The day after his crushing defeat at the last state election, Matthew Guy knew where he needed to go. While votes were still being counted to tabulate a disastrous campaign for the Victorian Liberal Party, he tossed some clothes in a bag, filled up the car and started driving towards a place he had always associated with long summers and happier times: Golden Beach.
Golden Beach is a tiny coastal settlement of fewer than 300 people about halfway along Gippsland’s Ninety Mile Beach. It is a place where the vast expanse of sand and timeless swell of the Southern Ocean can make even life-shaping events seem small; a perfect setting to confront the pain, humiliation and self-doubt that comes from being so publicly and emphatically rejected.
Matthew Guy conceding defeat in 2018.Credit:Chris Hopkins
Guy knew this wouldn’t be a quick or easy process. On the drive out of Melbourne, just as the last of the suburban estates give way to farmland along the Princes Freeway, he pulled off the highway into a KFC to grab something to eat. Normally, a politician would be safe from interrogation at a roadside fast food joint. On this day, everyone in the restaurant wanted to talk about the election. Everyone but the man who’d just lost it.
As he walked back to the car, he felt dozens of eyes boring into the back of his head.
Bill Shorten describes recovering from an election as a form of mourning. “You can’t outrun the pain, you can’t outswim the waves of grief,” he explained after his own election defeat in 2019. For Guy, the recovery meant two months away from the city walking along the beach, rediscovering with his three boys the Gippsland country he knew from his childhood and bushwalking through the High Country. “I would live in Gippsland tomorrow if I wasn’t a politician,” he says. “That’s where I feel emotionally and sentimentally attached to.”
There were also nights spent around the fire at Golden Beach with his most trusted parliamentary colleagues, talking through his options to quit or remain in politics and his prospects, if he did stay, of one day returning to the leadership and perhaps, becoming premier.
It was during one of these nights that Guy revealed how deeply his loss to Daniel Andrews had cut. Tim Smith had driven across from Melbourne, Bill Tilley was down from Albury and Guy’s brother Darren was there with Joey, Guy’s oldest son. “Matthew didn’t want the leadership back,” says Tilley, a Liberal MP who entered parliament in 2006, the same year as Guy. “He was very reluctant, he’d had his go. He said: ‘I never, ever want to pick up the phone again and concede to Daniel Andrews.’”
When Guy is asked about this, he confirms the conversation. He also alludes to, but does not spell out, something the premier said to him on election night when Guy called to concede. The phone call was brief but whatever passed between the two men still rankles. “I’d rather not go into it, but he is not a gracious man,” Guy says flatly. “I won’t be doing it a second time.”
Yet if the opinion poll published by The Age at the start of the campaign proves an accurate guide, Guy will not only be calling Andrews again on November 26, he’ll be calling earlier in the night than he did four years ago.
Back behind the wheel: Can Matthew Guy’s bid for the premiership end differently this time?Credit:Jason South
On election night in 2018, when Labor trounced the Guy-led opposition to finish with a majority of 18 seats, the combined primary vote of the Coalition parties was 35 per cent. According to a Resolve Political Monitor poll taken at the start of this campaign, it was sitting on a dismal 31 per cent. Strategists from both major parties expect this number to lift by polling day and recent polls suggest the margin between the Coalition and Labor is narrowing. But as things stand, Matthew Guy is driving the Liberals towards a brick wall and more than likely, the end of his political career.
Whatever possessed him to take the wheel again?
Guy smiles politely at the question. The opposition leader is sitting in the Collins Street office of the Liberal Party, an organisation which once dominated the political affairs of Victoria but since the turn of this century, has spent all but four years out of government.
He is dressed in the uniform of the modern, professional political operative – dark chinos, sports coat over an open-neck shirt and R.M. Williams boots – but is cut from a different cloth to past Liberal leaders. Where Jeff Kennett, Robert Doyle, Ted Baillieu, Denis Napthine and Michael O’Brien all attended private schools and had professional careers respectively as ad men, teachers, architects and lawyers, Guy went to Montmorency High and never had eyes for anything other than politics.
