The rapid rise of One Nation in the polls has now claimed its first political scalp. And it’s not someone that you would have expected.

The Victorian Liberal Party have just stabbed Brad Battin in the back in what can only be described as an act of self-sabotage. But it was the uptick in One Nation’s polling that provided the justification for this Julius Caesar style backstabbing. And make no mistake, this is an act of self- sabotage. The Liberal Party’s power brokers are actively sabotaging the best members of their own party in a ruthless effort to ensure that Victoria continues its relentless march to the political left.

Those power brokers have now installed Jess Wilson unopposed in Brad Battin’s place. And I think it’s time for the Liberal Party membership to face the fact. The Victorian Liberal Party power brokers don’t actually want to save Victoria from Labour. They want the Liberal Party to become Labour. And they’re using the rise of the One Nation Party as cover to justify the ruthless political actions needed. A big part of what I do here at the Topher project is to recognize history when I see it repeating. And I most definitely see history repeating here because the rapid and I would suggest unearned rise of Jess Wilson into the role of party leader carries very clear echoes of the equally unearned rise of John Prosciutto into the same role a few years ago. And there’s good reason to believe that the same power brokers are behind both and are doing it for the same reasons to stop the Liberal Party from being well actually liberal.

Brad Battin was doing well in the polls with the latest polls right before he was knifed showing the Liberal Party in an election-winning position with a two-party preferred vote of 51%.

If the Liberal Party power brokers wanted to actually win an election, they would have kept a good thing going. But they didn’t, which begs the question, why not? Now, for context, it is true that polling showed that the gap between the Liberal and Labour parties under Jacinta Allen had narrowed recently and at first glance that looks like trouble. But, and this is important, have a look at the other category in this graph down near the bottom. See, that sharp tick upwards which coincides with the downward tick of the Liberal Party. That’s One Nation. And they are trending upwards all over the country. Not because of state issues or anything that Brad Batton has done or because he was doing a bad job. No, it’s because of federal issues and because Sussan Ley is doing a bad job as leader of the Federal Liberal Party. Voters all over Australia are switching from the Liberals to One Nation in record numbers. Federally, One Nation are at 18% and rising fast. They’ve almost caught up with the Liberals who are at record lows of 24%. But once you remove the approximately 4 to 5% nationals vote from that LNP figure, you can see that federally the Liberal Party are close to being overtaken by the One Nation party already.

And One Nation can be expected to continue rising for the foreseeable future. And it’s this shift at a federal level that is driving the same switch in the polls at a state level with people switching from the Liberals to One Nation in Victoria as can be seen in this state level polling. But this this is not a reason to switch party leaders in Victoria because as you can see in this graph, even with this shift in the polls in Victoria, the Victorian Liberal Party are still way ahead. One nation just are not a threat in Victoria, at least not yet. But hold that thought. But also, thanks to our preferential voting system, the Liberals would pick up pretty much all of the preferences from anyone who was voting number one for One Nation in any case. So this tick in the polls, well, that’s not likely to cost the Victorian Liberal Party any seats at all in the lower house, and it isn’t any kind of reason for a leadership change when they are still in an election winning position.

So, more significantly here, even if this was a threat to the liberals, and it’s not, not yet, you don’t fix a threat from One Nation by switching from a Brad Battin to a Jess Wilson for reasons that I’ll cover in a moment. This is instead an act of electoral self harm. And I think it is now undeniable that the Liberal Party of Victoria is no longer fit for purpose. And perhaps the time really has come for them to be replaced. Ironically, the most likely replacement is One Nation in due course.

But before we go deeper into that, my name’s Topher Field. This is the Topher Project, and I help busy people like you to cut through the crap and make sense of the nonsense that surrounds us. I am 100% viewer supported, so please help me to keep the Topher project going by buying me a coffee via the button at topherfield.net. And if you like my videos, then you will love my books about government, power, why good people so often go bad once they get elected because of the perverse incentives of politics as well as being about human rights and most importantly in my view about the role of civil disobedience in keeping out of control government in check in the modern age. You’ll find both of my bestselling books. There’s Good People Break Bad Laws all about civil disobedience in the modern age and also Good Christians Break Bad Laws all about the theology of civil disobedience along with my DVD documentary Battleground Melbourne plus a range of t-shirts and hoodies with these five designs set to be discontinued at the end of November. All of that’s available at goodpeoplebreakbadlaws.com. So, head over there, grab the designs that you like now before stocks run out.

