By promising to fix Victoria’s budget, Jess Wilson has put a big target on her back

May 14, 2026 — 5:00am

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Australian political orthodoxy has long held that the best way to win an election from opposition against a long-term government is to make as little noise as possible.

Such is the agreed wisdom of small target electioneering it is now the exception, rather than the rule, for anyone with designs on the big job to promise much of anything.

The most spectacular jailbreak from campaign confinement was the father of programmatic specificity, Kevin Rudd, who spent the entire 2007 federal election year acting as though he was already in the Lodge.

The stand-out Ruddism of this period was the Labor leader calling his own national climate summit at Parliament House and inviting the actual prime minister, John Howard, to attend as a guest.

The late, beloved columnist Matt Price quipped at the time: “What extraordinary value voters are getting for their taxpayer dollars – two federal governments for the price of one”.

Howard was a regret at the summit, of course, leaving Rudd an uncontested lectern from which to declare climate change the great moral challenge of our generation. When Rudd squibbed his own moral test three years later by shelving plans for an emissions trading scheme, his leadership was cooked beyond the IPCC’s worst-case modelling.

Jess Wilson in her six months as Victorian opposition leader has........

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