Paul Austin's piece on Blog-gate in The Age today might as well have been written by Ted Baillieu's office. Rather than navel gazing with Red Ted's lefty fan club at The Age, they'd all do well to read The Australian's observations and to carefully ponder Tandberg's cartoon above and its meaning.
In Austin's hand we see the Baillieu office's first attack on a third person, who curiously is not named but is well known to party insiders.
WHODAT?
His name is Luke Dixon, who works in the private sector but was a former staffer for Phil Barresi, the former member for Deakin until the ETU rolled out an unprecedented campaign blasting him out of office with Mike Symon and more money than has probably ever been spent on a marginal seat excluding of course Millionaire Malcolm Turnbull.
His private emails - which just happened to be sent to the work email of his friends Simon Morgan (Dixon's flat-mate) and John Osborn - have now been published for all the world to see.
It is interesting to contemplate that some in the Liberal party of 2008 are comfortable dishing out individual's emails for public gaze, even if they aren't party staff. I suppose it's no more or less odd than releasing their own staff's private emails. But that's what we're dealing with, a paranoid party leader driven to further and further excesses by his salivating staff.
BAYING FOR BLOOD
The supposedly damning email - that will apparently form the basis of an attempt to expel the young Liberal - expresses a view that is pretty much unanimously held in both sides of politics, that channel deepening in the Port Phillip Bay is good for Victorian export capacity and therefore good for jobs and investment in the state.
No one with any credibility ever opposed that project. Baillieu's bizarre inclination to play footsie with The Age who stupidly campaigned against it for a while inspired understandable contempt not just from the business community but also from unions and from the Labor government.
Baillieu pledged to VECCI and employer groups that he supported the project. He then flip-flopped and sought to support a fear campaign against its possible environmental consequences. He was trying to have it both ways.
The OC regularly reports on conflicts within the ALP on policy issues and often there is dispute among its cultural warriors on environmental issues, as we frequently document. On the channel deepening there was no such conflict, no such problem. It was a good idea that no one with any real clout disputed.
Even the Greens party opposition to it seemed quite muted, which might have something to do with the money they'd squeezed out of the Maritime Union of Australia and other unions who supported it. The Greens party is loyal to that extent apparently, once bought they stay bought. Aspiring developers in Yarra Council take note.
Now Dixon is to be demonised for expressing a rather commonly held view. He is now deemed part of a "cell" or "cancer" operating against the leader of the party of which he is a member. The OC understands he is a target of the Baillieu faction who considers him a rival who should be dispensed with.
THE MADNESS OF KING TED WHO WAS RED AND IS NOW ALL BUT DEAD
And that's what we're seeing here, payback for previous factional battles lost. This is not "cleaning house". It's not achieving anything other than allowing one faction to obtain revenge against another. It presumes the traffic will be all one way in a mud pie throwing contest. A presumption very well rebutted with the embarrassing release of just one email that showed a Liberal Baillieu faction operative Susan Chandler at 104 Exhibition Street describing a Jewish candidate as a "greedy f*cking jew". Her protest that some of her best friends are Jewish was one of the lamest and most pathetic sights of all time only slightly exceeded by Baillieu's refusal to sack her on the spot when confronted by the claims by 3AW's Neil Mitchell.
It's the madness of King Ted, playing out in a very bizarre way.
Baillieu's staff no doubt mean the best for Red Ted, but given his public performance, it is fair enough to closely scrutinise their private efforts. Michael Kapel is his chief of staff, an acolyte of Petro Georgiou, one of the most left-wing Liberal party members running around these days.
A MADDIE IS IN THE HOUSE
Kapel is - and I don't mean this as an insult as it's a description that entirely true of the OC too - a bit of a maddie. He's inclined to go in very hard. (Patriots will recall the Latham Diaries on all this: Keating convinced Latham that those who made a difference in politics were the maddies. Keating described himself as “mad as a cut snake”. He flattered Latham with the thought that he was the same.)
When he edited the Australia Israel Review, a fine publication that does much to inform decision-makers in this country about the Middle East and Israel and Australia's relationship with Israel, he took no prisoners. You think the OC can be unsubtle, we have nothing on the hardman Kapel.
When he was given the names and private particulars and contact details of every member of the rancidly racist Pauline Hanson One Nation party, he didn't mess around. He published the lot, not just the names, the lot, every contact detail, everything.
It was a bridge too far and he eventually had to leave the editorship and by all accounts in the succeeding years did very well in business, importing umbrellas of all things.
But like many of us (presumably every reader of the OC to some extent and certainly its principal author) who savour its delights, his passion is politics. And he was reportedly very excited about the opportunity, arranged through his mentor retro metro Petro, to get back into the cut and thrust of it via Ted's office.
And that's what worries me now. Kapel has many strengths. But subtlety is not one of them. He is a bad-ass. And that quality combined with Ted Baillieu's widely known paranoia about people being out to get him is a potent mixture for further carnage.
AND BEYOND THE CREW, IT'S TED WHO IS REALLY SCREWED
Baillieu is constantly told, Liberal insiders tell us, by those who p*ss in his pocket and lavish him with praise that if only he could bring the Liberal party organisation to heel that he would be well on the way to victory in 2010. Jeff Kennett and Petro Georgiou are the main offenders in this, we understand.
