Read part one of Crikey’s wrap-up here.
If you had asked Victorians to predict the tenor of the November election this time one month ago, they might have said phrases like “endlessly boring” or “uniquely dull”.
But instead, there is just one word, and one word alone, which does full justice to this objectively batshit election: fucked.
So, brace yourselves, Crikey readers, for part two of our highlights of this truly bizarre and dangerously loose campaign.
Seeing red: Libs preference Greens before Labor
In a bold and daring gambit, and one which reportedly incensed important Liberals everywhere, Liberal HQ instructed its candidates to preference Labor last on how-to-vote cards.
Ian Quick, a member of the Liberals’ governing body, wasted no time in labelling the move “Trumpian bullshit”.
“I do NOT support any move to get the Greens elected,” he wrote in a lengthy Facebook post, adding that his phone had gone “ballistic” since the announcement. “Doing so is MORE dangerous than having the ALP elected (as problematic as they can be) and if the Greens ever hold the balance of power we are all screwed.”
He closed his poignant post by challenging opposition leader Matthew Guy to do something altogether more audacious mid-campaign: resign, and resign “now”. It was a sentiment seemingly shared by Liberal candidate for Richmond Lucas Moon, who initially ignored the voting card directive from Liberal HQ, only to switch to the official how-to-vote card hours later because he is, if nothing else, “a team player”.
When asked, Guy was, for his part, willing to concede the Liberals really do hate the Greens, but he insisted “Daniel Andrews and Labor are worse”, so if a few extra Greens cause political pain for Andrews, so much the better.
Besides, Guy said, the ‘Labor last’ policy wouldn’t apply to seats with candidates who have, what he called, “significant character or policy issues”. Whether or not that was an attempt at irony remains altogether unclear.
Introducing the secret-not-so-secret Pentecostal play for power
It’s fair to say the opposition leader has probably had better weekends than last, much of which was focused on yet more concerning revelations regarding Liberal candidate Renee Heath, whose deep connections to an ultra-conservative Pentecostal movement achieve the impossible and make Katherine Deves look like a moderate.
Guy refuted claims he was made aware of Heath’s religious connections, despite her father being the senior pastor of the controversial City Builders Church, and the fact Liberal insiders raised concerns internally weeks ago only to be ignored. It being too late in the day to disendorse Heath, who is set to secure a plum upper house seat, Guy instead announced she would never sit in the Liberal party room.
The extreme views of one Timothy Dragan, however, were not enough to invite similar retribution. The 26-year-old Liberal candidate for Narre Warren North reportedly ran away from journalists last week when questioned about his opinions, which include musings like, “there’s no such thing as traditional Australians because Australia is a post-colonial concept”, “we won this land fair and square”, and, in relation to abortion, “why is the passage through the vagina the reason why you can or can’t murder a human?”
On Sunday, Guy conceded “some of [these comments] were disrespectful”, while emphasising Dragan had in fact apologised for said “silly comments”, and, what’s more, that Dragan is “not alone in the world for making silly comments”.
Nazis, extremists and vandals
“The Liberal Party are preferencing racists, they’re preferencing extremists, they’re preferencing black-shirted women-haters, they are preferencing Nazis [ahead of Labor],” said Premier Daniel Andrews on Sunday. “All of that, all of it, needs to be explained by the alternative government.”
Usefully proving Andrews’ point was upper house MP Catherine Cumming the day before, who told a crowd of protestors aligned with the Angry Victorians Party that she’d like to turn Andrews into “red mist”.
Afterwards, Matthew Guy tweeted a condemnation of the comments, inviting this obvious rejoinder from deputy premier Jacinta Allan: “why are you preferencing her then @matthewguy?”. This prompted faux outrage within the Coalition, with opposition spokesperson for government scrutiny Louise Staley calling on Allan to “withdraw her disgraceful comments”.
Staley added Labor must give up its “negativity, desperation and baseless claims”, ignoring of course the fact they’re not baseless claims, as Crikey’s Cam Wilson reported this week.
An ill-judged boast, referrals to IBAC
What’s next? Well, in truth it’s been a very busy election campaign for Staley, who felt herself compelled to refer Labor to IBAC over the “preference whisperer” controversy that erupted last week.
In footage secretly recorded and released by the Angry Victorians Party, “preference whisperer” Glenn Druery — who incidentally claimed he’s “got more balls in the air than a vasectomy doctor” — spoke to the success of an alleged deal with the CFMEU and Labor at the last election, which he says delivered Animal Justice Party’s Andy Meddick to the upper house at the expense of four seats to the Greens.
