As leadership spill speculation grows, a former police officer is being touted as the top candidate for the embattled opposition leader’s job
With John Pesutto’s days as Victorian Liberal leader likely numbered, will it be third time lucky for Brad Battin?
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.to Pesutto in recent months but Battin is the only one said to have secured the support of enough conservative and moderate MPs to get over the line.
In his maiden speech to parliament in 2011, Battin described working for Victoria police as the “greatest job on earth”. 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.– an approach more aligned with federal leader Peter Dutton’s than Pesutto’s, which focused on wining back traditional “small-l” liberals and winning over moderate Victorians currently voting for Labor.
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 path to accomplishing this would be to appoint Kew MP Jess Wilson – a moderate – as his deputy. But it is believed Battin will instead back former professional tennis player turned Nepean MP Sam Groth.
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