Being a Victorian, and a Melbourne girl to boot, comes with some certainties in life; you walk out prepared for anything the weather can throw at you, and you also know the Liberal Party of Victoria is in a perpetual cycle of attacking each other.
Deep sigh.
So, less than 12 months since the last ritual blood letting when John Pesutto was deposed as the leader of the party after being sued by Moira Deeming for defamation, we now have a third leader of the Victorian Parliamentary Liberal Party in just a few short years, with Jess Wilson becoming the first woman to lead the Victorian Liberals.
Wilson is a young, fresh face in Victorian politics, having replaced Tim Smith (yes, that Tim Smith who got filthy drunk and drove into a fence and bedroom of a child) in the state seat of Kew. She worked for the former Treasurer Josh Frydenberg, led the Victorian Young Liberals and was the Executive Director of Policy at the Business Council of Australia. This was her second bid to secure the role of leader of the opposition after she was eliminated in the first round of voting in December 2024. However, she joined the shadow cabinet in October 2025 as Treasurer, following the resignations of two senior Liberal MPs.
The question, however, in the rapid ascendancy of both Jess Wilson and her Federal counterpart Sussan Ley as leaders, is whether they are truly given those roles with the expectation that they will succeed or are they just warming the leadership seats until a man gets there?
We know the Liberal Party has an intractable problem with women; from bringing into common vernacular the toxic blokey ‘Big Swinging Dick’ club, to Tony Abbott inspiring the infamous misogyny speech by Prime Minister Julia and John Howard defunding women’s organisations and dismantling gender equity programs.
So is the election of Jess Wilson light at the end of a long misogyny-fuelled tunnel?
I am unsure because the problem isn’t with people in the party, but their woeful lack of policy driven by anything vaguely resembling evidence.
It feels like every policy that both the federal and state Liberal Parties have announced in the last 12 months has been deeply steeped in culture wars and its talking points taken from right-wing think tanks like the IPA and Advance Australia.
On Monday, Sussan Ley announced a new energy plan, which is the fifteenth energy plan announced by the Coalition since 2015 by my reckoning. Other than dumping Net Zero, there is no actual plan. I have spent the last 48 hours poring over the five-page document, and I cannot find a single initiative or new policy that will address the twin crisis of the cost of energy delivery and climate change.
There are some vague vision statements, but no policy substance. There are references to energy mix balance and to not closing coal-fired power stations, but it does not explain that the cost of energy has been driven not by supply-side constraints but by infrastructure issues, and how their policy will address that. It does not delve into the problematic gas reservation policy, which means the Japanese pay less for Australian gas than Australians do. It also completely ignores how our aging fleet of coal-fired power stations directly contributes to energy instability and the subsequent skyrocketing prices.
The other hot button du jour in Melbourne right now is youth crime. It comes after a spate of machete attacks and thefts in the state, which left many Melbournians rightly horrified, and both the Premier Jacinta Allan and the former Opposition Leader Brad Battin raced each other to the bottom on the ‘tough on crime’ chest thumping and grandstanding.
Premier Allan announced that children who engage in violent crimes will face a lifetime in prison as will those who groom children to engage in violent crime. So Victorian children will not be able to access YouTube or TikTok, but they can be charged for crimes as adults.
Charging children as adults is a violation of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, for what it is worth.
The announcement also flies in the face of all the long-term studies on criminality, recidivism and re-direction. The government’s own research points to child neglect as a causal factor in criminality, so why isn’t that addressed ahead of throwing kids in prison? Sure, it does not sound as vengeful and as alpha aggressive as throwing kids in prison, but it demonstrates considered and measured approaches that are desperately needed in these times of populism.
The selection of Wilson into the top job as leader of the Victorian opposition also smacks of yet another episode of giving women jobs when they are most likely to file- a phenomenon known as the Glass Cliff that sees women more likely to be appointed to leadership positions during crises or periods of poor performance, increasing the risk of failure.
There are many famous examples of this in politics internationally, including Theresa May becoming UK prime miinster to take on the seemingly impossible job of Brexit. And in 2025, we have Sanae Takaichi, who became Japan’s first female prime minister just as the country is facing profound fiscal instability. Closer to home, Carmen Lawance and Joan Kirner became premiers of Western Australia and Victoria, respectively, when their states faced corruption and fiscal crises.
Jess Wilson comes into the role of the leader of the Liberal Opposition at a time when the Liberal Party’s internal polling suggests that the 2026 Victorian state election will be a nuclear holocaust for them.
While the Liberal party implodes and Premier Allan shifts further to the right, shattering what remains of that pesky Overton Window, Victorians are left wondering who will hold the government to account. Is it even a democracy, if only one party is electable?