They are no doubt sincere friends of his who wish him well. But they are doing him no favours.
Baillieu supporters tell the OC that Ted's strategy is - on many issues - to outflank Brumby from the left. And we've seen it again and again. Dredging. Public sector pay. Agreeing to teacher union demands before Brumby had. Making public transport free.
It's all very odd because it doesn't play to perceived Liberal strengths in financial management and efficiency in public administration. Ted Baillieu could dress up in his Thomas the Tank Engine costume all day long and never convince anyone that the Libs would spend more than Labor on public transport. But he might be able to convince them he could run it more efficiently. He's even had a good line out there about re-instating the seats in carriages because he opposed "Kosky's cattle class".
And in education. Why on Earth would he been seen to cave in to teacher union pay demands quicker than Brumby? It's so random as to be beyond words. The Liberals will never be seen as more generous in public education but they can play to a strength by focusing on standards and outcomes and accountability for them.
This is not rocket science. If it was a secret formula that I thought only I knew, then I probably wouldn't be putting it on this blog for Ted to read. In the recent sexually harassed cleaner versus the Melbourne Club fight reported in the excellent yarn in the Sunday Herald Sun, we naturally took the cleaner's side. Opposing Ted Baillieu comes just as naturally. Effete, born-to-rule, noblesse oblige do-gooders bleeding heart types who turn a blind eye to anti-semitism in their ranks aren't really what inspires patriots at the OC to do anything other than salute with raised middle finger.
WHEN THE GOING GOT TOUGH, TED GOT GOING BY THRILL KILL
So there we have it.
A weak ineffective leader who is eaten up by paranoia and poorly advised by a staff who think that carrying on a factional vendetta will somehow make their guy look tough. A very random and convoluted way of appearing strong.
He could have looked tough by strongly supporting Port Phillip Bay channel deepening.
He could have looked tough by opposing public sector pay rises in an environment of rising inflation and a seemingly inevitable and imminent economic downturn.
He could have shown strength by clearing out some dead-wood from his front-bench and his party room.
He could have looked tough by doing what people like Andrew Bolt regularly do and opposing what is criticised as trendy lefty police work that lets masked cloaked goons terrorise Melbourne's streets in public protest and permanently injure police officers. Where are the Libs on law and order? Are they really planning on outflanking Rob Hulls to the Left? That'd put them somewhere between the late Lionel Murphy and Karl Marx's left elbow.
THE GHOST OF OPPOSITIONS PAST
It's easy to second guess people in the toughest job in politics, leading Oppositions.
Much of what Brendan Nelson is doing federally seems pretty unimpressive too, despite his political smarts in building a party room majority from nowhere. It's been all downhill from that point, grimly for him. As did the much more substantial Kim Beazley look pretty ordinary too most of the time. Latham fleetingly looked like he was going to set the world on fire until he emerged looking he'd set his hair alight just prior to his spectacular resignation. And of course there was Crean, one of the worst Labor leader's ever who wasn't even given the opportunity by the party to go to an election and reduce it to a handful of seats. Before him was Howard, disastrous Downer, hopeless Hewson and before him Peacock, a man who was so smooth he was human silk but still couldn't quite rise above Keating's insult that he was a "souffle who rose twice". All these immensely talented people were shown up as political duds in the cruelest job going. (In Beazley's case calling him a dud is not fair, he nearly won in '98 and many say is probably the greatest Prime Minister Australia never had)
And just like all of them and Doyle before him, Ted Baillieu is struggling. The frustration is palpable. Like an enraged schoolyard bully who has failed remedial macrame for the third time, he's taking out his frustrations on a bunch of kids in a rival clique whom he initially imagined wouldn't be inclined to ever be fighting back.
Party President David Kemp said:
"What it demonstrates is that there are people who are prepared to pursue personal vendettas at the expense of the party."
Now he was speaking of the apprehended bloggers but the criticism equally applies to Ted Baillieu's odd pursuit of an imaginary "cell" operating he says to destroy him and it's interesting that a number of MPs (even in this current climate of extreme paranoia and jumping at shadows) were willing to make this criticism directly to a journalist Nick Higginbottom at the Herald Sun who wrote:
But many MPs were not so generous. Although pledging their support publicly for Mr Baillieu, many were scathing of his decision to address internal issues in a public manner.
One Liberal Party member said it was "horrifically mishandled" and the party wouldn't recover unless Mr Baillieu fired the people who leaked Liberal state campaign manager Susan Chandler's personal email.
Another described Mr Baillieu's tactics as "an absolute disaster", and said the matter should've been kept in-house.
Hurting weak people who can't or won't fight back is not the kind of strength that will inspire people to see a different Ted Baillieu. It's the Ted Baillieu his factional foes warned us about privately and on the anonymous blog. A paranoid who cannot land punches on John Brumby so aims his fury on his own, a man who is tall but acts quite small, a leader whose party room is in now open revolt and is furiously looking around for clear alternatives who are just not apparent. Yet.
Game on.
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