All right, who is Jess Wilson and why do I say that she’s just John Prosciutto in heels?

And why wouldn’t a political party really actually want to win an election? Well, Jess Wilson has the right background for a modern major party leader with degrees in arts, law, and accounting. And she’s a former president of the Young Liberals because of course she is. She worked her way up to being a senior policy adviser for Josh Frydenberg. Yeah. The former federal treasurer who presided over the financial aspects of Australia’s disastrous Covid response and then couldn’t even keep his own seat afterwards. Then after that, Jess won pre-election for the seat of Q where she was elected as a state MP in 2022. Yeah, that’s right. 2022. Jess Wilson is still in her first term as an MP. Now, interestingly, it was John Prosciutto himself who appointed Jess Wilson almost immediately upon her election to the front bench of the party, just a month after she became an MP for the first time. John Prosciutto made her the Minister for Finance. Let’s keep in mind that the finance ministry is considered to be one step away from being the treasurer and a presumptive future leader of the party. Jess Wilson literally walked in the door and boom, here’s the finance portfolio. Thank you very much for coming.

And if you’ve watched my past videos about John Prosciutto’s pathway into the Liberal Party, then you will already be seeing the similarities. But for those who haven’t seen my earlier videos, hold tight. I’ll give you a refresher in just a minute. Jess Wilson is not a moderate, no matter how much the media may try and paint her as such. She was the only Victorian Liberal MP to publicly support the voice, putting her out of step with a majority of Victorians of all political persuasions and badly out of step with the Liberal National Party membership and supporters who overwhelmingly opposed the voice. She was also one of only four Liberal MPs who succumbed to peer pressure and rose to applaud speeches by Aboriginal activists during the treaty debate in Victoria. It must be said though that she apparently opposes treaty at least in its current form. But she has sought to play nice during the debate. She is a progressive when it comes to abortion amongst other issues. She supports net zero despite the Victorian Liberal Party membership rejecting net zero. And to cut a long story short, if Jess Wilson were to be elected as premier of Victoria, she would be one of the finest premiers that the Labour Party ever had.

And that’s the key. The problem with Brad Battin from the perspective of the Liberal Party’s power brokers was that he might actually win and then go on to be an excellent Liberal Party premier, taking the state in a different direction to what it’s going in under Labour. And the truth is that these Liberal Party power brokers, they don’t actually want that to happen. Now, the Liberal Party members want that to happen. But the power brokers, they would rather lose an election and see the state keep going in Labour’s pro progressive direction than they would to win if it meant that Brad Battin got to change the direction of the state away from these disastrous policies which are making Victoria the California style failed state of Australia. Something I cover in my first book, Good People Break Bad Laws, is the reality that our political parties are not controlled by their membership, nor are they even controlled by the MPs that we see publicly. They’re controlled by power brokers. And in order to get pre selection as an MP, you need the support of a power broker. And then if you get elected as an MP, you have to do whatever you’re told by that power broker for fear of losing their support.

So, things like leadership spills and cabinet reshuffles, they’re not actually about the MPs, nor are they about the members of the party or even about what’s best for the state or who is best suited to what job. No, no, in reality, it’s just a dick- swinging contest between the power brokers. What we’re seeing with the stabbing of Brad Battin and the installing of Jess Wilson, well, that has nothing to do with what the people of Victoria want, nor what the members of the party want. It’s all about what the power brokers want and they want Victoria to keep going down the current progressive path no matter what it may cost the Liberal Party. Now, don’t misunderstand me. They do want to win. They want to have a Liberal Party premier and a Liberal Party government. Of course, they do. But they want that winning Liberal Party to be basically indistinguishable from Labour. And if winning required them to be actually different from Labour, then they would rather lose.

Now, why am I making comparisons between Jess Wilson and John Prosciutto?

