For Victorian Liberal MP Brad Battin, the third time proved to be the charm.
After falling short in a 2021 leadership spill against former opposition leader Michael O’Brien, and losing by a single vote to John Pesutto following the Liberals’ 2022 state election defeat, Battin on Friday had the numbers to snatch the leadership.
An embattled Pesutto has been under fire since he lost a defamation case brought by Moira Deeming earlier this month, then last Friday used his casting vote to defeat a motion to return Deeming to the party room, before making a major backflip on Sunday and announcing a fresh vote to enable her readmission.
The meeting at which that vote was due to take place – scheduled for 15 January – will not go ahead, with another called by five MPs, including Battin, for Friday.
The infighting comes despite the Coalition enjoying its best polling in years, including with Pesutto in the lead as preferred premier.
But it is not without precedent: O’Brien was eventually ousted by Matthew Guy when he was also doing well in the polls, while Ted Baillieu was dumped midterm as premier despite his success at the 2010 election.
Or as one long-serving Liberal MP surmised: “It’s the same shit, different year.”
Several names had been floated as a challenger to Pesutto in recent months but, Battin was the only one said to have secured the support of enough conservative and moderate MPs to get over the line.
One thing that sets Battin apart is his background. Raised in Melbourne’s outer south-eastern suburbs, which he now represents, Battin doesn’t fit the typical profile of a Liberal member.
He attended local public schools, dropped out at 15 and worked a range of jobs in retail, customer service and corrections before eventually joining Victoria police, where he reached the rank of senior constable.
In his maiden speech to parliament in 2011, Battin described working for Victoria police as the “greatest job on earth”.
He left the force in 2007 and opened a Bakers Delight franchise. Battin has said he did not consider himself political before he joined the Liberal party around the same time. He was preselected to be the party’s candidate for the Labor seat of Gemrook at the 2010 election at a branch meeting he attended in singlet and shorts.
He won the seat and held it until it was abolished before the 2022 election, when he moved to the new seat of Berwick, which covers much of the same area.
Battin’s supporters say he is a “normal bloke” who can “relate to people of all walks of life”, which they say the party desperately needs if it wants to grow its voter base.
During his 2022 leadership bid, Battin said the pathway to victory was through focusing on new growth corridors and engaging with multicultural communities – an approach more aligned with federal leader Peter Dutton’s than Pesutto’s, which focused on winning back traditional “small-l” liberals and winning over moderate Victorians currently voting for Labor.
It’s this strategy that led Pesutto to expel Deeming from the Liberal party room in 2023, a decision that drew the ire of the party’s conservative wing.
But while Battin has the backing of conservatives and voted to readmit Deeming, he is difficult to pigeonhole politically, having also taken progressive stances on certain issues, particularly when it comes to criminal justice.
In 2021, he broke ranks with his party by publicly calling for the age of criminal responsibility to be raised from 10 to 14. In an interview with Guardian Australia last year, Battin said low-level and white collar crimes should not be met with prison sentences and endorsed justice reinvestment initiatives.
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But he has also raised eyebrows over several stunts, including a bizarre press conference in August last year alongside a self-described amateur Sherlock Holmes and involving props, which was an attempt to reignite scrutiny over a 2013 car crash involving former premier Daniel Andrews.
The press conference – which the leadership team were not aware of until after the event – was described by several MPs as “weird”. Another such stunt involved bringing a white van to parliament, emblazoned with “Drunk? Get in” to highlight concerns over the decriminalisation of public drunkenness.
One Liberal MP said it was their expectation Battin would “dial down the crazy and the conspiracies” as leader.
Another MP, from the party’s moderate grouping, said a Battin leadership wasn’t the “end of the world”.
“He’s hardly a conservative,” they said.
But none of this matters if Battin cannot achieve as leader what those before him have failed to do: unite the deeply divided party room.
One path to accomplishing this could have been to appoint Kew MP Jess Wilson – a moderate – as his deputy.
Multiple Liberal figures pushed for Wilson to become deputy, including Charlotte Mortlock, the executive director of Hilma’s Network, a group focused on recruiting more women into the party
“In the last leadership team we had just one woman and three men,” Mortlock told Guardian Australia on Monday. “If they think they can take on a female premier by going backwards and not having a single woman in the leadership ranks, they are naive and not serious about winning.”
One of Wilson’s backers had said making former professional tennis player Sam Groth the deputy would make party unity “all the more challenging” as it would prove Battin “doesn’t have a disciplined grip on the actions of his supporters”.
Another said: “To put a completely male leadership team up against Jacinta Allan and try to argue they are the presentable modern face of the Liberal party is just laughable.
“We will just be back in the same position in a year’s time.”