Guy traces this fascination to his mother’s side of the family, which fled Soviet Ukraine to the Latrobe Valley, and his father’s best friend Wally, a Polish immigrant who endured the horrors of the Nazi occupation.
Wally was seven years old when the Nazis murdered his parents in front of his eyes. Until his death in 1991, he carried a bullet scar from being shot in the back when he was swimming across a river. In Melbourne, he worked as a signalman at Spotswood station and bonded with Guy’s father Chris over their shared love of trains. “I remember him giving me a Liberal Party badge, which I wore to school in 1983, I suspect back then much to my parents’ shock,” Guy laughs.
“I have wanted to be the premier of Victoria since I was in early high school,” he says. “I used to write it on my schoolbooks: ‘Matt Guy for premier.’ It’s not a flash-in-the-pan desire. I have great ambition for my state. I’ve always loved Victoria, it’s something I’ve always believed in.
“When I worked for Jeff Kennett – I know Labor make an effort of pointing this out – what he did was return pride to the state. What I’m obsessed with is making our state confident. There’s issues of the day – fixing the health system, ending debt, cutting taxation – all of that. But I want Victorians to feel pride in who they are, in what we are, as a state.”
It is a more positive pitch than the Liberal Party presented to voters four years ago, when cartoonish scare campaigns about ethnic gangs in the suburbs and gender theory in schools overshadowed more substantial policies aimed at decentralising Victoria’s population and easing the squeeze on a fast-growing city.
The most damning critique of that campaign came from inside the party, with a review by Liberal elder Tony Nutt finding that many people didn’t know what Guy or the Liberals stood for. It found that on polling day, a staggering 17 per cent of voters – about one in every six – didn’t know who Guy was.
Those who did recognised him as the lobster guy – the opposition leader who unwittingly sat down for a seafood lunch with a Calabrian businessman suspected by law enforcement agencies of being a mob boss – or a former planning minister who presided over dubious rezoning decisions at Phillip Island and Fisherman’s Bend and approval of CBD skyscrapers on the banks of the Yarra. Although the details of those decisions were already hazy in the minds of voters four years ago and more so now, Guy has never quite shaken the impression of a gladhand too eager to accommodate property developers and party donors.
However, the change of tone and substance in this campaign does not, in itself, explain why Guy is back leading the Liberals. We need to go back to Golden Beach and the tumultuous years in and out of COVID lockdown to understand an unlikely political resurrection.
A vision for Victoria
“Brad, don’t be f---ing stupid. No way. Don’t do it.”
Bill Tilley’s advice to Brad Battin, when the Gembrook MP called him in March 2021 to inform him of his plan to challenge O’Brien for the Liberal leadership, was typically blunt. Tilley remembers receiving the call from Battin when he was having a smoke in the parking lot behind his Albury electorate office. He recalls: “My next call was to Matthew. He said, ‘you f---ing what?’ ”
Battin had blindsided Guy, his chief numbers man Tim Smith and Liberal powerbrokers such as Kennett, who were variously trying to convince the former leader to put his hand up for the top job. Victoria at the time was out of lockdown but on a knife-edge, with the Andrews government pursuing a hardline, zero-COVID strategy until the federal government’s troubled vaccine rollout was complete.
“I felt something had to happen,” Battin tells The Age. “Matthew was still shell-shocked and I don’t blame him. We all know it was a woeful result in 2018 and every time he thought about it, he thought ‘do I want to go through it again?’
“That is a huge question to ask yourself. In saying that, Matthew’s always had a vision of what he sees for Victoria in the future. I don’t think he ever lost the concept of what he could do if he was premier. I had a conversation with him and said ‘if you are going to put your hand up, I will back you.’ Then I said ‘if it is not going to happen, I will do it’.”
