Lay down with cookers, wake up with burns

A clash of ideological experiments has damaged mainstream conservatism in Victoria and cost the Liberal Party another election.

Some were confident of victory, but Matthew Guy was unelectable (Source: Herald Sun)

The Liberal brand as we know it in Victoria has fallen into “shell-shock” after a convincing election result that has seen Dan Andrews’ Labor government returned with a majority that was never truly in doubt. It seemed from some refractions in the media that there may be weakness in his brand following his decision-making during the pandemic, but in the end, voters turned out for something that resembled a government, and not something that resembled the current iteration of the Victorian Liberals.

The newspapers in Melbourne openly campaigned against Labor throughout. Sky News ran a subjective feature length analysis that bought into question the fact that Dan Andrews used the words ‘stairs’ when it really was ‘steps’ he slipped on when he broke a thoracic vertebra in a freak accident. But aside from Peta Credlin’s slick documentary, Zapruder did not come forward with any damning footage, the grassy knoll did not influence proceedings, and the Herald Sun kept burning up like a comet flying too close to the sun, leaving behind a magnificent tail and the last fragments of any shattered legacy that remained.

When you have such poor ideologues, sycophants and malleable characters representing the Liberals and the tabloid press, it’s hard to backtrack when the incumbent government and most of the people in the state are reasonable and competent. NewsCorp might have wanted to join in some ‘Dictator Dan’ chorus with one of the most vapid and incapable selections of senior Liberals in the party’s proud history, and together they might want to call Victoria some socialist enclave on the radio, but the fact remains that a bunch of misaligned amateurs have been at the forefront of shaping Liberal party conservative policy to the detriment of the historically significant political movement. And a cohort of unscrupulous journalists under their heavy-handed masters are responsible for leading them astray. Guy’s hotch-potch of neo-right Christians, cowboys and cookers were no match for Andrews, and shame on the press for making them think that they were.

Long before the Victorian state election was called, the campaigning began early for the Liberals at the beginning of the pandemic. At the crucial daily health briefings, the campaigning quickly became a running knife fight, with fully animated press galleries auditioning for soundbites. The tabloid cartoonists inked subjective viscera that would have made Pol Pot blush. Johannes Leak became a fan of Maoist iconography as he placed red-starred caps on the Premier’s caricatured face, he depicted morbid sanguine cartoons of Andrews flaying limp corpses in chains, and Victorians couldn’t believe what they were reading on the tabloid rag in the smoko shed.  

They allowed people like Bernie Finn to take photos with cookers near the gallows on the steps of Spring Street way before election time, or put up ‘Dan Andrews is a Nazi’ posts on social media. They allowed people within their party to spread misinformation about the pandemic during critical periods of Australia's public health response. Furthermore, they allowed themselves to indulge in a failed strategy of embracing fringe right groups for relevance within the tearing fabric of consensus that divides the conservative population of the country. All for some paltry votes.

Political satirism took a new approach in Victoria during the pandemic (Source: Twitter)

But although there are unique factors that apply to the incongruousness and insincerity of Guy’s political buffet of poorly looking options, after two premiers worth of Baillieu and Napthine, after the kinetic energy of an Andrews government, Guy, then O’Brien, and then Guy again, were simply not good enough to win an election.

This is happening everywhere. In WA, the Libs got two seats in the house after a historic evaporation, Malinauskas folded the Liberal party into a small box after his party’s resounding and decisive victory in SA. Palaszczuk cemented her third tenure in the face of a third batch of poor talent, and it all seems to come down to a similar thing: low quality candidates without of touch and radical fundamentals trying to impose a radical conservative ideology that is simply not palatable to the mainstream. Let’s not forget the significant federal election result. Victoria was to be no different.

At the federal level, Dutton, still reeling from the historical loss in May, struggles with his Clint Eastwood approach to humanity. After some hawkish postmortem observations by senior party members and strategists like Jane Hume, it doesn’t look like some of the key takeaways reflect the reality. This new conservatism doesn’t gel down at the bowls clubs in the leafy greens, it doesn’t really fit with moderates in the ‘teal ribbon’ seats either, and, try as they might, it’s not gelling with the new far-right freedom elements who are so dangerously flirted with by these unscrupulous Liberal leaders who struggle to have a chat with normal citizens about the cost of living.

At the moment, all the Australian right can deliver is a foreign-inspired ideological framework extruded through hyper-capitalism and evangelical Christianity, and all it can deliver is Katherine Deves-like observations on the essence of identity politics, free passes for the rich, and threats about a spectre of doom for social safety nets like Medicare. The Australian conservative movement now sits in a political realm that is unpalatable to most, and horrifying to many, an incompatible political abomination kept on life support at the insistence of a US-based media mogul, endlessly engaging in foreign interference in the everyday lives of Australians.

The Victorian corporate press has given Guy a false platform to stand on, the blanket anti-Dan coverage and the subjective analysis creating a false atmosphere, but every word written, every Rohan Dean voice grab, and every stair (or step) slipped on, is another fragment of this fractured credibility that is splintered into the evaporating tail of that doomed comet. Matthew Guy can rest knowing he may have tried his best to lead his party to victory, however many lobsters were involved, but it is the destructive far-right press that is the biggest loser in this election. It has badly overplayed a weak hand of misinformation and bitter enmity, seeking to divide and fracture our communities during a series of compounding global crises. But the voters of Australia have affirmed several times over now, and reinforced again just last night: we are not stupid, and we see it all.

With all the Jordan Petersons in parliament, and the newborns being shoehorned into legislative assemblies in the Western suburbs, the Kyle Rittenhouse cosplay interns in the young Libs working at the offices of ‘moderate’ MPs, and the Ayn Rand-style US Libertarianism that sits ugly and ill-fitting in the heart of the party of Menzies — the conservative experiment is losing cabin pressure in Australia and the stressors on the fuselage are entirely due to dangerous flying and pilot malfeasance. As the project starts to crash, and we see the moderates perish in the catastrophe, and there are a bunch of fringe dwelling ideologues that are yanking back on the joystick and refusing to enact the emergency protocol.

Rohan Connolly @rohan_connolly

What's up Peta? Not happy? What? You got it wrong again? Gee, who'd have thought? #VicVotes2022 🤣🤣🤣

Perhaps the Victorian Liberals will learn from their mistakes, to take less from the broken media that leads it down garden paths to its own detriment, and to look the population in the eye to see how it can govern for them, not for whatever fractured version of themselves they’re deciding to be today. The influences that look to transmute the resting state of this country’s beliefs have failed in this State Election, and they have failed across the country. The talking heads at Murdoch are looking tired, their disjointed narratives, airlifted from the nasty parts of Murdoch’s America, are poorly received by Australians. An unholy alliance with corporate media has been to the detriment of the modern Liberal Party across state and federal politics, and its modern leaders have been irresponsible to think that they could profit from it.

The existential risk lurking in these checker-like chess moves in Liberal configurations across the nation is the splintering of the political movement into new smaller parties along the broadening spectrum of right-wing politics. This convolutes and ultimately obstructs any ability to form a cohesive political position, and to form a government. It is foolish for major parties to think that they can abandon their foundational base to pursue new ideological footings that may be unpalatable to voters, even offensive.