it seems an unlikely alliance between Wilson, a Gen-Y lawyer and former adviser to Josh Frydenberg whose advocacy guided the Business Council of Australia to its support of net zero by 2050, and McArthur, a 76-year-old beef farmer with the sublety of a cattle prod.
But these women share connections to the party that run deeper than the fickle, often fluid distinctions between wets and dries or moderates and conservatives. McArthur was just 23 years old when she joined the Liberal Party. Like Wilson, who met her husband, Aaron Lane, through the Young Liberals, McArthur married into the party. Her husband, Stewart McArthur, is a plain-spoken Western Districts Liberal who served as the federal member for Corangamite for more than 20 years and was one of John Howard’s closest friends in parliament.
The Wilson and McArthur families, through the party, have known each other for decades. Bev McArthur remembers Jess Wilson and her sister, Sarah, visiting their farm outside Camperdown when they were little girls. More tellingly, McArthur served on the state party’s administrative committee – the party’s governing board – in different stints, a generation apart, when Ron and Jess Wilson were each Young Liberal presidents in their early 20s.
James Paterson, another former Young Liberal president, owes his Senate seat in part, to work McArthur did in support of his initial preselection before the 2016 federal election. That he in turn used his influence to help secure Jess Wilson the state leadership is unsurprising – his wife, Lydia, works in Wilson’s office and Wilson, Lane and the Patersons are godparents to each other’s children.
Loading
Mark Birrell, the president of the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry and a minister in the Kennett government, was one of the familiar faces at the Windsor Hotel on Thursday alongside Paterson and federal Liberal MP Dan Tehan, former Liberal ministers George Brandis and David Kemp, and party powerbroker Michael Kroger.
Birrell counts Ron and Jo Wilson among his dearest friends and first met Jess when she was one day old. He is biased, of course, but firmly believes she is the leader the Victorian Liberal Party has been waiting for.
“Jess has a delightful ability to bring people together and lead by example,” he says. “That is why she has brought disparate groups behind her. The party has been on a search to balance tradition with understanding of the future. That is what drives it. They are seeing in Jess an answer to that question.”
The Victorian Liberal Party has burned through six parliamentary leaders since Daniel Andrews led Labor to unexpected victory in the 2014 election – Denis Napthine, Matthew Guy (twice), Michael O’Brien, John Pesutto and Brad Battin. Of these, the choice of Battin was the most unusual.
Although he has served in parliament since 2010 and made no secret of his leadership ambitions, he had come to the party well into his working life and became the first, outer-suburban MP to lead it.
If he is interested in the philosophical traditions of the party, he never showed it. As a former policeman and Bakers Delight franchise owner, his gaze was always outwards, focused on crime and other problems in our suburbs. He has since admitted he felt lonely in the job and became too isolated from his party room colleagues.
Wilson’s prospects of turning a downtrodden opposition into a genuine, alternative government by next November’s election – and indeed, whether her leadership can survive until polling day – rests heavily on the relationship she develops with McArthur.
Jess Wilson and former Liberal leaders John Pesutto, Brad Battin, Matthew Guy and Michael O’Brien.Credit: Matt Davidson
A senior Liberal who knows McArthur well and has worked with her over many years says the key to this is respect. “Bev is very, very, very difficult,” he says. “Agree with her when you do, tell her when you don’t and deal with her with respect. Like any elder of the party, they deserve respect – and she carries half-a-dozen votes with her.”
Some of McArthur’s views are as dry as the Western District’s dust in February. When people ask her why she is in politics, her stock answer is so she can get government out of their lives. “Government is often the problem,” she says. “We have got to make sure the individual is enabled by government, not road blocked.”
She predicts there will be policy “variations” between her and Wilson but adds: “We both believe that the individual is the prime mover, not the government, that freedom of association, speech, thought and assembly is important, not collective thought.
“The problem with government is that it actually gets in the way of productive enterprise. We have to change that. We can’t have an economy just led by the government sector. We have got to have a flourishing private sector that actually creates wealth and employs people. What is wrong with that? What is not to love about that? Socialists always run out of other people’s money.”
We are unlikely to hear Wilson describing Victoria’s Labor government as socialist, but she shares McArthur’s belief in the power of private enterprise to reboot Victoria’s sluggish economy, which has shrunk over the past 20 years when measured in per-capita terms. “With the highest takes, the highest unemployment and the poorest business conditions, why would any business or young entrepreneur choose Victoria,” she says after the latest ABS figures showed Victoria’s economic growth for 2024-25 was half what the government had forecast.
In her first few days in the job, Wilson made clear her intent to keep bringing every problem in Victoria – from the rising crime rates and ambulance response times to low teacher pay, surgery waiting lists and pot-holed roads – back to the economy, the budget, and the rising cost of servicing Victoria’s debt. Her next big decision is who best to trust with the shadow treasury portfolio and responsibility for prosecuting this argument.
Can Wilson make it stick? “I hope so mate, I am so sick of it,” one MP said. Perhaps the strongest glue, other than Wilson’s deep attachment to the Liberal Party, is the approaching state election. This, more than anything, tends to focus minds in politics. McArthur says she would be shocked if anyone in her party is thinking of anything else.
Start the day with a summary of the day’s most important and interesting stories, analysis and insights. Sign up for our Morning Edition newsletter.
