Featured

Narrow Minded Italian Catholic Conservative Peasant From Footscray

The prompts from the blog platform suggest that I introduce myself.

In short, I am several things.

Firstly, I am a Narrow Minded Italian Catholic Conservative Peasant From Footscray. I have been describing myself as that for at least the past 15 years or so.

This description might not be totally accurate.

I am probably not as narrow minded as I boast I am.

Whilst I am of Italian ancestry and reasonably fluent in Italian, I probably think more the iconoclastic way that Australians do, having been born and lived in Australia my whole life.

Nor am I particularly observant religiously, although like most people, 1600 years of Christianity being the dominant religion (‘thank you’ Emperor Theodosius) in Western Civilisation does tend to hard wire us in a particular way. (I do like to amuse myself by claiming that the dinosaurs missed the ark and that the world is just over 6000 years old.).

Peasant? Well, my parents are from peasant stock, as probably most Italian migrants in the 1950s were, and I like growing my own tomatoes in the backyard. But I am a lower middle class office worker really, with the luxury of participating in a post industrial economy. I also have a university education, and not in agriculture.

Whilst I am very personally Conservative, both culturally and socially, I am more Liberal than Conservative, and believe in individual rights and liberties and freedom of choice and conscience etc to the point where I can get quite worked up when I hear of proposals to intervene in the lives of people or to curtail our freedoms.

I also don’t live in Footscray, although I was born there (and proud of it), and lived and went to school there during my childhood and adolescence, and the Western Bulldogs (formerly known as the Footscray Football Club) is my AFL team. I do not live too far from Footscray though. I am in Avondale Heights, which is like a north western outpost of Footscray, and previously lived in Maribyrnong. But just like people from Fremantle claim that they are from Fremantle rather than from Perth, real Footscray people claim that they are from Footscray rather than from Melbourne. I suppose, historically, that it has something to do with the fact that there is quite a distance between the eastern boundary of Footscray at the Maribyrnong River, and the centre of Melbourne, and most of that two mile distance was occupied firstly by a swamp and then by a wasteland involving docks, chemical depots (where were you during the Coode Island fire in 1991?) and quarantine grounds….

Secondly, I am a postgrad dropout. That does contradict a lot of what my first description suggests I am, but we all are complex and many layered people. The MA thesis I was planning to write was about Nietzsche, Hegel and the End of History or some such, which is the sort of topic which would have been pretty passe in 1994 when I was interested in doing it. However, life gets in the way – working full time and getting a promotion at work which resulted in me focusing my energies and attention on my job meant that I did not have much left in the tank for a 30,000 word thesis. And whilst I still enjoy reading Nietzsche for his manic and frenetic style, Hegel is really boring.

As for more? I much prefer the writings of Anthony Trollope over Charles Dickens. I still enjoy re-reading my favourite Nevil Shute novels, and I occasionally re-read my copy of JRR Tolkien. I did ditch Game of Thrones about 100 pages into the first book, and don’t regret it at all. I remain very curious as to whether some of the unpublished novels of JD Salinger from his period of seclusion (I have the general impression he wrote some) will see the light of day during my lifetime, although I loathed Catcher in the Rye whilst finding his short stories fascinating.

Treasury Wine Estates Continues To Spiral

The more I look at the news around Treasury Wine Estates, the more I am grateful that I sold 90% of my shares last year, leaving only sufficient to get me an invitation to the Annual General Meeting.

The announcement in mid-February that TWE was not going to pay a dividend this half year was not exactly surprising, given that the share price had been continuing to travel south and there has been no good news amongst any of the company announcements over the past year.

This morning, one of my friends sent me a link to the latest cheery news reports – that the Plato fund management group has not only been betting on the share price falling even further, but that they believe that there is a strong risk that the company could go bankrupt.

Well… in just under 18 months the falling share price has caused about $8 billion to be wiped from the company’s value.

A lot of the blame for the fall in the share price and the poor financial situation is due to the decision some 30 months ago to buy Daou vineyards in the USA. I remember that TWE did a rights issue at the time – a rights issue in which I did not bother participating.

