By Michael Newhouse
THERE was talk of political warfare, a couple of low blows, and maybe even delusions of grandeur, but on the whole last week’s Liberal Party Western campaign launch was a fairly modest, albeit optimistic affair.
Between 40 and 50 of the Liberal Party faithful, including all the upper and most lower house state election candidates, turned out at Essendon Football Club Social Club last Wednesday night to officially launch the party’s campaign for the upper house Western Metropolitan seat.
After the shock Liberal defeat of 1999, no one in the room would have ever imagined seven years ago that the party would now be less than three weeks away from almost certain victory in the Labor heartland that is Melbourne’s West.
But now, thanks to reforms to the upper house, the Liberals are as good as guaranteed at least one upper house spot in the West, with the party hoping it can make it two.
Liberal leader Ted Baillieu was nowhere in sight but State Liberal Party president Russell Hannan was on hand to give the Western launch a bit of muscle.
“The air of excitement sweeping the West is, of course, also due to the fact that the Liberal Party will have a permanent presence in this region on November 25,” Mr Hannan told the gathering last week.
“The tide is going to turn,” Mr Hannan predicted, turning to old war analogies as he described his candidates as “ground-breakers” on the verge of storming the “barricades, sweeping the enemy aside on the western front”.
Although Mr Hannan was a novel drawcard for Liberals in the West not used to seeing such a high profile party member, the loudest voice at the launch came from one-time 3AW broadcaster and former Kennett Government MP Bernie Finn.
Mr Finn, who held the northern seat of Tullamarine until his defeat at the 1999 election, and who is now number one on the Liberal’s upper house Western Metropolitan ticket, pounded the lectern, accusing Labor of taking Melbourne’s West for granted for too long.
“In years gone by… it would be very difficult to get a state president to visit the West, nigh on impossible in fact,” he said.
“What we are seeing now is the beginning of a Liberal revolution in the West and it is being driven by the very people that the Labor Party has depended on,” Mr Finn said.
He forgot to mention the Liberals were also being driven by the very issues on which Labor has depended.
Hospitals, schools, and infrastructure – traditionally Labor vote-winners – were on every Liberal candidate and members’ lips last Thursday night.
An attack on long-serving Keilor MP George Seitz, from Mr Finn – “I really looking forward to asking George Seitz a couple of pertinent questions; whether he will be in any position to understand them is something else all together” – was as low as the night descended.
