2 weeks ago
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Getting elected leader of the Victorian Liberals is rather like receiving a participation award in grade 1 at a state school: everyone gets one.
As the current class of Victorian Lib MPs filed into their latest Hunger Games ceremony on Tuesday, how embarrassing it must have been for a very few of them to reflect that somehow, they had not yet participated in the brief pleasure of leadership.
Brad Battin was rolled less than a year into the job. Credit: Simon Schluter
Why, you’re a Liberal nobody in Victoria if you haven’t been leader at some point.
Brad Battin, the latest to make it before (naturally) being discarded, gets a special award for brevity, having failed to reach a year in the merry-go-round office.
His 320 days wobbling around at what might loosely be called “the top” is, in truth, deserving less of a participation award than a tick for each muttered “here” at morning roll call.
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Still, few of his recent predecessors managed to hang around for much longer.
If we count the latest of the chosen – Jess Wilson, the first woman, surely setting moustaches quivering down the street at the gentlemen-only, Liberal-heavy Melbourne Club – Battin is one of 10 Victorian Liberal leaders (some of them double-counted) in the 26 years since what is known as the Kennett Era ended.
For reference, the Victorian division of the Liberal Party had just four leaders in the first 26 years of its existence. And one of those, Trevor Oldham, had the great misfortune of dying – in a BOAC plane crash in India – after just 134 days in office.
For those skilled at arithmetic, the average period spent in the leader’s office over the past 26 years was artificially enhanced by the unusually lengthy six-year reign of Ted Baillieu, who actually won an election – the only Liberal leader to do so this century.
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Baillieu was succeeded as premier by Denis Napthine, who lost the 2014 election 20 months later, introducing habit-forming defeats ever since.
Napthine was one of those who had two stints as leader.
He spent a fruitless two years and 298 days in the job back at the very start of the century before being deposed by Robert Doyle (remember him?), which surely tells us something about the generous manner in which the party’s participation awards have long been handed around.
Matthew Guy was another of those who got two goes.
He served as leader for four years from 2014 to 2018, lost an election, was replaced by Michael O’Brien (remember him?), and returned for an action-packed one year and 92 days after deposing O’Brien.
Creative headlines were made for Guy – “Lobster with a ‘Mobster’” seems unlikely to be forgotten this side of the Rapture – but no one knew quite what to say when, during his tribute to the late Queen Elizabeth II, Guy referred to King Arthur. Hansard mercifully changed the reference to an actual king, Alfred, but no throne of any type awaited Guy.
His exciting period at the top ended in a second mighty election loss, when the Liberals found themselves with precisely 19 seats, cobbling together a telephone box-sized opposition with the Nationals’ nine seats against Labor’s 56.
And so the unfortunate John Pesutto was handed the keys to the leader’s office.
Pesutto for a nanosecond appeared to have a chance of mounting a halfway feasible challenge to the Labor government. But then came Moira Deeming, and let’s not go there.
Today, it’s Jess Wilson stepping to the front of the restive little class.
Wilson surely deserves a participation award and an encouragement certificate too, and would be well advised to keep a sharp eye out for those who fancy their skill at arithmetic, otherwise known as the number-counters.
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