Sitting in the Victorian parliament, amid the rowdiness of question time, opposition leader Matthew Guy found himself distracted by events unfolding on the other side of the world.
Russia had just begun its full-scale invasion of Ukraine and the 48-year-old’s phone was lighting up with messages from his second cousin, who lives near Kharkiv, the country’s second largest city.
“His wife was about to give birth. And they were saying, ‘What do you think? Should we go in [to Kharkiv]?’” Guy tells Guardian Australia during an exclusive interview to mark the launch of our new Victorian state news section.
“I said, ‘You can’t go into the city because you’ll never get back out.’”
It was only after encouragement from the member for Kew, Tim Smith, that Guy addressed the lower house on the situation.
“I wasn’t going to do that. But one of my colleagues said, ‘Now that war has commenced, you should get up and say something’ … I thought, he’s right, now is the right time,” he said.
It led to a rare moment of bipartisanship for Victoria’s 59th parliament, with the premier, Daniel Andrews, thanking Guy for raising the issue.
Days later, the opposition leader’s second cousin welcomed a baby girl.
“She was born to the sound of bombs going off.”
Colleagues hope the positive response to Guy letting his guard down encourages their leader to speak from the heart more regularly in future.
“This is the Matthew Victorians need to see more of,” one Liberal MP said.
“Political leaders who share their vulnerability in modern politics should be rewarded.”
Guy has been a fixture in Victorian politics for more than a decade, leading the Coalition to an election loss in 2018, but several of his colleagues say voters are only now starting to see the real Matthew (he doesn’t go by Matt).
Guy’s maternal grandparents, Ivan and Maree, fled Ukraine – then part of Stalin’s Soviet Union – during the second world war, for Germany. His aunt, born in 1944, died when the Nazis wouldn’t allow her medicine. His mother, Vera, was born in 1946, three years before the family made its way to Australia.
Guy’s childhood, however, was “quintessentially Australian”. He rode his bike up and down the hills of Montmorency, in Melbourne’s north-east, played street cricket with neighbours and attended a public primary and secondary school. Mum worked at ANZ, Dad in radio and the commonwealth public service.
Like most migrant kids, Guy would spend part of the school holidays at his grandmother’s each year, where she taught him Ukrainian and told him stories of what life was like under both communist and Nazi rule.
She told him about famine. Air raids. Dead bodies. Coming to Australia with nothing. Stuffing towels down the holes in the floor at Bonegilla migrant camp to stop the snakes from getting in.
“It’s not an uncommon story,” he says, although he admits it has shaped his worldview.
“So it makes me angry when I see people talk down this country.”
Who does that, exactly?
“The left likes to make out Australia is a nasty and intolerant country,” Guy says. “It is not. Canada, Australia and Argentina have welcomed more migrants per capita than anywhere else in the world.”
“I don’t think Australians are inherently racist. I think Australians are actually inherently nice, decent people.”
Guy says people who come to Australia and work hard do well, and it’seasy to see why he’s a firm believer in meritocracy when you consider his rise through the Liberal party, despite not coming through the usual channels of private school and privilege.
He joined the party at 16, in the dying days of the Cain-Kirner government, because he was sick of the Labor party “taking advantage” of hard-working families like his. Within a couple of years he was working in premier Jeff Kennett’s office as a researcher. He soon headed that team.
Following the 1999 election loss, he became chief of staff to the then opposition leader, Denis Napthine. It was in Napthine’s office that Guy met his wife, Renae. They have three sons and live in Templestowe, about a 20-minute drive from where Guy grew up.
Having been elected an MP at age 32, he was minister for planning by 36 and opposition leader at 40.
But Guy’s spectacular rise came with a crushing fall. The 2018 election saw the Coalition shed 10 of its 37 lower house seats, including the blue-ribbon seat of Hawthorn.
Guy resigned as opposition leader days later and was replaced by Michael O’Brien.
An internal review into the loss found the ousting of Malcolm Turnbull as federal party leader had a major impact but it was also scathing of the party’s law and order led strategy and focus on “African gangs”.
Voters saw it as a political tactic rather than a plan to make the state safer – research found it only influenced 6% of people’s vote, and not necessarily in the Coalition’s favour.
But Guy maintains he “never mentioned African gangs” during the campaign and instead blames Labor and the federal government for focusing on the issue.
When it’s put to him that members of his frontbench, including Smith and the then member for Hawthorn, John Pesutto, singled out African people, Guy replies: “Our policy never ever mentioned the words ‘African gangs’, because many of the gangs we were talking about were not African.
“Many in the left, in the Labor party and the Age, like to rewrite history. But that is not what we talked about.
“At every single press conference I said that the policy should apply to everyone whether they’ve been here one month or their family’s been here 100 years.”
Asked whether the issue would be resurrected during this year’s election campaign, Guy replies: “It’s not 2018.””
When he returned to the leadership in September Guy promised Victorians a “positive agenda” and “hope” for the future following repeated Covid-19 lockdowns.
Last month, he released a 44-page document outlining key principles, including a commitment to no longer impose lockdowns, fixing the state’s healthcare and mental health “crisis” and slashing hospital waiting lists, keeping schools open, cutting the cost of living, and supporting businesses to recover and to employ more people.
He said the initiatives would be funded by reining in over-spending on the government’s infrastructure projects.
Guy appears comfortable that he has struck the right balance between the opposing sides of his party. He has opposed a mandate for Covid-19 booster shots but has ruled out any changes to new laws banning gay conversion therapy and supports the government’s plan to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 50% by 2030.
He’s also brought back O’Brien to the frontbench as shadow attorney general, and maintains there’s a place for controversial MP Bernie Finn in the party, despite reports aspirants are lining up to challenge him for the number one position on the Western Metropolitan upper house ticket.
He describes Finn, who has campaigned against abortion reform, same-sex marriage and voluntary assisted dying laws, expressed support for Donald Trump and the rioters who stormed the US Capitol building, opposes Covid-19 vaccination mandates and attended anti-government protests, as a “very loud and proud conservative”.
“Just because most of the mainstream media don’t like his views, that doesn’t mean that people who have his views shouldn’t have a place in parliament,” he says.
“We’ve got people from the conservatives and small-l Liberals in the same room, representing different constituencies in Victoria, with different points of view on topics but [who] can come to an agreement at the end of the day.””
Certainly his colleagues seem happy with the direction Guy has taken. Liberal MPs tell Guardian Australia that he has learned from 2018, having been “humbled by the experience”.
For the first time in years, they say, the party is united, focused and in a competitive position.
“He’s grown up a lot in the last four years,” one says.
