Didn’t I tell you three months ago?

If the Liberal party around Australia is buggered, in Victoria, it is totally f—ed…

On Saturday night, Daniel Andrews brazenly went out and took credit for Labor’s thumping election win over the Liberals. Not the Coalition, mind – like their federal counterparts in May, the Nats outperformed the party of Menzies in the state of Menzies.

But Andrews is drinking his own Kool-Aid. He didn’t win the election; his Liberal opponents utterly lost it.

Having been decimated in 2018, and recycling 2018’s failed leader Matthew Guy, the Liberals were outmanned, outgunned, and outperformed.

A campaign brains trust led by a Tasmanian didn’t help. You’d have thought that Tasmanians having two heads would be an advantage, but these two heads had no political brains between them. The Liberal campaign misread mainstream Victorians and played to the obsessions of Spring Street elites, and too little to the lives of High Street families and small businessmen.

As for leadership, Guy was not the right Guy. Instead, he was a left Guy, determined to outflank Labor by being more gung-ho on carbon emissions, social progressivism, and debt-fuelled unaffordable infrastructure and free stuff.

And the party itself, after four miserable years of Danistan, still failed to offer Victorians a coherent plan, a vision for the future, an understanding of who Victorians are, what they aspire to, and what sort of promised land they wanted to lead us into.

Commentators will polemicise and pontificate on the election result. Some will say the Liberals were too conservative, others they were not conservative enough. Some will say a change of leader – with Guy resigning on Sunday – will set the Liberals back on the road to redemption; others that will achieve nothing.

But, for what it’s worth, here’s what this Victorian (as opposed to the horde of out-of-staters claiming to be instant experts on Victorian politics) thinks.

Andrews won because, as I said earlier, the Liberals lost. He won despite his treating Victorians like pawns in his Covid game, despite the harshest lockdowns anywhere in the Western world, despite being a person ‘assisting’ not one but four corruption inquiries. And he won despite swings against Labor in northern and western metropolitan seats.

Despite Andrews’ crowing on election night, his government was on the nose with mainstream Victorians. As any experienced political analyst can tell you, however, to change a government there must be a viable alternative to jump to. Not a least-worst, but better.

There is no way in Hades that Liberals offered Victorian voters that choice. No way whatsoever.

And that reflects, above all, the woeful quality of the team. There were too few frontbench lifters – only health spokesman Georgie Crozier and infrastructure structure spokesman Matthew Bach come to mind – and too many leaners warming seats but doing little else.

As the dust of election night settles, it’s galling that left standing among the ruins are long-serving MPs whose best days are behind them or indeed, never came.

People like David Davis, Kim Wells, David Hodgett, Wendy Lovell: long-serving MPs and one-term ministers whose should have retired at the previous election to make way for fresh blood, fresh ideas, and a fresh start. People who have got so used to Opposition it fits them like a glove they never want to take off. Just as has their whole party room.

These MPs and others should stand aside early in this term, getting talented, enthusiastic new blood into the party room well before the 2026 election. People like Asher Judah and Nicole Werner, who unsuccessfully contested winnable seats on Saturday, who have more than half a brain and can contribute to renewal instead of ongoing decay. And people in the Liberal party generally who won’t stand for Parliament because they loathe the factionalism, the back-stabbing, and the character assassination that too often passes for preselection.

In a threadbare party room after Saturday, especially after losing frontbenchers Nick Wakeling and Louise Staley (although in the latter’s case that’s no great loss), there is no room for passengers. At least these two are being exchanged, subject to the final count, by likely returning Hawthorn MP John Pesutto, and newly elected Kew MP Jess Wilson. Pesutto is a pragmatic moderate but economically dry: he is accepted and respected across the party’s broad church and, unlike most of his colleagues, he can do policy and work hard. In the absence of any competent alternatives, he should be made leader should he be returned. Wilson is canny, whip-smart, and can also do policy: she is a future leader and – stuff seniority – should go straight to the frontbench.

Another new MP, tennis player Sam Groth, should be given a frontbench run once he finds his feet. And in terms of making the best of what they’ve got, Brad Rowswell, a young MP who won a significant swing after a knife’s-edge 2018, is another who deserves his chance to shine.

In short, policy is a big problem, but without enough good people nothing will change. There needs to be a prompt clean-out of the dead wood in the state parliamentary party and the Victorian Liberal organisation. Fly-ins from Tasmania, a state where, thanks to its bizarre electoral system, the Liberals need to be Labor in all but name, were never the solution in Victoria. MPs whose best days are behind them should take their pensions and move on.

And did I mention the base? Decent, industrious people with small-c conservative values and real-life experience in life and business, possessing a wealth of expertise and insight, but treated like children by a patronising party room, and deemed only good for buying raffle tickets and manning polling booths. Instead of being treated like the proverbial, the membership needs to be brought into the policy and decision-making processes beyond debating State Council motions that are never honoured, and policy forums that are ignored by the parliamentary leadership.

Furthermore, the party hierarchy’s idiotic decision to preference the Greens for, as it’s turned out, no political gain, was a blatant kick in the small-c conservative grass-roots’ guts, and highlighted the party’s putting opportunism over principle.

Get the leadership right, get the personnel right, get the party culture right. Do that and the Vic Libs might start back from the brink. Once they do, only then can they get the policies right.

Much is being said about the Victorian Liberals being in government for only four of the 23 years since 1999. That’s bad enough, but they’ve been in office for only 11 of the last 40 years since Lindsay Thompson lost to Labor in 1982. Now another four years will be added to Labor’s already-crushing tally, and likely at least another four after that. Nearly half a century of utter Labor domination of what was once the jewel in the Liberal crown.

If the Liberal party is to survive in its foundation state, it must start changing now. Or die.