Who’s to blame for the dismal drubbing of the Victorian Liberals in the state election? That depends on who you ask. A month ago, NSW Treasurer and Minister for Energy Matt Kean was keen, so to speak, to take credit for shaping Victoria’s policies. In an interview with his Victorian counterparts deputy leader David Southwick and shadow minister for the environment James Newbury, the latter explained how he consulted Kean before he announced the plan to legislate an emissions reduction target of 50 per cent by 2030.

‘You can see your advice in the way we’ve shaped our policy,’ Newbury told Kean. ‘You can see how we have looked to NSW and your successes and it won’t be the end of it. We’re going to pinch from you a little bit more’.

The same week the Victorian Coalition announced a policy to spend $50m boosting the uptake of low-emission cars, including 600 new charging stations surpassing Kean, who announced $39.4m to introduce 500 charging stations in NSW the same day.

Former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull takes credit for getting the Guardian Australia going but he must not have been reading on 28 October when Newbury, Kean and Southwick went public with their bromance. This week, Turnbull tweeted that at the heart of the Liberal party’s defeat in Victoria was the ‘paradox’ that ‘in the most small “l” liberal state in Australia, the Liberal party has been taken over by the hard right’ and was therefore at odds with the electorate whose support it seeks.

In fact, the opposite happened. Victorian Liberal leader Matthew Guy, who has now resigned, is a conservative but his policies were emerald green, designed to appeal to wealthy voters in blue-ribbon Liberal seats who might be toying with voting teal. To that extent they succeeded. Former federal Liberal treasurer Josh Frydenberg believes his chances of winning back his seat in the next election have been boosted by the Liberal defeat of teals in the state seat of Kew and a likely victory in Hawthorn, which overlap his seat of Kooyong which he lost to teal Monique Ryan in May. Hope is also apparently springing in Liberal breasts in Higgins and Goldstein.

There’s just one flaw in this policy. Unless the Liberals can craft policies that appeal to suburban families, tradies and small businesses they cannot win government at either the state or federal level.

Those who imagine that the Victorian election was a referendum on the premier’s management of the pandemic or his popularity are wrong. No doubt Andrews harsh, ruinous and ultimately futile pursuit of zero Covid – donut days when there were no Covid cases – lost him some voters. But the irony is that the people who were most fed up with Donut Dan didn’t vote in the election, they voted with their feet. Almost half a million Australians moved during the pandemic and Victoria was the biggest loser, its population declining by almost 50,000 to less than 6.6 million.

This certainly made a difference in an election where seven seats are still too close to call. In the seat of Pakenham, for example, Liberal David Farrelly trails Labor’s Emma Vulin by eight votes. Yet the reality is that it won’t change the outcome or the reason the Liberals lost.

Yes, statewide, Labor’s primary vote fell by almost 6 per cent and it suffered double digits swings in Melbourne’s north and west, but the number one concern of ordinary people was the cost of living. For those voters, Liberal policies making electric cars cheaper makes a mockery of their struggle to pay bills.

For the time being, John Howard’s battlers have put their faith in Labor’s in renewable energy policies bringing down power prices because that is what they have been told by almost everyone – including the Liberals. But they prefer Labor’s policy because of Andrews’ promise to bring back the State Electricity Commission, hoping that, regardless of the cost of power, the state government will keep prices down.

And why wouldn’t voters think that? Already under Labor, Victoria’s debt has ballooned to be larger than the combined total of NSW, Queensland and Tasmania in both nominal terms and as a share of gross state product. Indeed, by the time Victorians go to the polls again in 2026 it is projected to be larger than any other state or territory on both measures.

Yet however profligate Labor is, Victoria will be propped up, via the distribution of the GST, by the mining wealth generated in Western Australia and Queensland – two states which have exploited their gas reserves rather than lock them up as Victorian premiers have done, most of the time, on both sides of the aisle, in pursuit of renewable energy follies.

Victoria’s ruling elite dwell at the Paris end of Collins Street. It brings to mind Buenos Aires that has always styled itself as the Paris of South America. Worryingly, Andrews seems to be pursuing big-spending Peronist-style policies, carving out an ever-bigger role for the state, while wooing corporates and the unions. Peronism is extremely popular in Argentina – that’s the whole point – but it drives massive inflation and always end up bankrupting the country.

There is an ominous message in the Victorian election for NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet who goes to the polls on 25 March.  Like Guy, he is a man of the right rolling out policies of the left. After three terms in government, there is a real risk that voters will opt for a fresh-faced Labor leader, untainted by the corruption that lost Labor power 12 years ago, offering the same green-left policies.

In the wake of the election defeat last weekend, one ex-Victorian tweeted, ‘Very happy I got the hell out of Victoria. Australia’s California… where is our Florida?’ The truth is that there is no Florida. No Ron DeSantis.

The whole of Australia is California, cue the brownouts. Had the Liberals won last week, they wanted car number plates to say ‘Victoria: Open for Business’. A better slogan regardless of who won would be, ‘Victoria: the virtue-signalling state’.