There was a moment a little over a week ago, albeit a fleeting one, when it looked as though the warring tribes of the Victorian Liberal Party were prepared to put aside their mutual loathing and mistrust and unite behind a stable, next-generation leadership to take them to the 2026 state election.
Instead, a party that has spent 21 of the last 25 years malingering on the opposition benches returned to type.
The Liberals have a new leader in Brad Battin and the final, crushing margin in Friday’s ballot suggests there is a desperate yearning across the party for him to succeed.
In truth, the party room he inherits from John Pesutto is riven by the same divisions and rivalries that devoured an opposition leader who was popular with the public, beating Labor in the polls and positioning his party for a serious tilt at government.
Battin and his backers arrive at Friday’s meeting.Credit: Eddie Jim
In the febrile aftermath of an excruciatingly locked, 14-14 vote a week ago on whether Moira Deeming should be admitted back into the party room, two of the youngest members of Pesutto’s frontbench, Jess Wilson and Brad Rowswell, met with his putative challenger Battin and his chief strategist Richard Riordan to discuss the party’s future.
Wilson and Rowswell had earlier met with Pesutto, in the parliamentary office of Michael O’Brien, to tell their boss the tied vote had left his two-year leadership critically wounded and emboldened his party room enemies.
“It wasn’t an ultimatum,” Rowswell says. “It was a conversation with a bloke to say this is our read on things, it is best for you to consider your position and work out how this can be dealt with in a way which provides you with maximum dignity and respect.”
Wilson’s message was blunt. “This is untenable,” she told him.
Wilson and Rowswell were now negotiating directly with the enemy camp to see if an accommodation could be struck instead of another bruising leadership contest.
Battin’s plan, proposed by Riordan and supported by conservative powerbrokers within the state and federal party, was for Battin to be the next leader and for Wilson to serve as his deputy and take over from Rowswell as treasury spokesperson.
Pesutto was told his position was untenable.Credit: Eddie Jim
Wilson’s plan, conceived with her closest allies Rowswell, Evan Mulholland and Senator James Paterson, was for her to replace Pesutto as leader and have Battin serve as her deputy.
Either scenario would bring together the moderate and conservative traditions of a party cleaved in two by the Deeming imbroglio and provide a new leader with the backing of nearly all Liberal MPs. Under both scenarios, Deeming would be invited back into the party room which exiled her 18 months ago.
The problem was, neither Battin nor Wilson was willing to play second fiddle.
Throughout the meeting, which was held in Rowswell’s office, Riordan argued the dumping of Deeming had unleashed a fierce backlash within the party’s branch membership and that the same people who had got them into this mess couldn’t now be trusted to provide a way out.
Rowswell, a conservative MP who’d been close to Tony Abbott and worked as a Canberra staffer through the leadership turmoil of the federal party, was unmoved. He sat in a chair, sucking on a vape, and insisted they still had the numbers. Wilson would be the next leader of the party, he told them.
Through the haze of scented steam, Battin and Riordan detected a whiff of condescension. Instinctively, they dug in their heels.
Jess Wilson was first to be eliminated from the leadership vote.Credit: Luis Enrique Ascui
Battin, a former cop from Berwick who ran a Baker’s Delight, is not your A-type Victorian Liberal leader. He left school at 15, went to university later in life and didn’t develop the inner-Melbourne party contacts that open the doors to staffing jobs for senators or advising MPs. He is a non-religious, tattooed, outer-suburban bloke who has built his political convictions on the job.
Wilson, a qualified lawyer and former executive with the Business Council of Australia, was born into the Liberal Party, which her father Ron represented as state MP. She worked as an adviser to former federal treasurer Josh Frydenberg, replaced Tim Smith in the once prized seat of Kew and recently became a first-time mum. Her CV fairly screams future party leader.
But, for all her political pedigree, Wilson has served only two years in parliament compared to Battin’s 14 years on the opposition benches. The tied vote from a few hours earlier – a decision which shocked nearly everyone in the party – showed momentum was with Battin and his hard right supporters, rather than Wilson’s grouping which had backed Pesutto throughout the protracted Deeming dispute.
The meeting in Rowswell’s office ended without a deal and within hours, any prospect of one disappeared. This was one of several sliding doors moments in a series of intense backroom machinations that ate Christmas, devoured what goodwill remained in the party room and culminated in Friday’s winner-takes-all ballot in which Battin emerged triumphant and Wilson finished a humiliating third.
The potholes that claimed John Pesutto
Of all the missteps along the treacherous, pot-holed path that led to this point, the most serious were made by Pesutto.
It was Pesutto who falsely accused Deeming of being knowingly associated with neo-Nazis after a group gatecrashed a rally where she had spoken for greater protection for women’s rights against the rising political tide of trans inclusion. It was Pesutto who was unable to settle Deeming’s defamation claim against him and prevent party secrets from spilling into open court.
It was Pesutto who, as he sat alone in his parliamentary office with wife Betty minutes after Federal Court Justice David O’Callaghan handed down a damning finding against him and ordered he pay Deeming $300,000 in damages, failed to appreciate that, if his leadership was to survive, he needed to show less fight and more contrition and humility towards the woman he had defamed.
A happy Moira Deeming after being readmitted to the Liberal party room.Credit: Luis Enrique Ascui
Pesutto vowed to continue as leader but one of his staunchest supporters, Georgie Crozier, had already assumed he was cooked. In the hours after the judgment, while Pesutto’s chief of staff Louise Staley paced the corridor which houses government and opposition MPs offices with her phone glued to her ear, Crozier made calls of her own to sound out the possible return of Michael O’Brien as leader.