Thinking about it, I have some 26 years of history as an investor in TWE and its various predecessor companies, such as Fosters Group and Southcorp to give me context.

Southcorp made a fatal mistake in consenting to what became a reverse takeover when it merged with Rosemount circa 2000. Not only did the fall out from that merger seriously damage the bottom line, but it caused the rise of Casella Wines’ Yellowtail brand at Southcorp’s expense. Nor was the Rosemount brand maintained (it had been the second biggest selling domestic wine brand in 1999) – it is now just a footnote in the TWE annual report each year rather than a surviving brand.

Then… despite the reservations held by the CEO of Fosters, the Fosters Board decided to take over Southcorp shortly afterwards, when the Oatley family (former owners of Rosemount) offered to sell their shares in Southcorp to Fosters. That decision did not exactly benefit the Fosters bottom line.

The moral of those stories is that bolting on additional large wine businesses to an existing wine conglomerate is not necessarily going to be a successful transaction. Indeed, looking at the many mergers and demergers which occur across many businesses in all sectors (the 1999 merger of BHP and Billiton, and the various capital restructures of Westfield come to mind) cause me to think that merger and acquisition lawyers are the main beneficiaries of such boardroom decisions. Call me cynical.

The TWE AGM is due to occur in October. Last year, I was very disappointed with the quality of the catering and the quantity of wine available, particularly in comparison to the 2024 AGM. I will go along again, but I will anticipate the explanations from the Board almost as much as the post meeting refreshments. And I will be bringing my party posse.

The Latest Twist In The Moira Saga….

I was premature in my predictions about Moira Deeming and Western Metropolitan. There was another twist I did not see coming.

It has been known for several years that Dinesh Gourisetty, the endorsed candidate for 18 hours for that seat, had been fined heavily over health code violations at a restaurant he owned. This issue was raised by a Liberal Party official four years ago when he sought the Western Metropolitan preselection for the 2022 state election. At that time, that was enough to kibosh his chances of a political career.

This time around, it seemed that everything was forgiven. Despite his conviction for health code violations, he was able to win the endorsement with 37 votes against 29 for Moira and 3 for the second upper house MP, Truong Luu (who is a really good bloke).

Then, on Monday morning, all the triumph came to a premature end. It turned out that two years ago, Dinesh had written a character reference for a friend who ended up getting gaoled for child sex offences. This reference was public record, in that it was held in the AUSLII legal database, easily accessible to anyone who might think to look.

[I do wonder do had actually thought to look and then release this information at the most unfortunate moment, rather than sometime before the preselection convention.]

Suddenly Dinesh no longer looked like a barely viable candidate. The state opposition leader, Jess Wilson, announced that she would not allow him to join the party room after the election. Phillip Davis, the state president, sent out an email late Monday afternoon announcing that the preselection would be redone, without Dinesh as a candidate, and that Dinesh had agreed to step down.

Subsequent news reports suggest that he did not agree to step down, or at least not so readily.

In any event, nominations were reopened almost immediately for the number one spot on the Liberal ticket for Western Metropolitan. The Herald Sun has misinterpreted this as the party making another move against Moira Deeming, rather than the party trying to follow due process, albeit in its usual ham fisted way.

It really is amateur hour. Davis’s opponents on the state executive are demanding he immediately resign – despite the fact that his term is up in May. Some people are calling for a federal takeover of the state division, even though I somehow do not see that the federal apparatus of the Liberal Party looks particularly credible right now.

But the Western Metropolitan debacle is merely symptomatic of a wider malaise in the Victorian Liberals. The state election is scheduled for 28 November, less than 8 months ago. The coalition need to win a minimum of 45 seats – 26 more than they won at the last election. The only endorsed lower house candidates are the 19 in the coalition held seats. Nominations closed on 27 February for 4 marginal seats, and on 27 March for 8 marginal seats. No candidates have been chosen yet in those seats, let alone in the additional 14 minimum seats needed to win government.

Time is growing short to select candidates and get them on the ground, running for office. The lack of candidates is going to hurt.

