Trashed and thrashed
The Australian Liberal Party’s heavy defeat in the Victorian state elections was the price of trashing their own brand, writes Tony Wright.
When the prosperous residents of an electorate like Brighton, a coastal suburb of Melbourne, suddenly vote for anyone but the Liberals in such numbers that for a long moment it appeared a 19-year-old Labor candidate who had spent $1750 on his campaign might become the local member, you can be pretty sure that something has gone seriously wrong.
Forget a lot of the agonised tripe that has been written and said about the reasons for the Liberal Party’s near-death experience in the Victorian state elections at the weekend.
It’s a lot simpler than all that. The Liberal Party has trashed its own brand.
And it’s far from limited to Victorian state issues, despite the shambles of a campaign by the unconvincing Victorian Liberals leader Matthew Guy, whose slogan, ‘‘Get Back in Control’’, gave the game away from the very start.
Labor’s state premier, Daniel Andrews, of course, ran a campaign that showed he and his colleagues were actually the ones in control and prepared to borrow and spend big to keep it that way.
Improved roads and rail, free school lunches, doggie vet subsidies, public IVF treatments and cheap solar panels might have won Labor the state election anyway.
But whatever Labor offered would never have been enough in even halfway conventional circumstances to tempt large numbers of affluent voters in places like Brighton or Hawthorn to abandon the Liberals in the way they did at the weekend.
Those voters, quite obviously, were rejecting a party they felt had rejected them, or at least their idea of what the Liberal Party was supposed to be.
The behaviour of what had been their party at federal level – the flirting with Tony Abbott’s choice of punisher, Peter Dutton; the overthrow of their idea of a leader, Malcolm Turnbull; and the choice of a chancer, Scott Morrison, as a replacement prime minister – had poisoned them. And the poison had seeped all the way down.
It’s how you trash a brand. A batch of frozen berries is tainted in Beijing, causing customers in Melbourne to fall ill, and that brand of berries quickly finds itself with no buyers anywhere.
Andrews and his colleagues recognised this pretty simple equation. That’s why they erected all those billboards featuring pictures of Guy surrounded by Dutton, Abbott and Morrison.
They were tainting Guy with federal poison, just to be sure.
And Liberal voters in every corner of Victoria were reminded, wherever they looked, that their old party, its current leaders near and far, consumed by a search for some mythical base, had lost its bearings.
Should anyone be surprised that brand Liberal, poisoned from the top – just like brand Labor during the Rudd-GillardRudd years – had found itself short of buyers at any price? Of course not.
Those who’ve been watching had already seen the toxin have its way in September, when the Liberal Party lost a New South Wales state byelection in, of all places, Wagga Wagga, and in October, when the party couldn’t retain Turnbull’s previously unloseable seat of Wentworth.
Next March the breadth of the contamination will be tested when the NSW Liberal-National Coalition goes to its own state election. And then, no later than May, Morrison will take his party and his colleagues – the confused, the hopeful, the reeling, the malcontents and all – to the judgment of federal voters.
He’d better hope the rot that made him prime minister so recently will have worked its way through the system by then.
But when an electorate like Brighton convulsed so dramatically at the thought of voting Liberal that it very nearly chose a Labor Party teenage nobody, and when the people of blue riband Hawthorn turned their backs on their Liberal MP, John Pesutto – a man respected enough to appear the sort who could actually lead his party out of the depths, should he survive – brand Liberal has an awful lot of healing to do in an awfully short time.
Meanwhile, the Victorian Liberal Party will be busily tearing itself apart in search of an antidote to the poison that savaged it at the weekend.
What a time to be a Labor leader. –
‘‘The Victorian Liberal Party will be busily tearing itself apart in search of an antidote to the poison that savaged it at the weekend.’’