Rather than taking Druery’s boasts with a grain of salt, however, Staley went full-on Gordon Ramsay, claiming the whole episode was “yet another corruption scandal, and [that] Labor are up to their necks in it”.
But as Crikey and others have pointed out, even if there is some truth to Druery’s claims, none of the conduct described is in fact unlawful.
And as if to prove fate truly is a bitch, Matthew Guy and former chief-of-staff Mitch Catlin were themselves referred to IBAC by the Victorian Electoral Commission on the very same day over the $100,000 donor scandal.
A ‘below-the-belt’ charade and the return of Somyurek, Finn, Shaw
Druery, for his part, has headlined the election campaign more than once in recent weeks, the first occasion relating to what he dubbed “the most elaborate sting in minor party history in Australia”. For over six months, Meddick’s Animal Justice Party involved itself in complex negotiations with Druery only to double-cross him at the eleventh hour and formally direct its preferences to a bloc of progressive parties.
The Animal Justice Party’s Ben Schultz defended the party’s Brutus move, saying he hoped the sting would spell the end of the “backroom deals of predominantly older, white males”. But Druery was having none of that, claiming he felt “gutted” and “taken advantage of”.
“It’s fine to try and outwit each other and outsmart each other — that’s what I do … But this was below the belt.”
Crikey, however, trusts Druery’s hurt feelings would have proved short-lived, given Meddick, courtesy of Druery’s clever ways, will probably be booted from the upper house come Saturday, with sacked former Labor powerbroker Adem Somyurek and sacked Liberal MP Bernie Finn to emerge as victors of the scheme.
Both men, in case you missed it, are contending this election as candidates of the right-wing, anti-abortion and anti-euthanasia Democratic Labour Party, with Somyurek announcing his political comeback just two weeks after formally resigning from politics.
“I realised my state needed me,” Somyurek said of his decision to return to politics. “Victorians are worried about their future. I am the only person who can hold [Andrews] to account.”
Meanwhile, controversial former Liberal MP Geoff Shaw, best known for mocking the welcome to country, an ombudsman investigation and for securing the downfall of former Victorian premier Ted Baillieu, is leading the charge on behalf of Clive Palmer’s populist United Australia Party.
The former Frankston MP accused the Andrews government of “destroying people’s lives” and the Libs of acting too much like Labor, while Palmer claimed Andrews’ changes to the state’s donation laws, which prevent him donating his usual millions, had “rigged the system”. The logic of that claim is, of course, something to behold.
Libs follow porn stars, and Victoria’s version of the ‘big lie’
In a nod to its fourth estate responsibilities, early last week the Herald Sun ran an “exclusive” on a trove of “racy” social media accounts allegedly followed by shadow treasurer David Davis and shadow environment minister James Newbury (and hastily unfollowed after the publication contacted for comment).
Davis, the Hun revealed, had also been following Twitter accounts which equated feminism with “cancer” and described it as “toxic as any other hate culture”.
Still, all that rather fades in significance when — *drumroll* — attention is focused on the Liberal’s candidate for Mulgrave Michael Piastrino. The contender for Dan Andrews’ seat has recently joined Freedom Party fringe-dwellers in calling for the election to be postponed on the basis of the Druery preferencing boast, which he said deprived the election of legitimacy.
There are also a slew of other minor parties railing against the state’s “dictatorship” this election, including the Angry Victorians Party, the Sack Dan Andrews Restore Democracy Party — which also wants to end the city’s “inner-city woke agenda” — and Pauline Hanson’s One Nation, which plainly needs no introduction. It would seem all the newer parties are yet to reckon with the paradox of destroying the state’s dictatorship and their very real participation in the democratic process – a painful contortion of the mind, if there ever was one.
VEC under pressure, issues poor behaviour card
And finally, send sympathies to the VEC, which has found itself under siege on many fronts this election, having picked a fight with teals candidates over their how-to-vote cards and lost, the Libs thwarting its investigation into the Catlin donor scandal, and the Libs also — in a truly unprecedented move — accusing it of electoral interference for then referring scandal to IBAC.
Adding to these pressures, the VEC has had to issue a number of cease and desist notices to campaigners at pre-polling booths across the state for “consistently behaving poorly”.
“The need to take this action is disappointing but unfortunately necessary,” said acting electoral commissioner Dana Fleming of the most recent incident in the state’s north-west. According to the ABC, the Victorian Socialists were to blame for the unseemly conduct, with one Freedom Party volunteer complaining they “kept stepping on her toes”.