And every day reduces the likelihood that the candidates will be chosen by a preselection convention involving local grassroots members, rather than appointed by the State Executive.

At this rate, I do not see that Federal intervention in the state Liberals is actually going to make a difference – it will just put a new captain on the bridge of the Titanic at the time after the iceberg has already collided.

What Will Moira Do Next?

Last Friday I hosted one of my former colleagues for luncheon at the Savage Club.

Whilst waiting for my guest to arrive, I grabbed a cup of coffee and settled down in the Social Room (the large downstairs bar) with a copy of the Australian Financial Review to update myself on business news.

As soon as I opened the paper, I saw an ad covering both of the next two pages for the United Australia Party (ie Clive Palmer’s occasional political vehicle), featuring Clive and his current sidekick, Senator Babet.

Hmmm… I thought. It looks like Clive is making another comeback. Then I turned to the companies index overleaf to check which publicly listed companies of which I am a shareholder were being covered in that issue.

The United Australia Party (aka Palmer United Party, aka Trumpet Of Patriots) has had a rather interesting and eccentric history over the past 13 years, as well as exerting a more directly plutocratic influence over Australian politics than most billionaires would attempt.

But then, Clive is not exactly subtle.

Choosing to resurrect the UAP at this particular moment, 12 months after the most recent federal election was called, and when Pauline Hanson’s One Nation is surging unprecedentedly in the polls as an alternative conservative protest party, does seem like an uncommonly eccentric decision by our most entertaining homegrown billionaire.

It was not however the most interesting political news of the past few days.

I would consider that the decision of the Victorian Division of the Liberal Party yesterday to choose an alternative candidate rather than Moira Deeming MLC for the lead spot on the Western Metropolitan Province ticket for the upcoming state election to be a much more interesting outcome.

In other words, Moira has been dumped by her party, and is not going to re-contest her seat at the state election, at least not as a Liberal.

The news for much of the past 24 hours has speculated on what will happen next.

Given that the reappearance of Senator Babet and his sponsor Clive Palmer in political advertisements three days ago, it is moot perhaps to observe that the good Senator today has denounced the dis endorsement of Moira as a a disastrous decision for the Liberals, and expressed the hope that she defects and that everyone stops voting for them.

Of course he would say that. He narrowly beat out a Liberal for the sixth senate spot four years ago and is up for re-election next year.

I was not particularly surprised about Moira losing her endorsement. At various times in the past three years, I have expressed my grave reservations in this blog about Moira’s judgement, priorities and impact as a Liberal MP. I fear that her impact has been quite destructive to the chances of the Coalition at the next state election.

It also has, through her initial activities to pursue the expulsions of local Liberals who campaigned for Fred Ackerman after he decided to run against her, damaged the local Liberal grassroots base.

The question is what Moira will do now?

All the major news sources – the ABC, the Murdoch Press, and Fairfax – have speculated that Moira will defect to One Nation. The president of One Nation has described her as ‘courageous’ and said that she would be welcome in One Nation.

When I saw Moira Deeming speak to the Collins Club three years ago, just after she had been expelled from the parliamentary Liberal Party, she described the Liberals as ‘The Party that I love’. Given that in that same speech she spoke about her non-Liberal background, and her first disillusioning encounters with Young Liberals, I suspect that her love has limits, and that those limits have been reached.

Joining One Nation must be very tempting right now for her. In the five state elections since the introduction of proportional representation to the Legislative Council, the Liberals have won a second seat in Western Metropolitan only twice. In the other three elections, that seat has fallen twice to the DLP, and once to Catherine Cummings under the Hinch Justice Party umbrella (a party which she immediately deserted).

It is very likely right now that One Nation could take that second seat, the one which makes up the two out of the five which get won by right wing parties, but usually not by the Liberals.

Will she join One Nation, or won’t she? Only time will tell, but my money is on an announcement within the next week.

