Only the most unabashedly partisan of voters would argue that the current incumbent Labor government of Victoria deserves to win another term. The most recent revelations of corruption running to a 12 figure number (ie tens of billions) lost in inappropriate payments to entities and personages aligned with the more sinister elements of the union movement, combined with the ongoing technocracy and blatant cynicism (eg the cancelled Commonwealth Games debacle) of this government would cause most fair-minded people to think that State Labor deserves a period in the electorate wilderness similar to that to which the Old Testament God condemned the Israelites.
I am pretty partisan myself, but in the other direction, although the promises of Peter Dutton as Federal Opposition Leader last year caused me to preference Labor above Liberal for the first time in my life.
I am, therefore, hoping fervently that the Allen Labor Government is consigned to electoral oblivion in November, just over 9 months from now. That is despite the tragic departure of John Pesutto as Victorian Opposition Leader just over a year ago and the revolving door which has since followed. [Full disclosure – John is a decent fellow and whilst out of parliament served as the patron of the small Italian community group of which I am a board member.]
But thinking with my head rather than my heart, I am not optimistic about it actually happening.
I do not know much in practical terms about campaigning, but I do know that you need to have two things to be competitive: money and people. Money does help to get you people, in terms of paid staff to run campaigns and administrations. People are needed both to volunteer to participate in campaigns, and also to actually run as candidates.
At the moment there are deficiencies in both areas, and they are inter-related.
My impression is that the Victorian Liberal Party is still suffering from the $2 million fraud perpetrated on them by their then state director, Damian Mantach, which was discovered belatedly in 2015. Immediately after this, I am told that there was a significant fiscal belt tightening at headquarters.
Reduced staffing means a reduced ability to service membership issues, such as maintaining the volunteer supporter base. It also reduces the ability of the party administration to organise important meetings, such as preselection conventions, which are needed to endorse candidates.
The main financial backer of the Victorian Liberals is an entity known as the Cormack Foundation, which is a trust administering legacy funds from the sale of an AM radio station once owned by the Liberal Party very many years ago. After the discovery of the Mantach fraud, the Cormack Foundation trustees felt a natural reluctance to hand over more funding unconditionally without some changes in governance, which then resulted in acrimonious litigation. I am not sure whether they have resolved this difference satisfactorily, but this would hurt the capacity to run actual election campaigns.
The main issue is the one of people, which does tie into money, but I fear goes a little beyond it.
This is where we get to the Game of Thrones, or Seats, if you will, and what is needed to win an election and form government.
In the Victorian Legislative Assembly, the lower house of the Victorian Parliament, there are 88 seats. Of those, 18 are currently held by the Liberals, and 10 by their Coalition partner, the Nationals. There is one additional seat, Nepean, which is about to face a by-election as the former MP, a Liberal, resigned recently for family reasons (due to a smear campaign against his family purportedly run by Liberal insiders).
A quick Google search indicates that the cost to the Liberal Party for running a campaign in this by-election will be approximately $200,000, money it can ill afford to spend in the lead up to the state election.
So, assuming (and this is me being optimistic rather than realistic) that the Liberals hold Nepean, the Coalition is sitting on 29 seats.
All sitting Liberal lower house MPs have been automatically re-endorsed, by decision of the State Executive (which, I very recently discovered, was renamed such last year after being known as the spinx-like Administrative Committee for many decades).
When you subtract 29 from 88, you get 59. My understanding is that the Liberal Party is planning to run candidates in 51 of those seats – I assume that the other 8 might be earmarked for the Nationals as coalition candidates.
The magic number to win government is 45. That means that the Coalition needs to win at least another 16 seats from Labor in November.
Where we have a major problem is that there are no candidates endorsed for any of those seats, and therefore no one already campaigning there for the overthrow of this appalling government.
Nominations remain open in 47 of those seats, with no apparent closing date (FYI, I believe that nominations were originally invited in September last year). In 4 seats, which are regarded as most marginal, nominations will close at the end of February.
As we get closer to the election date, the absence of endorsed candidates has two serious issues at the least. The first is that the lack of candidates means a lack of campaigning at the local level, drastically reducing the likelihood of winning more seats.
The other issue is how exactly the diminishing lead time is going to impact on how candidates are chosen.
The preferred manner of choosing lower house candidates in Victoria is for all financial party members of 2 years’ standing in a particular seat to comprise 60% of the membership of a preselection convention, with the other 40% made up of mostly randomly chosen delegates from elsewhere in the Liberal Party. This rule, introduced around 2008 or 2009, was intended to encourage and nurture grassroots participation in candidate selection and hence to motivate local members to donate time and money in their local campaigns.
The alternative manner is to have the State Executive choose the candidates. That is a top heavy approach, where less than 20 people, none of whom are necessarily members of the local electorate, impose their choice of candidate on the rank and file. Several years ago, at the time of the Aston by-election, I wrote at length in this blog about why this was a process which is not going to inspire grassroots participation in the campaign process.
I also feel bad for those people who put their hands up last September to serve the party they support as candidates, and who have been left in a limbo not of their own making, uncertain as to whether they should put their lives on hold until November.
In this Game Of Thrones, I fear that not only are the Liberals going to lose for having started so late on basic administration, but that, more importantly, the people of Victoria will. We cannot afford another four years of this appalling corrupt technocratic government.
Lost For Words! 