If you were Matthew Guy, you’d have to be one of the few Liberals thankful to Scott Morrison for being so deluded and deceitful. As the Victorian Liberal leader dragged himself to the end of last week, he was in a bad way. Weighed down by the still-unresolved scandal around a plan to supplement the salary of his previous chief of staff, he’d given an interview on 3AW that was everything he didn’t need it to be.
The Matthew Guy who Victorians had decided by a near-record margin they didn’t want as premier in 2018 was back on display: aggressive, dismissive and eventually angry. Meanwhile, his staff were fleeing as if a fire had broken out in his office, and speculation started appearing in the media about moves to replace him. Since Guy returned to the leadership almost 12 months ago, that sort of talk had always been a possibility, given how thoroughly the Liberals were smashed during his first stint as leader.
Opposition Leader Matthew Guy talks to the media on Sunday.Credit:Scott McNaughton
But Morrison’s final term ministerial follies came to the rescue, consuming the political media’s oxygen. This allowed Guy, equipped with a new chief of staff keen to get his boss out there being positive rather than defensive, to reset. Wisely, Guy is focusing on the state’s health system, where the Andrews government is at its most vulnerable. First there was an attempt to win over healthcare workers by promising them free public transport. And yesterday the big one, when Guy blended old promises and some new ones to build new hospitals, upgrade others, cut surgery waitlists and increase staff levels.
The money for this will come from ditching the Andrews government’s signature infrastructure project, the Suburban Rail Loop. There’s no shortage of infrastructure experts who are critical or altogether dismissive of the loop, but the Labor Party believes it won several seats at the last election by promising to build it.
The government set aside $11 billion for the Loop’s first stage, which is to connect Cheltenham to Box Hill. Work to the tune of $2.2 billion has already begun on stage one and Guy says he won’t tear up existing contracts. This would get him around accusations of hypocrisy, given how harshly the Liberals attacked Daniel Andrews for costing the state close to $1 billion for ripping up contracts for the East-West Link project after he took office in 2014. But it also likely cuts Guy’s healthcare war chest down from that initial $11 billion. Expect the government to try to drive that number down as it attempts to pick his health plans to bits.
All the same, it opens the possibility that the forthcoming election campaign could be a health versus infrastructure fight. At least that might make it a contest, with the ‘practical’ Guy looking after the urgent needs of today compared with the ‘grandiose’ Andrews building monuments to himself on an extended timeline.
Then again, it could also hurt the opposition. A fundamental problem for the Liberals across the country, but especially in Victoria, remains how much they want to lift their heads, look to the horizon and engage with the future. It’s a given that the role of opposition leader on behalf of either side of politics in any jurisdiction is a terrible job. But in recent history that’s been especially so for Liberal opposition leaders in Victoria.
Some of the harshest critics of the Victorian opposition in recent times hail from its own side: rank-and-file members and supporters who decry them for being ineffective or Labor-lite. Too frequently for the party’s own good, Victorian Liberal MPs and candidates who have some sense of the way most Victorians actually think find themselves boxed in politically by their base – their old, white, reactionary party membership and their media backers. Guy, to his credit, has made an effort to take his party to some of the places it needs to go. Last month, he produced an energy policy strong on renewables and aimed at cutting carbon emissions by 50 per cent by 2030. Many in the base, who still see climate change as a hoax created by Marxists, weren’t happy and let their Liberal MPs know about it.
The party has to do more to modernise and get in tune with the Victorian electorate, to move beyond the idea of politics as an endless ideological fight. That’s almost impossible when it’s being tugged towards a political bubble that seeks to limit its policy choices and the availability of good people to stand as candidates.
By putting a stake in the ground on the health system, Guy might well have found a decent place to have a showdown with Andrews, whose entire time as a minister and premier has been closely associated with health.
But the missing piece remains who Guy is. If he’s still the irascible fellow who thinks he can bluff his way through his troubles that we endured a week or two ago, voters could well decide they’ve already got one of those – in the current premier – and there’s little need to contemplate change.
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