Goodbye Len Deighton

There’s a somewhat irreverent website I like to visit for some dark amusement. It’s called Deathlist. It’s a British website run by people of approximately my age, and probably started off as a game played in a university cafe in the late 1980s, where a circle of friends would come up with a list of 50 people likely to die over the course of the coming year. The list eventually became a somewhat viral website.

The rules of Deathlist are simple. Only 25 people from the previous year’s list can reappear, and all the people on the list have to be famous enough to get mentioned on the UK media for something other than a condition causing them to die.

The obituaries are irreverent and perhaps rather insensitive (eg the heading ‘Mary Tyler No Moore’, or ‘Duke of Deadinburgh’, or ‘From Sceptre to Spectre’ – well, you get the gist) but funny in that horrid way that most of us would find, but be too polite to admit.

So I just took a look at Deathlist 2026 to see how their predictions are going so far this year, and noticed that Len Deighton passed away yesterday.

Deighton was an author, principally of spy novels. In my mid twenties I read several of them, namely the three trilogies he wrote about Bernard Sampson, the anti-hero outsider of British intelligence, someone who was loyal, but distrusted, repeatedly betrayed, and feared by his superiors. They were quite enjoyable, in their own way, and mostly went a long way to set Deighton up in the company of Robert Ludlum and John Carre as a leading author of spy fiction.

Ian Fleming, mind you, was in a class of his own, if you want my opinion. [Read The Spy Who Loved Me and see if you don’t agree.]

There were a few lines in various of his novels which still call out to me across the years. There is one passage, narrated by Sampson, where he discusses the French occupation zone of Berlin, describing it as given to the French ‘so they could play at conquerors’. Sharp and cynical and totally accurate.

And then there is Goodbye Mickey Mouse, his novel about a Second World War US pilot stationed in England. I think I might have read it in my late teens, if not my early twenties, but definitely a few years before I read the nine Bernard Sampson novels. There is one part where two of the characters are discussing the nature of war, and how men welcome it as a way to escape from the reality of their lives.

It’s very dark, but not quite bleak, and it has stuck in my mind for well over thirty years. He was much more than a spy novelist, his work approached serious literature.

Goodbye Len Deighton.

A Sociopath’s Guide To A Successful Marriage

I still buy and read books, although I much prefer to idle a few hours away on the iPad with the Kindle app, reading what is on offer via Kindle Unlimited (my preference is for Sharpe and Hornblower imitations about the Napoleonic War).

Browsing physical books in an actual bookshop is still a simple and real pleasure for me, one which I do not envisage ever giving up.

Recently, when browsing in QBD at Highpoint West, I came across a new release called ‘A Sociopath’s Guide To A Successful Marriage’.

With a title like that, I had to buy it, and I greatly enjoyed it, with the tension and black humour building as I got further into the book.

One very small detail which stood out for me, which really sets this book apart, is that the first husband (and victim) of the narrator happens to be an Australian, who is first introduced to us wearing a Western Bulldogs cap.

As this happens to be my team (and as we won today, I happened to have noticed that a few people besides myself were wearing such caps when out and about), I am pretty chuffed about this little detail. I have gone as far as contacting the author via instagram to ask what caused him to add this little detail, as it is very intriguing to me, but alas, no response.

I doubt that this book will be studied by scholars in the decades to come, with no Penguin Classic annotated edition to come out, so I expect that this question will remain unanswered.

But I suspect that this is the first time that, outside of Australia, any mention of the Western Bulldogs will have made it into literature, even the crime noir variety.

Iran – Will Anything Actually Change?

AI creates some very weird and wonderful fake videos these days. One which brought a chuckle to me (despite the gravity of the situation) was an AI revision of the Flock Of Seagulls hit (their only hit FYI) ‘I ran’. Trump, with his distinctively wild hair, takes the place of the lead singer of that band at the moving synth keyboard, singing ‘Iran’ instead of ‘I ran’.

Since I last reflected on Iran in this blog, some 49 senior regime officials have entered the afterlife thanks to American and Israeli aerial bombardment. It probably is a much higher number by now, but I stopped paying attention to the count early on in this bemusing war.

