The Herald Sun posted a non-April Fools’ piece on April 1 suggesting that the findings of an investigation ‘could deliver a devastating blow to Labor’s election hopes’.

Really?

I’m not sure I believe that.

Something tells me Labor could have spent the Easter break putting bunnies in a blender and leaving Alien face-hugger eggs on the Easter Hunt and the polls would remain exactly the same, bolted in place by mysterious forces.

Victoria is the Bermuda Triangle of Australian politics.

Every good idea sinks when it crosses the border. The focus groups point in strange directions. And no one can get out. But if you ask the so-called experts, they will tell you nothing’s wrong.

Something is wrong.

Take the week leading up to the Easter holidays as an example.

It is almost certainly the case that the Liberal preselection fiasco between the Moderates and Moira Deeming received more press coverage than any of Labor’s serious misdeeds.

Not just press coverage – it was social media noise screaming in the ears of voters.

This is the most damaging sort of engagement because online groups form collective political opinions and then hold them tightly. One Nation should cut the Moderates a cheque for all the free advertising.

By trying to remove Moira Deeming, the Victorian Liberals publicised their intention to purge the party of conservatives who still believe in biological reality and traditional values. That has become the definition of their Fresh Start! slogan.

Opinion polls support this, documenting a walk-away from the Liberals straight to One Nation, even though Moira Deeming has managed to retain the top spot. (It was not as if the Liberal Party had a revelation or learned a lesson. They were defeated by their own shambolic incompetency.)

The Moira Deeming saga is certainly an aspect of the party’s problems, but by no means is it the source. They haven’t been in power since 2014 and not even the appalling government of Daniel Andrews, which became a global lesson in what not to do in a crisis, was reason enough to switch over to the conservatives.

And it is not as though Victorians are enjoying themselves.

The post-Covid businesses wipeout was brutal. Those that survived have been taxed into misery. There are youths roaming the streets with machetes. Mobs storming shops believing theft is a legitimate form of reparation for something that never happened in this country. Tens of thousands of protesters screeching for the global intifada or clutching the disguised flags of Islamic terror groups. Marches demanding literal race taxes branded as sinister Pay the Rent activism. The whole place is an unsafe, economically decrepit, socially unstable nightmare at war with itself and the Enlightenment.

It looks nothing like the Victoria of the 1990s.

That Victoria has been dead so long there’s an entire voting generation unaware of what was lost.

This bizarre political landscape of Victoria raises a few questions.

How bad does the Jacinta Allan leadership need to be for voters to hand power to the Coalition?

Victorian Labor already have the worst finances in the country, so why can’t the Coalition win an economic argument?

Why didn’t the machete wars dent the Labor vote?

If conservatism is ‘dying’ in Victoria, why is One Nation on the rise and sitting within one percentage point of the Coalition?

Are conservative voters still voting Labor, and if so, why?

If these questions cannot be answered, Jess Wilson will become another seat warmer for the doomed Coalition.

The political experts don’t have the faintest clue what’s going on in Victoria, so I decided to ask Victorians on X and Facebook what their feelings were coming up to the state election at the end of the year.

Here are some common observations.

Overwhelmingly, former Liberal voters said they were ‘fed-up’ and intend to vote for One Nation. The vibe for this in Victoria is a little different to the other states in that conservatives can find nothing of value when it comes to the Liberals. Most expressed having no idea what they stood for. They said there was no plan. And the only talking points they had heard matched the Labor Party or had flip-flopped in recent months. The Voice was offered as one example, where there was a level of unease expressed at having a leader who originally supported the obviously anti-conservative position.

A note to One Nation here, of the nearly thousand comments we have received so far across these platforms, there were many saying they wanted to vote for One Nation but had to vote Liberal because there was no local candidate.

The consensus from these replies that there was effectively no Liberal Party is hard to validate in print, but it is definitely a widespread opinion. Sort of like the perception of bias at the ABC.

A few life-long Liberal voters described their reluctance to vote for the Victorian party because it is in a ‘shambles’. They listed the revolving door of leaders and bewildering factional fighting which nobody outside the party can understand.

Others complained that if they are going to adopt similar left-leaning ‘globalist’ policies to Labor, they might as well vote Labor because they were apparently better able to handle the unions. One person even described the party as ‘rotting from the inside out’.

The leadership executive was, in their opinion, ‘lazy, arrogant, and patronising’.

‘Labor deserve to lose, but the Liberals don’t deserve to win.’ This comment summed up the general response.

There are nuances, of course, with quite a few business owners saying they were in such a dire financial position that they intended to vote Liberal to avoid splitting the vote. They did not see how they could survive another term of Labor. What are the Liberals offering them, other than the absence of Labor? That is hard to quantify. Hope?

Quite a few people genuinely asked what the Liberals would change if they were in power. That the answer isn’t clear is probably part of the problem.

‘They have no strength or vision. They do not defend our identity or culture, small businesses or the economy.’

Winning back a state can definitely be done. Liberal Leader David Crisafulli won Queensland off Labor almost entirely on a tough on crime message. He proved that it is possible to dislodge a persistent left-wing government and he did so with a small number of firm, clear, and deliverable policies. Crisafulli was not trying to re-write the narrative soul of conservatism. He went back to basics and won.

Unfortunately, Crisafulli is also the political opposite of the current Victorian Liberal Leadership. He is a conservative, not a wet.

Do you live in Victoria? What do you think Jess Wilson’s chances are of overthrowing Jacinta Allan?

You can join the conversation online or read the answers in full below:

Are you a Victorian?

I'm interested in your opinion.

Would you vote for the Liberal Party? If not – why not.

And would you put Labor back in power despite running the biggest economic black hole in the country?

— Alexandra Marshall (@ellymelly) April 6, 2026