Matthew Guy with his erstwhile spruiker-in-chief Tim Smith. Credit:Paul Jeffers
The failed Battin challenge cleaved the Liberal Party into three factions; those backing O’Brien, those supporting Battin and those willing Guy’s return. It was an inherently unstable peace, with O’Brien unable to unite the party, Battin not seen as a credible alternative and Guy unconvinced about whether he wanted his old job back. Guy says that at the time, he expected O’Brien to lead the party to the next election.
This is what he told O’Brien over a lunch of Peking duck when he and Smith met with the opposition leader in May at Bamboo House, a Chinatown restaurant. O’Brien left the lunch thinking he had Guy’s backing. Four months later, with Melbourne back in lockdown and the public mood increasingly mutinous, Guy’s supporters called for a spill and O’Brien was dumped as leader.
“The party just needed to be held by the shoulders, sat down in a chair and get on with the job,” Guy says. “The state desperately needs a change of government. I believed then, as I believe now, that the best person to lead the party to do it was me. You don’t lose that fire and I hadn’t lost it. I just felt we have got to get our show on the road. We’ve got to move on and we’ve got to beat this guy.”
Guy took nearly three years to come to this realisation. His retreat at Golden Beach convinced him that his future, however unclear, remained in politics. For the 18 months which followed, his self-imposed stint on the backbench – his first since he entered parliament at the age of 32 – allowed him to reconnect with the lives of constituents and his own family in a way that can be difficult when you are on a political fast track.
Throughout Melbourne’s first long lockdown, he helped supervise remote learning and saw first hand what social isolation meant for school-aged kids. During his allotted hour of exercise time he would walk along a grassy reserve that borders a creek near his Templestowe home, talking to local traders whose businesses were failing and community members in despair. “You would hear an overwhelming number of constituent issues and inquiries. Everything was local. It made me, as a politician, more appreciative of where I live. People here don’t work for the government, they work for themselves. Many are first-generation Australians.”
Louise Staley supported O’Brien’s leadership but would regularly talk to Guy on the phone when he was out on his walks. She notes that when he returned as leader, he passed on the big office next to the party room, so he could stay in the parliamentary annex building with his fellow MPs. She says he is more consultative and clear-headed than he was. “I think this time round Matthew is more sure of the Victoria he wants to build,” she says. “I don’t think it was just having gone away and thought about it after the last election. He has been profoundly changed, as have many people, by the experience of his family and community over COVID.”
For Guy, these experiences prompted an impassioned speech he delivered to parliament on September 4, 2020. Victoria was in the depths of its longest lockdown and the Andrews government needed law changes to keep its COVID restrictions in place. In his speech, which has since been viewed nearly 2 million times on social media, Guy railed, accusing the government of centralising power under its COVID response and the Premier of refusing to accept responsibility for the policy failures which led to Melbourne spending months in lockdown while the rest of Australia was largely COVID-free.
“If anything characterises the soul of this government it’s the fact that they see this more than anything as a PR problem, and not as a problem that is destroying our state, our economy, our mental health, our children’s education,” he said. “Take some responsibility for what is happening in this state. For what they are doing to our children, our elderly. Take some responsibility, we say to the Premier.”
Guy says the speech was unscripted and from the heart. It was also the moment he decided that, if O’Brien wanted him to, he would return to the front bench. “I resolved from that time that I needed to do something. I wanted to make sure whatever role I played, it was playing a role in this government’s removal from power.”
If his maternal grandparents had arrived in Victoria at another time, Guy might have ended up a Labor supporter. All the men on his mother’s side of the family worked blue-collar jobs in the coal-fired power stations of the Latrobe Valley. His grandfather was a fitter and turner at the Yallourn W station, his uncle Vic was a foreman at the same plant and his other uncle Nick was an electrician at the Hazelwood station, which was decommissioned five years ago. His mother Vera was working as a telephone exchange girl in Moe when she met his father Chris, a local radio announcer on 3UL Warragul, on a blind date. Matthew was christened in Yallourn, right next to the cemetery where his grandparents are buried. It is a working class, classically Labor pedigree.
