‘Where’s the sausage?’ I asked my wife as we lined up at the local primary school to exercise our democratic franchise in the great state of Victoria.

I’m pretty sure some number plates call Victoria ‘The Garden State’. (Or maybe that’s Queensland. Also – I don’t care.) The school where we were queueing certainly had nice gardens.

‘I wish we were wealthy so we could send our kids to a school with nice gardens,’ my wife said.

I laughed one of those knowing laughs that husbands do when internally regretting that they’re not stonking rich. ‘Just you wait until my collection of occasional pieces sells 10 million copies, then you’ll see,’ I didn’t say, but thought to myself, before my powers of concentration returned to the issue of sausages.

‘There must be a sausage around here somewhere,’ I muttered darkly beneath a beetling brow.

‘There’s no sausage,’ my wife said.

The sausages had apparently gone the way of the Liberal party, canned for lack of market demand. That or Daniel Andrews had them socialised. (Did the Liberal party socialise itself, or get socialised? Their policies looked pretty socialist to me. Or maybe they’re just anti-social policies.)

Matthew Guy – or ‘Matt’, as he kept insisting we call him – certainly didn’t need a sausage, having earlier filled up on ethically sourced lobster. Incidentally, free sausages would have been a more effective policy pledge than the entire slate of Liberal party proposals.

Anyway, it wasn’t much of a day for people who don’t like big government. But we all knew that was going to be the case well in advance.

Sausage-less, I trudged up to the polling booth (do we call them ‘polling booths’ in Australia?) and grumpily grabbed my upper and lower house ballot papers. The lower house one was easy enough to fill in: one for least worst (Liberals), eight for most worst (Greens). Liberals and Labor weren’t giving me a sausage, but at least they weren’t offering me a vegan one.

The upper house ballot paper was a different matter. With about forty-five parties competing over two seats, you’d have to be overburdened with time – or a complete psychopath – to actually know who you were ranking above whom. I usually wriggle off a shoe when I need to count above ten, so thinking about that many parties at once can be a vertiginous experience for me. As I stood there with furrowed brow, my mind wandered to alternative and more serious uses for the upper house ballot paper. Maybe I could wrap my Christmas presents in this? I thought.

Soon enough I gave up on the whole below-the-line voting wheeze of pretending I knew the difference between the fascist party and the vegetarian party. I pencilled the Liberal Democrats for my top preferences, then the Liberals for the remainder. I like the Liberal Democrats. As dyed-in-the-wool libertarians who’d prefer the government didn’t even pick up our rubbish bins, they largely share my values. They also get about the same number of votes I get. They’re so much against government coercion, their candidates don’t even want you to vote for them.

Finally, I plonked my ballot papers into the cardboard box and toddled off home with the wife to cook my own sausage.

I’m not a complete creep, so I didn’t watch much election coverage that night. Like most Saturdays, I was in bed by 9pm. My eyes flickered open soon before midnight and I checked the results: Labor landslide.

Completely unsurprised, I went back to sleep.

How did Victoria come to this? I don’t mean how did Victoria actually come to this – we all know how that happened. Daniel Andrews might look like a jug-eared praying mantis in a suit (with only marginally less creepy eyes), but he’s the best politician in the country. He’s mastered the trick of stealing the money we don’t have to buy us more things we don’t need, while sternly telling us it’s for our own good. Good work if you can get away with it. And he can.

Against this the Liberals put up a chap – or guy – who is precisely as charismatic and generic as his surname suggests. Having put up such a sporting performance in 2018, the Liberals thought they’d give the guy another go, which tells you something about the depth and breadth of talent in the Victorian Liberal party.

For a while there, it seemed like the erstwhile member for Kew, one Timothy Colin Smith, might be the Liberals next best – last? – hope for leader of the opposition. Smithy is a big rich well-fed bloke with an expensive education and the right sort of resume for a Liberal leader. Surely, we thought for a spell, he’ll be able to steady the Victorian ship of state.

Well, given how steady his hands appear to have been in command of his own motor vehicle, it’s probably best he wasn’t captaining the ship. In Tim’s defence, he was drunk, which is how I’d prefer our legislators to be most of the time. (I’m something of a traditionalist on this score. If memory serves, Edmund Barton was once carried out of the House of Representatives for being too shickered.)

Answering the question ‘How did Victoria get here?’ would require me to be a more intelligent and serious person than I am. But if I had to wager a fiver on the answer, I’d say it’s something to do with the fact that the Liberals in Victoria are a good-for-nothing party. They failed with the whole law-and-order schtick in 2018 before ‘Matt’ Guy tried out the old wardrobe-switcheroo in 2022 – offering Labor-lite policies and truncating his name (‘I’m familiar and relatable – just like Dan!’)

In a state as ‘progressive’ – or just plain kooky – as Victoria, the Liberals’ only chance is returning to the Jeff Kennett playbook. Sure, Jeff looks like a Dickensian villain, but Dickensian villains at least have panache. Jeff was a bit of a good-time guy. So far as I can tell, his main policy priority was being pro-getting rich and otherwise leaving people alone.

In a state full of champagne socialists, Daniel Andrews certainly offers the socialist – but it’s Liberals like Jeff who supply the champagne.