Matthew Guy steps down as Victoria’s Liberal leader days after state election result
Matthew Guy has stepped down as the Victorian Liberal leader, days after Labor won the state election in a landslide victory.
During the state election over the weekend, experts forecast that 55 seats would likely go to Labor in the state’s lower house.
In Victoria’s upper house, the ABC’s election computer calculated that Labor would increase its numbers from 14 to 19, while the Liberals’ numbers were forecast to decrease from 14 to 9.
According to a report in The Age, Guy congratulated re-elected premier Daniel Andrews on Labor’s win over the weekend.
“I would like to place on record my deep appreciation for the hard work of all my Liberal members in the last parliament,” he said in a statement.
“They were the most unified team of any parliamentary party in Australia.
“Now that the parliamentary party has been called together, they will elect a new leadership team.
“I will not be a candidate for the position of leader.”
In the lead up to the state election, the Victorian Liberals came under fire from the LGBTI community for their anti-Safe Schools stance, after committing to scrap the program if re-elected.
They were also criticised for preferencing a far-right independent candidate – Dianne Colbert – in the state’s west ahead of the election. Colbert, an extreme conservative Christian, had called homosexuality a form of “sexual brokenness” and said that trans people were “part of Satan’s push to remove male and female from the dictionary”.
During a 90-minute post-election meeting of federal Liberal MPs in Victoria earlier this week, cabinet minister Kelly O’Dwyer said her colleagues in the Liberal Party were regarded as “homophobic, anti-women, climate change deniers” by the general public.