One of those casualties was the Iranian Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khameini, which represents the crossing of a long held line where heads of state usually do not get intentionally killed by their enemies in a war. [I notice that such a line goes back at least to the Hundred Years War, where French kings and princes went into battle and got captured rather than killed, although this is not a matter either in international jurisprudence or world history which I have ever studied]

With over four dozen senior officials of this extremely odious regime now no longer in a position to issue orders or participate in making decisions about the future of the Iranian theocracy, what happens now?

Well, the son of the Supreme Leader has now been chosen as his replacement in that role. He is even more hardline than his father. The Council of Experts, a theocratic college which chooses the Supreme Leader and vets (ie disqualifies) candidates for elections, is clearly still extant and making the decisions for which it was established.

The apparatus of repression of the regime, particularly the Revolutionary Guards and the Islamic vigilante militia known as the Basij, is still operating.

And whilst AI on Facebook has generated songs about the Shah-in-exile being the sole legitimate alternative to the current regime, Pahlavi Fils has not offered up an actual alternative, in the form of a constitution, which could be the initial foundation for a new regime.

So… what do I think is going to happen? The Israelis and the Americans have mostly achieved their real war objectives – preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons by brute force. Once all the equipment is shattered, all the expertise exploded (I assume nuclear physicists in Iran were a high priority target), and the materials removed (Trump is now talking about collecting all of Iran’s uranium), Iran’s capacity to make nuclear weapons will be gone.

Aside from that, the people who have been sponsoring insurgencies (or terrorists, if you prefer) across the region will have been chastised with lethal force. The ability of Iran to sponsor mischief around the region will have been reduced, at least in the short term.

So then the US and Israeli forces will go away, and leave the theocracy to its own devices.

The alternative, which I do not see happening, is for the Shah to fly into Iran under cover of US armed might, and declare a newborn monarchy under a new constitution.

Nice dream, but whilst I am a Commonwealth Constitutional Monarchist, I am probably more of a republican about despotic regimes.

Apocalocyntosis Redux

Last summer, I wrote about trying to grow pumpkins. I ended up successfully producing two. They were butternut variety.

This year, I tried again. Put in a few seeds of a variety which grows best in pots. So I have a few tennis ball sized (so far) yellow fruits in vines growing in pots.

I also decided to try again growing giant pumpkins. I planted a few seeds in a compost heap. Now I have several very healthy vines growing out of that heap and several pumpkins rapidly fattening up. I do not really want a 50 kilogram pumpkin, as I cannot lift such a beast, but I am very curious to see how big I can grow them.

This makes up in part for the disaster which has been this year’s attempt at growing heirloom tomatoes. I take some consolation in knowing that it is a bad year for tomatoes for a lot of people, from what I have heard.

More Fun With Business Cards….

It is going to be a while before I run out of the business cards I ordered in late 2024. I did, after all, order 500 at that time.

But when I do, I need to work out what sort of outrageous claims I can make on the card, beyond calling myself by the post nominal ‘Esq’ and describing myself as a ‘Gentleman of Leisure’, which looks rather boring in comparison to some of the others I have seen.

Let’s look at the business card I was given at the Savage Club in late 2024 by one interesting character.

That chap calls himself ‘Man of Action’ and then lists the following services:

. Lions Tamed

. Insurrections Put Down

. Mountains Climbed

. Virgins Cured

. Opinions Given

. Channels Swum

. Wars Fought

. Lawyers Intimidated

. God Disproven

. Casseroles Cooked.

You would think this was pretty original. However, when I was at my Bottle Club at Jimmy Watson’s Wine Bar on Thursday, another chap handed me his newly printed business card which described him as a ‘Gentleman and Flaneur’. [In case you are wondering, a ‘flaneur’ is someone who ‘saunters around observing society’.]

The flip side of this chap’s card offers the following services:

. Revolutions started & uprisings quelled

. Tamer of tigers and wayward moustaches

. Souls saved & sceptics convinced

. International adventurer & sometimes casual hero, bounder and a cad

. The difficult done immediately.

. The impossible takes longer.

