Over the weekend, the Melbourne media were full of fevered speculation that a challenge to struggling Victorian Liberal and Coalition Leader, John Pesutto, could be mounted as early as this Tuesday, but certainly in the coming weeks or months.

All that’s missing is a declared challenger. Pesutto’s rival, Shadow Police Minister and former Plod, Brad Battin, has ruled himself out, albeit with sly ‘never say never’ words. Another speculated candidate, Shadow Treasurer Brad Rowswell, also has dodged the question while a third, former professional tennis player and commentator Sam Groth, has gone to ground and thus seems the most likely challenger.

I’ve been a Victorian Liberal for two decades. I’ve stood unsuccessfully for preselection (deluded fool that I am) several times, on the basis of being non-aligned factionally. But lately, I’ve come to realised I’m indeed a member of a faction.

The Competence Faction. MPs who are competent, diligent, and capable of making a genuine policy contribution are MPs I will happily align with. It doesn’t matter how moderate or conservative they are, it’s their ability to get rid of Victoria’s incubus of a Labor government that counts. The two speculated leadership candidates, Rowswell and Groth, and a third who’s not so far been mentioned, Jess Wilson, are eligible to join the Competence Faction.

Rowswell is a hard-working, personable, media-savvy frontbencher who can actually do policy. He is popular among the wider party membership, and has the potential to at least get the warring moderate and conservative interests to work together, if not unite, in a common cause. But he is only a second-term MP who needs more parliamentary and party experience under his belt to be ready-made and seasoned leadership material. Time as deputy is my suggestion.

Groth is a strong media and public performer because that’s where he came from. His tennis career and public profile give him a back story that none of his colleagues and rivals can match. But he was only elected in November 2022 and has been there a political equivalent of ten minutes. He’s also unproven on policy, political management and team leadership.

Wilson is Shadow Education and Finance Minister. Her likeability and political pedigree, as daughter of a highly-respected former state MP with a highly impressive pre-parliament CV, makes her a standout talent in a denuded parliamentary talent pool with the depth of a Peppa Pig muddy puddle. But she is like Groth: elected only in November 2022. Wilson needs time, political experience, and proof her talents translate to effective policy and parliamentary performance, to be considered true foreman material.

If any of these three come to the Victorian Liberal leadership now, they would come to the job far too soon. The state Labor machine, backed by a partisan bureaucracy, stuffed with brutal political operatives, and resourced by its union mates, would run riot and these good prospects for a future Liberal revival would be both burned off and burned out. The Liberals can’t afford to lose any of this trio if they are to have any prospect of winning the 2030 Victorian election, let alone in 2026.

It will dismay many readers to hear this, but the best thing for the Vic Libs to do is to leave Pesutto in post until considerably closer to the next state election. It is not worth the risk of throwing fresh talent to the wolves while the state is still in the first half of the current political cycle, and voters are switched off.

But to earn any survival, Pesutto needs to face realities and change. The recent resignations of his unpopular chief-of-staff and media director show a willingness to clean up the mess which is the leader’s office. It is, however, only a start.

Tapping into the innately conservative nature of the Victorian electorate in terms of policies is way overdue. Contrary to the Daniel Andrews-Jacinta Allan political myth-making, Victorians aren’t ultra-progressive. There’s much community disquiet on social and green issues and what our kids are taught about them. People are worried that too much attention is paid to redressing the grievances of Aboriginal activists, symbolised by the banishment of the Victorian flag by the Aboriginal banner in front of schools and state public buildings. And people are wising up to the crippling costs and debt caused by Labor’s mismanagement and unaffordable infrastructure programs, especially the boondoggle pie-in-the-sky that is the proposed Suburban Rail Loop.

Cleaning out the Augean stables of the Liberal party room wouldn’t hurt either. There are too many passengers, factional hacks, time-servers, and extinct volcanoes wasting parliamentary space better occupied by up-and-comers with drive and ability. They should be tapped on the shoulder to go at the next election, if not before, and surely won’t be missed.

Most importantly, however, Pesutto needs to staunch the needless and oh-so-avoidable bleeding from his Moira Deeming fiasco. His rush to judgment in the wake of that fateful Let Women Speak rally wrongly and unfairly tarred Deeming and others with a very ugly brush, and denied them the very Liberal principles of presumption of innocence, natural justice, procedural fairness, and unfettered right-of-reply. Even if major errors of judgment were made by Deeming and others as well as him – and they most certainly were – Pesutto must show political and personal courage to admit his own, make sincere public apologies, and settle the ever-widening litigation that has sent the Victorian opposition totally off-course.

Pesutto is a moderate, but he has a policy brain and knows his party and, in spite of his stubbornness on Deeming, is a decent man. If he is brave and honourable enough to take that step he would not only buy his own leadership time, but ensure his eventual successors have a better shot of winning government from an incompetent, but arrogantly smug and complacent, Labor. He can do it.

So parliamentary Liberals, hold your leadership fire, form the Competent Faction and sort yourselves out, pronto. You owe it to your party, and to all Victorians.

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