A week ago, the Victorian opposition was quietly confident.
After struggling to gain any political momentum amid the pandemic, the opposition leader, Matthew Guy’s consistent and disciplined messaging on the triple-zero call response crisis appeared to be cutting through.
Coalition MPs had hit the road to win over voters with promises of road upgrades, new sports and community facilities, and plans to rebuild piers. Former opposition leader, Michael O’Brien, returned to the frontbench, bringing much-needed experience to the shadow attorney general position.
According to internal polling, the party was in the most competitive position it had been in for some time, Guardian Australia was told.
Some MPs even saw the result of the South Australia election – a Labor landslide – as a positive sign ahead of the Victorian poll in November. Labor leader, Peter Malinauskas, campaigned relentlessly on health: Guy planned to do the same.
But where this sitting week was meant to be spent hammering the government on triple-zero delays, ambulance ramping and the state’s lengthy elective surgery waitlist, Guy was instead defending his own party. The opposition’s whole week was a spectacular own-goal.
On Monday, the opposition backflipped on its plans to scrap the government’s mental health and wellbeing levy, which targets businesses that pay more than $10m in wages and is forecast to raise $843m each year to fund services.
Bizarrely, the shadow treasurer, David Davis, and opposition mental health spokesperson, Emma Kealy, denied the Coalition had ever said it would dump the levy if elected.
Guy was forced to hold an evening press conference, during which he conceded the party’s position had indeed changed, blaming the state’s battered budget.
On Tuesday, Guy left parliament before question time to get a Covid PCR test.
A day earlier he had told reporters he had been feeling unwell since Saturday. But it didn’t stop him from attending Victorian senator Kimberley Kitching’s funeral and several other events at the weekend, including a multicultural gala with 1500 people on Saturday night.
Also at the gala was Davis, who was forced to apologise after The Age on Wednesday revealed he was so intoxicated he had to be escorted out by his fellow MPs.
In a subsequent report, the newspaper alleged Davis swore at staff at a regional brewery after it had run out of the squid dish he ordered and he was told a glass of wine he wanted could only be ordered by the bottle.
Safe to say a wine-tasting fundraising event he was due to be co-hosting on Sunday was promptly cancelled.
Then, to cap off the sitting week, Liberal MP Wendy Lovell told the upper house there is “no point” in having social housing in wealthy areas “where the children cannot mix with others”.
“There is no point putting a very low income, probably welfare-dependent family in the best street in Brighton where the children cannot mix with others or go to the school with other children, or where they do not have the same ability to have the latest in sneakers and iPhones,” she said.
Labor seized on Lovell’s comments, describing them as “postcode snobbery”. The premier used the opportunity to spruik a social housing project planned for the bayside suburb.
As they say, a week is a long time in politics. This is one the opposition will quickly try to forget.