. Miracles by appointment.

. No obligations, no worries.

You can see some similarities and opposites between what is included in these two totally separate business cards, such as the taming of lions or tigers, putting down insurrections as opposed to revolutions started and uprisings quelled, God disproven compared to Souls saved and sceptics convinced….

The chap who handed me his card on Thursday said that he was thinking of including ‘Virgins cured’ on the card, except that he wants to remain married.

Which leads me to conclude that there is some printer of business cards somewhere in Melbourne who is catering to the whims of the more eccentric members of our Gentlemen’s Clubs, and producing some standard text options for amusing inclusion on cards.

It all does make my simple card look rather boring indeed.

Postscript:

Since typing this blog post yesterday, I did have a bit of a Google search on the subject of such business cards, and have discovered that such business cards with almost identical phrasing have been making the rounds since at least the late 1980s, and not merely in Australia.

Off With His Head! How To Best Resolve The Problem That Is The Andrew Formerly Known As Prince

I am fond of the plays written by Shakespeare, and by extension, those written by his near contemporary (and alleged ghostwriter) Kit Marlowe. The audiences at the time enjoyed a bit of gore, for instance, and so Titus Andronicus (Shakespeare’s equivalent of a Road Runner cartoon), with its rapes, dismemberments, murders, and cannibalism, is particularly amusing.

So too are some of the purported histories Shakespeare and Marlowe wrote. Richard III, for instance, features the king’s brother being drowned in a tub of malmsey (a type of cheap alcoholic drink) whilst imprisoned in the Tower of London. Marlowe’s Edward The Second features the killing of the deposed king by having his bowels burned out with a red hot poker, a scene which would have probably delighted contemporary audiences.

But for all the gore of Elizabethan drama, the reality was not much cleaner. There have been many executions of relatives of kings in actual history. Two of Henry VIII’s queens, most famously Anne Boleyn, but also the hapless Catherine Howard, were beheaded in the Tower of London. This was, given the times, much cleaner and easier than divorce, given how much trouble Henry had with that earlier on in his love life. Lady Jane Grey, who was the figurehead of an attempted coup d’teat, also was beheaded after her reign failed to eventuate.

So too Mary Queen of Scots, someone too dangerous to allow to live, despite being cousins of the Queen Regnant and mother of Elizabeth’s eventual successor.

The lesson that we can take away from history is that if you were a royal, and you were an embarrassment to the sovereign, the cleanest and easiest way to end the embarrassment was with a headsman and a sharp axe.

Doing so inside the Tower kept it discreet. After all, a royal was not a common criminal, and to treat them as such would diminish the status and place of the Sovereign himself.

Which brings us to the arrest a couple of days ago of the Andrew Formerly Known As Prince, for questioning relating to allegedly corrupt practices relating to his former role as a trade envoy for the United Kingdom.

He is the brother of the King and the favourite son of our Late Beloved Queen. He is also a living and breathing embarrassment, who could very well face extradition to the USA to face child sex related charges if it were not that most of the American political establishment, including President Trump, is closely implicated in the entire Epstein scandal. It is not in the interests of the American establishment to extradite him and have him answer for those allegations in open court.

But his alleged misconduct in enriching himself in a public office in the UK as a trade envoy is another matter. The evidence appears prima facie strong enough that the police feel obliged to detain and question him, bringing forth the prospect that he could face public trial and imprisonment, despite his former status as a prince and a senior member of the Royal Family.

In the golden days, which our King might now be nostalgically harkening back to, a beheading was a quick and clean way of ridding oneself of such embarrassments. So too would the Prince of Wales be thinking this way, given that in his early childhood, he did tell a kindergarten teacher when having a tantrum that, when he was king, he would get his knights to cut off her head.

Of course ordering ‘Off WIth His Head’ as one of the Queens in Alice In Wonderland is not realistic in this day and age. But is it too late to arrange a car accident in Paris?

A Game Of Thrones (Or Seats) – Why The Liberals Face An Uphill Battle In The November 2026 Victorian State Election

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 11 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 electoral 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.