BY MICHAEL SLOVANOS
NOT all men are good political leaders and even fewer women are. An average bloke will stand in the gap for the nation, either as a politician or soldier, but we don’t expect the same for women unless you’re a left-leaning Millennial feminist like the Victorian Liberal Party leader Jess Wilson.
Exceptional women prime ministers are few, like Margaret Thatcher or Indira Ghandi and the present Italian PM Giorgia Meloni. Even Angela Merkel could stand her ground in the political arena as can that unelected, power obsessed EU chief bureaucrat Ursula von der Leyen..
But the wanna-be Victorian Premier Jess Wilson is not one of those exceptional women leaders – not by a long shot.
At 36, she’s too young to be a female premier regardless of the fact that her father was an MP. She would be better employed at home looking after her two-year-old son Patrick.
Labor’s John Kirner became the first Victorian women premier when she was 52. She had 16 years’ more life experience than the girlish Ms Wilson. She had also raised three children.
Kirner was from the Victorian Socialist Left faction of Labor, but there is not a large political gap between her and Ms Wilson, who is pro-abortion and pro-“marriage.equality”, was the only Victorian Liberal MP to support the Voice to Parliament and supports the transition to net zero carbon emissions.
In short, Jess Wilson is a progressive, a leftist, although officially she calls herself a “moderate, small-l liberal” from the “centre right”, whatever that means.
How One Nation will be able to work with her is anyone’s guess. It is not beyond belief that the Millennial Ms Wilson will do a coalition deal with people other than One Nation if the numbers suit her.
As the NewsCorp-sponsored NewsPoll seems to indicate, large numbers of Victorians are still buying into the Uniparty Punch and Judy Show. But at only 33% primary vote support, the Liberals are going to need the 20% One Nation primary vote as well.
Joel Jammal of Turning Point Australia, thinks One Nation can win the Lower House by winning Labor seats in Melbourne’s west. That would be a gigantic blow to the political powers that be in Victoria.
As her video interview reveals, Ms Wilson has got little to offer Victorians except the “adult crime, adult time” slogan borrowed from the Queensland LNP and some vague promises about being a responsible economic manager.
Ms Wilson also wants to be State Treasurer, which is interesting, given that her main political mentor, apart from her father, is former Federal Liberal cabinet minister Josh Frydenberg, who is now the Chairman of Goldman Sachs Australia and New Zealand, as well as the global bank’s Senior Regional Advisor for Asia Pacific.
We wonder how kosher it will be for a Victorian Treasurer to have been mentored by a global banker from the same political party?
Maybe Ms Wilson will surprise us and be an effective, efficient manager of the State of Victoria. But she’s hardly inspirational. Even those Labor premiers that have made a mark on the state – Dictator Dan Andrews excepted – make Ms Wilson look like some sort of rank amateur, not long out of school.
