On October 20, the party suffered a 19 per cent swing against it at the ill-fated Wentworth by-election.
Now, looking back on the November 24 Victorian state election that followed the Wagga Wagga and Wentworth disasters, the swing against the Liberal/National opposition of 5 per cent seems unbelievably modest in comparison. There is no doubt that Matthew Guy's campaign to be premier was terminally damaged by the Liberal Party's federal brand, which was rancid across Australia but particularly in Victoria.
Malcolm Turnbull was seemingly more popular in Victoria than elsewhere and the conduct of his supporter Julia Banks meant a strong link was drawn between Turnbull's removal and it being occasioned by the bullying of female MPs.
Labor has a special way of dealing with recalcitrants; whether it be Colston, Latham or Husar. Yet Banks’s allegations put every Victorian Liberal MP under suspicion. The media ran whispering campaigns against certain MPs but we received instructions not to attack Banks lest she resign from the party!
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As such her allegations went unchallenged. In the minds of many they became fact. Whilst Daniel Andrews was removing level crossings, “nasty” Victorian Liberals had allegedly been bullying MPs like Julia Banks. Our failure to publicly criticise her was immensely damaging electorally in Victoria. In recent months, and to her great credit, Victorian Liberal senator Jane Hume has taken on Banks.
Banks was, of course, not the only problem. The strength of unions in Victoria means we are outmanned on the ground four or five to one. The unions can get 100,000 to a demonstration in Melbourne but only 10,000 in Sydney, and being a non-mining state, Victoria's concerns about global warming significantly outweighed concerns about the loss of mining jobs.
By February the fog of toxicity that had plagued the Liberal Party between August and December was lifting, not only due to the lapse of time but because of the work done by Scott Morrison and Josh Frydenberg to engage heavily with the electorate on policy rather than engage in the shouting match the federal Liberal Party had been having with itself. They have both been magnificent and become Liberal Party heroes.
By March the NSW government was narrowly re-elected despite being smashed in the Wagga Wagga byelection some six months earlier. Premier Berejiklian and her team had been a good government but benefited from the last week blow-up by Labor when leader Michael Daley offended the entire Chinese community. Former Labor premier Morris Iemma described those comments as devastating for Labor's campaign.
And despite the millions spent by GetUp! and the unions, Scott Morrison has prevailed. The relentless campaigning by him and Frydenberg, appealing to the working middle class and to retirees who no longer work but generate income from their savings and investments, defeated Bill Shorten’s campaign directed at public sector unionists and the politics of envy. Shorten did not appeal to aspirational Australians. The electorate sensed he had no policies to grow the Australian economy. His was the politics of shutdown. The mining states of Queensland and Western Australia went hard against him. Even in NSW, Joel Fitzgibbon lost 14.15 per cent of his primary vote in Hunter.
Not for the first time, the polls were spectacularly wrong. As went Trump and Brexit, so went Australia. The shy Trump voter effect wreaked havoc again on the public opinion polls. It now appears that Morrison was always in front; it is just that we did not know it.
Michael Kroger was president of the Victorian Liberal Party, 2015-18.