'It's complicated': why Victorian Liberals have it all to do

The veteran hard man of Victorian conservative politics was talking about his date with destiny - and the Federal Court - on Thursday.

Judge Jonathan Beach will decide if Kroger has been justified in pouring so much of the Liberals’ money and of his own personal prestige into the legal scrap with party piggy bank the Cormack Foundation.

But the broader situation facing the Victorian Liberals is also “very complicated”, just at a time when they need things to be simple.

First up, Thursday’s outing to Jonathan Beach’s courtroom isn’t going to settle the “family dispute” between the party and Cormack, its main source of funding since the 1980s, and it might even make things worse.

The whole idea of the court case was for the party’s executives to gain control of the $70 million investment fund that they say was created solely to support the Victorian Liberals.

But even a victory on Thursday might not deliver that goal and still leave the party facing financial crisis, and Kroger, who drove the issue all the way into court, facing even more awkward questions about his judgment.

Elsewhere, the factional upheavals playing out in the background, and the rise of the religious right, have the potential to get a lot more serious as tensions between moderates and conservatives over who gets to contest the next federal election threaten to erupt into open warfare.

Few people outside the political bubble have ever heard of Liberal senator Jane Hume, but if she ends up being challenged for her spot on the party’s ticket by a bloke aligned with the ascendent conservatives, Hume will be a national story about the Liberals’ ongoing “women problem”.

There could be trouble, too, over preselections for the lower house of Federal Parliament.

Either they won’t happen and grassroots members will be very unhappy about being cut from the process, or they will happen and some high-profile figures will be fighting for their political lives.

Neither the Cormack saga nor the looming preselection scraps are likely to cost state leader Matthew Guy many votes in November’s state election, but they don’t help him win any either.

The twin issues make the party look disunited, more interested in talking about itself than solving voters’ problems and they will command a lot of column inches, depriving Guy of the oxygen he desperately needs if he is going to knock over Daniel Andrews’ first-term Labor government.

Despite recent history, it’s still very tricky for an opposition to unseat a first-term government; you need momentum, a disciplined party and a dollop of luck.

Labor’s knack of shooting itself in the foot over the past three years has been fortunate for Guy and he has no immediate worries about the unity of his Parliamentary team.

But he has been nowhere near as streaky as Andrews was in 2013 and 2014, when the Labor leader watched on from the opposition benches as first Ted Baillieu and then Denis Napthine were cut down in a hail of political gunfire from within their own party.

The latest published polls have Guy’s Liberals in a competitive position, trailing Andrews’ Labor only slightly.

But the polling from the same period four years ago showed Labor surging to a decisive lead amid the chaos and dysfunction of the dying months of Napthine’s leadership.

For all of Labor’s sloppiness, infighting and scandal since then, the sense of constant crisis that Napthine couldn’t shake in the end, has been absent.

It means that, unless their luck changes, Guy and his team will have to rely on their own powers of persuasion to knock Andrews and co off their perch come November. That’s going to be tough if Guy can’t get everybody in the party on the same page.

The Victorian Greens, too, have a big date for the diary this week. The party’s official investigation into its disastrous effort at March’s Batman byelection is to be presented to the state’s Greens hierarchy in a closed-door session on Saturday.

You’ll recall Richard Di Natale’s outfit went into the contest with their tails up, well aware that the resignation of Labor’s David Feeney gave them the chance to finally get that second seat in the House of Reps they’d been threatening to snag for years.

But all that promise descended into a nightmare with members of the Greens’ Darebin branch, the nation’s largest, viciously turning on each other.

With the campaign left a smoking ruin and one of the Victorian Greens’ brightest stars, long-time activist and candidate Alex Bhathal, probably too damaged by the experience to consider running again, Di Natale wanted answers, or at least to look like he wanted answers.

Trouble is, the answers might turn out to be more troubling for the party, and its chances at upcoming state and federal elections, than the questions.

The review, by former WA Greens MP Giz Watson, will have to be a work of genius if it is going to please everybody in Darebin and not simply generate more negative headlines for a party that’s uncommonly sensitive, in every way, to bad press.

The Greens have high hopes for November, balance-of-power status should be within their grasp. But like the Liberals, the Greens are running out of time to clear their decks for action.

And that's not complicated.

Noel Towell is state editor.