Labor has effectively decided to ‘run against itself’ as a new party with a new face at the Victorian state election in November.

The party that failed Victorians. The party that built a monument to hubris and waste. The party that became a global warning against tyranny. That Labor Party remains unchanged.

Come November, it will smile at you, flashing a different set of teeth, on billboards and social media ads.

Shoving leaders onto strategically placed swords is the cheapest, laziest trick employed by desperate political parties of all colours. Labor orchestrated a more civilised slaying than, say, Abbott’s demise or the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd slasher.

These things happen when the powers behind a political party run out of ideas to shift dire poll results.

Final polls in the week leading up to Jacinta Allan’s demise showed ‘public trust’ as a major problem for the leadership. While those who responded to these surveys referenced the CFMEU debacle, infrastructure overspends, the massive debt, and tax hikes, we can safely assume random machete fights on the street and the general state of filth taking over former retail havens contributed to these frustrations.

Ben Carroll, who brushed aside the tearful Allan with promises that he wasn’t Dan Andrews r Jacinta Allan (not much of an endorsement of his party’s legacy), seems to believe he can greenlight a Royal Commission into the construction sector and call it a day.

Calling for a Royal Commission into alleged problems with construction projects your government sat back and watched for years should, in any reasonable voter’s mind, be too little too late. Labor has inhabited the Victorian government like a hoarder, accumulating problems in every room of the economy. Now, they have changed the doormat and promised to clean the handprints off the walls. Everything should be fine, right?

Unfortunately, it might work.

Victorians have shown themselves uniquely tolerant of intolerable political leadership. Often, this leaves them as the butt of a joke about Stockholm Syndrome but, to be fair, Victorians haven’t been offered a real choice of political representation for a while. The Liberals are trying to get their act together and yet they are still fresh from several years of vicious infighting and legal dramas that have left the public wondering if they are fit to govern. After all, if they can get themselves into this much of a mess in Opposition, what might happen to them in office?

The state faces significant challenges that requires a serious team of disciplined ministers. It is not the time for politicians. The state needs professionals who decided to be politicians.

There are not many of those anymore.

On this occasion, it almost feels as if the next election is being framed this way: ‘Vote for an exhaustive Royal Commission into the building sector.’

Rather than: ‘Vote Labor!’

We will probably see Ben Carroll weigh heavily into this promise until the salivating, out-for-revenge taxpayers ignore all previous abuses against them and vote for a Royal Commission without much thought put into re-electing the exact same government that helped create the environment that made a Royal Commission necessary.

This is not an argument against the Royal Commission. It should go ahead, immediately, by whichever party finds itself in government.

It is merely a cautionary tale about whether or not the Royal Commission is enough.

Opposition Leader Jess Wilson is probably doing her polls no favours by branding something the people desperately want a ‘fake Royal Commission’.

‘I suspect that we’re going to have a sham Royal Commission without terms of reference that will ensure that we’re calling witnesses from the Labor Party, former ministers, current ministers.’ Wilson added, ‘Jacinta Allan must be called to give evidence … she’s the architect of the Big Build.’

Instead, Wilson could have leaned a little more heavily on the point that there is no point sending the state bankrupt with this Big Build – no point investing in infrastructure – if the soul of the city is being eaten away by mass migration, violent crime, and private sector economic ruin. Where, exactly, are people catching trains to if the shops have all closed and it is no longer safe to go out for dinner?

The Liberals have been stuck in economic conversations for several generations and it is sinking them. For example, something tells me that Victorians would care a lot less about the Big Build fiasco if the cafes and shops were thriving and Melbourne had the demographics of the 80s instead of an international airport vibe.

Social cohesion is not about Islamic terror attacks, it is centred on the coherent dominant culture of a city and its people who share a history and future.

Melbourne is no longer a city with an enviable soul.

Labor suffocated that soul in its desperation to be a ‘modern’ hub of diversity built on a Marxist wet dream with romantic environmentalism mixed in. Confused local council pamphlets promising big ideas translated into a rapid expensive collapse, one area at a time, as money was wasted on dead-end ‘vibes’ at the expense of basic services, all paid for with rate hikes that eventually killed off productivity.

Victoria, and Melbourne in particular, require a complete cultural reset.

The state needs an economic overhaul that benefits the productive private sector and axes huge portions of the public sector. That is what it needs if it wants to return to a functioning economic equation. It is also politically impossible with such vast numbers of people dependent on the public purse … or married to someone who is. This is how socialism kills a state. The fix is known, it is possible, but the public simply refuse to enact it. We saw a test run of this in Covid where temporary Covid jobs resulted in people actively campaigning to keep the lockdowns going even at the expense of the future sustainability of the nation. Socialism, in all its forms, is short-sighted.

How strong is Jess Wilson and what is her plan to carefully reverse this enormous problem?

Perhaps she could pen us an opinion article offering a tangible plan that conservatives can get behind before the theatre of One Nation starts in earnest next week with the reveal of candidates and policies. Once that starts, the polls will be messy and any ideas Jess Wilson has will be more different to hear.

The problem is, the Liberals have a habit of keeping things vague in an era where voters are desperate for details.

Their audience is comprised of serious people.

People who are trying to plan the next few years of their life based on the direction of the state government. We have already seen the devastation of Jim Chalmers’ budget at a federal level coupled with threats of more taxes and more restrictions coming out of the Labor Party Conference.

Jess Wilson is no longer running against the decrepit, despised Labor government. She is running against a branding machine with deep pockets and no shame.