Instead, when his family settled in the Latrobe Valley in the postwar years, the ALP was split over whether to accommodate or denounce Communism. For a family fleeing Ukraine, where the great famine caused by Stalin’s forced collectivisation of farms and the brutal suppression of religion were seared into memory, the idea of any Australian political party playing footsie with the murderous Soviet regime was anathema.
Yallourn Power Station in 1960.Credit:State Electricity Commission
“People have come from Eastern Europe, where you can’t get married, where they bulldoze the church you go to in front of your eyes, they tear up gravestones that have a crucifix on them,” says Guy. “We’ve now come to this new country, we’re given the right to vote and suddenly this, these people are saying we want to pursue relationships with the Soviet Union?”
While he is talking about this, Guy pulls out his phone to show the village of Novoselivka, outside Kharkiv, where his family still has a farm. It is from there that Guy’s cousin Alina texted him during question time earlier this year, on the first day of Russia’s invasion. “It has started,” she wrote.
Savings ... and costs
Victoria’s electricity assets were sold by the Kennett government to reduce the state’s debt – a debt dwarfed as a proportion of the economy by the $165.4 billion Victoria is now forecast to owe by 2026, the year of the next election. One of the Andrews government’s boldest promises in this campaign is to recreate the State Electricity Commission and establish a state-controlled renewable power company bankrolled by a $1 billion government investment. Guy says that in the Latrobe Valley, no one is buying it. “People in the valley are sick of being led on by governments,” he says.
If the people in the Latrobe Valley feel they are being sold a pup, they are not alone. With Victoria’s net debt already greater than NSW, Queensland and Tasmania combined, there is a fiscal unreality to the election campaigns being waged by both major parties.
Guy nominates his pledge not to build the Suburban Rail Loop as his single biggest saving measure, but promising to spend borrowed money on something else – in Guy’s case, hospitals and healthcare – cannot be counted as a genuine saving. In the meantime, the opposition is offering $2 train tickets and half-price V-Line fares, free public transport for nurses, tax cuts for tradies, payroll tax cuts for small and family businesses and a moratorium on stamp duty for first home buyers.
When asked about fiscal repair, Guy says Victoria needs a “growth-led recovery” and argues that Kennett-style austerity wouldn’t work today. In response, the ALP is running a scare campaign claiming that the “Cuts Guy” is secretly planning to do it anyway.
The return of Guy to the Liberal leadership has already come at significant cost. O’Brien, a former treasurer who, had he stayed leader, could have credibly campaigned on stability and fiscal responsibility, tried to walk a tightrope between supporting Victoria’s public health response while challenging the government’s excesses. Instead, he was torn down just as the government was abandoning its ill-fated pursuit of COVID-zero. Tim Smith, having pushed for Guy’s return to the leadership long before even Guy was convinced, should have been his consigliere. Instead, within two months of Guy regaining the leadership, Smith blew up his own career by crashing his car while drunk.
Guy’s rebooted leadership – and any prospect he had of effectively campaigning against Labor on integrity issues – was in turn dented by revelations that he was aware his former chief of staff, Mitch Catlin, tried to strike a side deal with a wealthy party donor to augment his salary. The last polls taken while O’Brien was leader showed the opposition within striking distance; Guy would dearly love to have those numbers now.
It is enough for one of Guy’s supporters to say he should never have agreed to take the leadership back. “It was the dumbest thing. There were so many people who were in to him, telling him all these theories about why he was going to win.” This goes to the heart of what some of Guy’s allies describe as his weakness as leader; the difficulty he has in saying no.
Guy warns that after 20 years of Labor domination, Victoria is showing troubling signs of becoming a one-party state and the only people who can change that are the 4.4 million Victorians registered to vote. But to vote for change, they need a viable alternative.
Do they see that in Matthew Guy?
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2022-11-11 18:55:00Z
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