The Liberals’ new leader Jess Wilson proves optics now outrank experience

Ideologically Wilson aligns more closely with the Teals, having backed the Voice and championed climate activism and multiculturalism in her maiden speech.

QUICK READ, THE ARTICLE IN 5 DOT POINTS:

• Jess Wilson’s appointment as Victorian Liberal leader is inappropriate, driven by desperation and optics rather than competence.

• She has minimal parliamentary experience and a career defined by political machinery, not merit or achievement.

• The Liberals have selected her as a DEI style branding exercise, a “young professional woman” to court female voters.

• Ideologically Wilson aligns more closely with the Teals, having backed the Voice and championed climate activism and multiculturalism in her maiden speech.

• Her elevation marks the Liberals third leader in 11 months, confirming the party is directionless, unserious and politically cooked.

The appointment of Jess Wilson to lead the Victorian Liberal Party is wholly inappropriate. And that’s being polite.

First, she has very little experience.

She hasn’t even completed a single term in parliament, but apparently that’s just a trivial technicality for a party so desperate it thinks optics are a substitute for competence.

The Liberals have convinced themselves that if they squint hard enough, a first term MP can pass for a leader. Spoiler, she can’t.

Second, she’s a career politician, through and through.

Aside from a brief corporate sabbatical at KPMG - just long enough to pad her CV and refresh her LinkedIn headshot - she’s spent her entire adult life slithering through the political apparatus. Young Liberals. Frydenberg’s office. And then, as if blessed by the political fairy godmother, a safe seat in 2022.

Merit? Don’t be absurd. This is conveyor belt politics.

And now, because the Liberals are obsessed with proving they can out woke Labor, they’ve decided what they really need is a female leader. Not a competent leader. Not a principled leader. Just a young woman they can parade around as proof that they too can play Diversity Dress Ups.

Which brings us to the obvious point, Jess Wilson is the Liberals’ latest DEI hire.

The party can deny it until the solar panels come home, but when a strategist like Tony Barry gushes about her being a “fresh start” and a “different look,” you know exactly what’s going on. He didn’t praise her principles. He didn’t praise her accomplishments. No, he praised her look.

He literally said she is, and I quote, a “young professional woman - a constituency we haven’t spoken to or connected with for a very long time” Translation: please, for the love of God, could some women vote for us again?

She’s been chosen because the party thinks a younger woman will magically reel in female voters.

And ideologically? She’d be more at home as a member of the Teals.

She was the only Victorian Liberal MP who publicly backed the Indigenous Voice - a position so out of step with the base it borders on self parody. In her maiden speech she celebrated climate activism and multiculturalism like she was auditioning for an ABC panel show rather than a centre right political party.

With Jess Wilson’s coronation, the Victorian Liberals now have their third leader in 11 months, proving once and for all that the party - both state and federal - is completely, irretrievably and spectacularly cooked.

Senator Ralph Babet, Senator for Victoria, United Australia Party.