Because they were both favored and elected by party power brokers. I’ve already mentioned Jess’s fast tracking after being an adviser to Josh Frydenberg. But in John Prosciutto’s case, he was chief of staff to the then Premier Ted Baillieu, the useless wet pre wet blanket premier whose visionless term is a key reason why the Liberals have been utterly unelectable ever since. Prosciutto then ran in 2014, winning his safe liberal party seat and being immediately appointed shadow attorney general. Yep. He was given a senior cabinet position in his first term. Sound familiar? senior adviser to a terrible Liberal MP, followed by being parachuted into a safe seat and then being given an instant front bench position in both of their cases. Yeah, I told you history’s repeating, right? In John Prosciutto’s case, he was so badly disliked that he actually lost his safe seat at the very next election. Now, he did go on to regain that seat by a slim margin one election later and then he was quickly elevated by the power brokers to the position of party leader at the very beginning of what was only his second term as an MP and as an MP who had only just reclaimed his once safe seat by a narrow margin.

Both John Prosciutto and Jess Wilson have all the hallmarks of having been selected in advance by the Liberal Party power brokers of being given golden child status and in my opinion an unearned fast track to the top. That means that the top is a position that they don’t know what to do with now that they’re there. John Prosciutto nearly destroyed the party within just a few years because he was visionless and ineffective once he reached the top and then because he tried and failed to ruin the career of Moira Redeeming who is one of the Victorian Liberal Party’s few real talents and she’s a threat to the golden child to someone like John Prosciutto because she is actually competent and that’s something that terrifies someone in Prosciutto’s position because if other people are competent it only serves to highlight his own incompetence.

Now, in Jess Wilson’s case, she’s only just taken on the leadership position, and only time will tell whether she proves to be as disastrous to her party as what Prosciutto was. But we can already confidently predict that she will be disastrous for the state of Victoria. Why? Because more than ever, Victoria needs an opposition that offers them a real choice, a substantial difference with real policy differences. And the Liberal Party needs a leader that reflects the will of its members, not of its power brokers. And I’ll add one more final point. Jess Wilson was made the shadow treasurer in October earlier this year in a cabinet reshuffle that was supposedly going to bring stability to the party.

Now, part of the justification for her now knifing Brad Battin in the back was the claim that Brad Battin wasn’t cutting through on the economy, on the state debt or on the situation with taxes in Victoria. Thing is, as shadow treasurer, that was literally Jess Wilson’s job was to take the government to task on their financial mishandling of the state. So, if that wasn’t happening, why not? And I think the question has to be asked, did Jess Wilson hold back in her role as treasurer specifically to help create the pretext for a coup against Brad Battin? Now, whether she did it, whether that was on purpose, that’s been the result. And I think the Liberal Party members would be justified in asking why that happened.

The knifing of Brad Battin in favor of Jess Wilson means that at the next election, the people of Victoria will have a choice between Labour and almost Labour.

And that is bad news for the people of Victoria, no matter what the result of the election is. Now, the irony is that this leadership switch will only help One Nation to grow even faster in the state of Victoria as more and more long-term Liberal Party voters simply give up on them as a lost cause. If the Liberal Party thought that the rise of One Nation was already a problem before, wait till they see how much of a problem it’s about to become now. But at this point, honestly, I think the best thing that could happen to Victoria is for the Liberal Party to be obliterated and replaced. It’s very clear that the Liberal Party are no longer fit for purpose in Victoria. They no longer work for their members, nor do they work for the Victorian people. They’ve been captured by their power brokers who care more about their progressive ideology than about anything else. And they will handpick Liberal Party leaders, not on the basis of what’s good for Victoria, but on the basis of what suits their ideology.

So, if you’re in Victoria and you’ve been thinking about joining a minor party like the Libertarians or One Nation, Libertarian being the ones that I personally vote for, let me suggest that now is the time to go ahead and do that. My name’s Topher Field. This is the Topher Project and I help busy people like you to cut through the crap and make sense of the nonsense that surrounds us. I’m 100% viewer supported. So, if you appreciate what I’m doing, then please help me to keep going by buying me a coffee via the button at topherfield.net. And if you like my videos, then you’ll love my books, my DVDs, and merch, which you’ll find at goodpeoplebreakbadlaws.com.

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