Geoff Shaw is currently the most powerful man in Victorian politics. When he triggered Victoria's political crisis last week by resigning from the Liberal party because he 'no longer had confidence in Ted Baillieu', the Coalition Government lost its majority — if Labor wins its Lyndhurst by-election next month, each will have 43 seats. Shaw will hold the balance of power.
And who is this man? A maverick who gave his Premier two days to 'explain himself', after Baillieu referred his chief of staff's apparent role in a plot to oust the then police commissioner for investigation by Victoria's peculiarly stunted, brand-new, already compromised and quasi-anti-corruption body, the IBAC.
Shaw himself is under investigation for misuse of his parliamentary Ford Territory for deliveries from Albury to South Australia for his private business. The first inquiry by the Ombudsman found that he had done so, and recommended a parliamentary inquiry. There is now both an OPI investigation and a Parliamentary Privileges Committee investigating the matter.
Shaw is one of those big men in a small town who flourish at community cocktail events with a 'what you see is what you get' manner; a man who joined the Liberal Party only in 2009 and, after 22 years as a local accountant, charmed his way into pre-selection for Frankston (a working-class, low-cost housing former coastal resort to the South-East of the CBD) and whose win helped the Baillieu Government, unreadily, into power.
He is the new MP who deliberately tipped a bucket over the expectation that he would give the now-traditional 'welcome to country', prefacing his maiden speech by 'acknowledging the original owner of the land on which we stand', as 'the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God of the Bible'.
He is also a man who put up a billboard on the main road begging his estranged wife to forgive him (for what?) in the terms of Psalm 42 ('As the deer longs for streams of water, so my soul longs for you'); who publicly equated homosexuals with dangerous drivers and other 'murderers': and who, when invited into the Premier's sanctum for a quiet talk about his propensity for causing instability, apparently lectured his leader about the morality of his voting in favour of the 2008 Brumby government's reform of Victoria's abortion laws.
These laws, and his discontent with the reduced superannuation entitlements of relatively new MPs in the Victorian government, are issues he has publicly laid about as critical to his support, in the newly installed realm of government under Denis Napthine. Napthine, incidentally, voted thrice against abortion law reform.
Ted Baillieu was a modern Liberal whose close friendship with former premier Jeff Kennett sat uneasily with his presentation as a Hamer-style Liberal of the 1970s: a patrician, sensitive, humane and rather likeable personality with all the media skills of a teddy bear.
Under his leadership, in just two years, Victoria saw an enormous chasm between his pre-election promises ('the best paid teachers in Australia'; 'open and accountable government') and reality.
His regime destroyed the hopes of Victorian students for options for training other than academic studies by slashing billions from TAFE funding; removed the autonomy of the Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission; and saw to the removal of the ALP-installed police commissioner in a murky series of manoeuvres that came back to haunt him on 7 March (not quite the Ides) as the assassins' knives went in.
Baillieu has been criticised for leading a 'do-nothing' government, but with a record such as this, it clearly wasn't so. It is true that 'senior business leaders' said they were confounded by his failure to work closely with them, but that was a matter of perception — as is the torrent of claims that he 'couldn't deal with the media'; as if persuading a journalist was his business.
Perhaps the avalanches of opinion rather than exploratory reporting of reliable, tested facts were a factor in his downfall. The people didn't know him. The ones who did, liked him. The ones he led, didn't follow him.
Baillieu presents as a renaissance man, interested in all things and resistant to spin, even if it damaged his political fortunes: a man with a touch of 'born to rule' about him, with some reluctance to be seen to enjoy what power he has. It was this vulnerability that brought Denis Napthine down, himself, as a former leader of the opposition. Nice men, in politics, don't last.
All parties have factions. Baillieu didn't control his nor did they control him. The ALP's factions have a life of their own, but began to skewer themselves as well as their leaders, since Rudd was bowled out and Gillard in. Unless that nice Dr Napthine has, after being tapped on the shoulder by equally nice Mr Baillieu, got a mind and a bat of his own, he will be run out in his turn, in the months to come.
I'm not sure that fixed term elections are a good thing, in the circumstances, for democracy. There will be crises, and rumours of crises, ahead. The times are a-changing. I wonder what Victorian children will think of them.
Moira Rayner is a barrister and writer.