O’Brien 2.0 – an idea the man himself scotched as soon as it was raised – went nowhere. Within a couple of hours, Crozier had walked back her earlier calls and resumed full support of Pesutto. But when news of the short-lived intervention reached Battin’s supporters, it confirmed that Pesutto had never been more vulnerable.
It was also Pesutto who, following last week’s 14-all vote, couldn’t see his own, impending political demise or provide a straight answer when repeatedly asked whether he’d used his casting vote to break the tie.
Finally, it was Pesutto who, two days later, belatedly realised his leadership was careering towards a brick wall and threw both principle and any remaining passengers out of the car.
On Sunday 22 December, he issued a short statement apologising to Deeming and announcing his intention to call another special meeting on January 15 where he would move a motion himself to readmit her to the party room.
“After the first decision by the leadership group to remove Moria, John admitted to us that it was a mistake to expel her without consulting the team more widely,” says James Newbury, a moderate MP and manager of opposition business whose defection to Battin delivered the death knell to Pesutto’s leadership.
“Whether we agreed with the original decision or not, we supported the leader for 20 months. Last Sunday, despite John’s promise not to make party changing positions without consultation, he announced he would bring her back into the party.
“My view was that he had made the same mistake of bypassing the team twice.”
Earlier that day, Newbury had called Pesutto to say he had lost the support of his colleagues and for the good of the party, needed to go. Newbury was one of five MPs who signed a request for the meeting to be brought forward to December 27 so the matter could be dealt with before the end of the year. Under Battin’s leadership, Newbury is expected to remain manager of opposition business and become shadow treasurer.
An unreturned phone call sealed Jess Wilson’s fate
Last Saturday morning, when this masthead and the Herald Sun each carried reports Wilson had urged Pesutto to consider his position after the tied vote, internal party manoeuvring went into overdrive.
Senator Sarah Henderson, a political mentor to Battin appalled at how Deeming was treated by the party, called Paterson, a close friend of Wilson, and urged her to accept the offer of deputy leader.
Wilson wanted more time to consider it, consult colleagues and test the strength of support she had to run as leader. She also wanted to try and convince Pesutto and his leadership team that the interests of the party would be best served by stepping down. She thought he might do this in time for a Monday party room meeting, after MPs had gathered in the city for Kevin Andrews’ funeral.
By this stage, Battin and Riordan had already moved on.
Unbeknown to Wilson and those advising her, Newbury made his own move on Saturday. Furious at the previous night’s intervention by Wilson and Rowswell and what he believed was a betrayal of Pesutto’s leadership by his “golden child” – a nickname some MPs bestowed on Wilson due to her favoured status with Pesutto – Newbury gathered a small, breakaway group of moderates willing to switch to Battin. It is not clear how many MPs were in this group but only a couple were needed to give Battin the numbers.
In return for his support, Newbury was promised the shadow treasury previously offered to Wilson, and Sam Groth, a first-term MP who had quit Pesutto’s frontbench on the day of the defamation judgment, was drafted into camp Battin with the promise of being his deputy.
David Davis, a veteran MP who’d supported Pesutto but run against Wilson in Kew, backed the Battin ticket on a promise to become his upper house leader. Former leader Matthew Guy, a reluctant participant in a spill not of his choosing, also shifted to Battin.
On Sunday morning, Wilson called Battin to accept his offer of deputy leader. He said he would think about it and never called back.
As late as Boxing Day, just 24 hours before the decisive party room meeting, Wilson again contacted Battin and was politely told there was no longer an offer on the table. Groth would be his deputy and Newbury his treasury spokesman.
Later that day, Wilson issued a statement declaring that if the leadership was spilled, she would stand as a candidate. “The best way forward to defeat Jacinta Allan and Labor was with a unified leadership ticket,” she said. “Unfortunately, it has been made clear to me today that a unity ticket is no longer on the table.”
Her decision to contest, taken at the 11th hour, was disastrous. Once the party room voted not to allow absent MPs to vote remotely, she knew she had nowhere near enough support. In a final, forlorn attempt to preserve the status quo, Wilson, Rowswell and Mulholland joined Pesutto and another six MPs in voting against a leadership spill. By then, the forces for change they had helped unleash were running beyond their control.
The final act of a decent parliamentarian
When the Victorian Liberal Party plays Game of Thrones, kings are more often killed by ineptitude than well conceived plots. Battin, although he had contested the leadership twice before and is supported by some of Pesutto’s most vociferous detractors, had not spent the past two years white anting his leader.
As Richard Riordan reflects, “there wasn’t a campaign of undermining John. There was an ongoing, underlying frustration at his inability to deal with the Moria issue.”
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The most telling blows to Pesutto’s leadership came not from enemies in the party but his own supporters: the young, first-term trio he had promoted in Wilson, Rowswell and Mulholland; James Newsbury, the MP who’d counselled him shortly after the 14-14 vote to hold the line; and Richard Welch and Wayne Farnham, two MPs who unexpectedly voted for Deeming to return a week ago without realising the disastrous impact it would have on their leader.
In perhaps the most poignant moment of Friday’s meeting, Deeming walked back into the party room that had unceremoniously turfed her out and added her vote to those mounting against Pesutto, the man she held most responsible for her unfair treatment.
After Deeming walked in, Pesutto rose from his chair, shook her hand and apologised to her again – this time with the entire Victorian Liberal parliamentary party as his witness.
It was the final, gracious act of a thoroughly decent parliamentarian. Had he done it months ago he might still be leader.
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