in April 1917, Russia was in uproar. Although the Tsar had been overthrown by a liberal revolution, chaos reigned, the provisional Russian government continued to fight the first world war, forcing Imperial Germany to continue fighting on two fronts.

The Americans had just declared war on Germany. Kaiser Wilhelm II’s key generals – Ludendorff and Hindenburg – knew that once the Americans arrived, Germany would be overwhelmed unless she could achieve victory beforehand. Knocking Russia out of the war altogether was crucial.

The German General Staff had a solution. Infect Russia with a political plague bacillus – Bolshevism – by ‘injecting’ the fanatical Bolshevik leader, Lenin, into the Motherland from his exile in Switzerland.

So it was that, thanks to the German government, the notorious ‘sealed train’ carried Lenin, and his most devoted followers, through Germany and neutral Sweden, into Russia.

In the short term, the cynical political strategy paid off for Germany. Lenin rallied his Bolsheviks, fed popular discontent with the new Russian regime, and, in October 1917, led the Bolshevik revolution that took Russia out of the war, even to the extent of accepting a punitive German peace treaty.

But in the end, it was all for nought. 104 years ago this week, the Imperial navy mutinied at Kiel, Left-wing revolution swept Germany, and the Kaiser abdicated. Days after, newly-socialist Germany signed the Armistice with the Allies.

Meanwhile, the Bolsheviks eventually secured their hold in Russia and changed it, and the world, for the worse. All thanks to a Kaiser and his generals desperate for victory, while not caring about the morality of the means of achieving it. They proved to be Lenin’s useful idiots.

The point of this brief history lesson is that in Victoria, the state Liberals are considering using the same morally questionable political strategy against Daniel Andrews and Labor.

Opinion polls suggest Labor can be squeezed into minority government by losing up to four inner-Melbourne seats to the Greens from the Left, and the Liberals recovering some seats lost on 2018 from the Right.

The Australian reports today that senior Liberals are seriously considering doing a preference deal with the Greens, to ensure that minority government result. My enemy’s enemy is my friend, and all that.

It’s the political equivalent of Lenin’s sealed train.

Let’s assume it happens, and it succeeds. The Greens, with Liberal preferences, picks up three lower house seats to add to the three it now holds. Meanwhile, the Coalition gains seats, but nowhere near enough to win government. The result: an Andrews Labor government propped up by the Greens, who won’t hesitate to pull an already hyper-Woke government even further to the Left.

All it will do is entrench a permanent Left majority in the Victorian parliament and, barring unforeseen catastrophe and/or corruption, will be entrenched for decades.

My three-year-old daughter will likely be the next Liberal premier of Victoria. And all because of the short-sighted cynicism of a cabal of ‘senior Liberals’.

Have those Liberals contemplating this deal with the devil had a look at the policies set out, in ominous detail, on the state Greens website? On education, the economy, the environment, culture, gender, Aboriginal activism, and more – their Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity, and Intersex Policy is a good example – the Greens promise whatever social and economic engineering Andrews Labor has delivered, but on steroids.

Being the nasty, vicious, ideologues they are, the Greens won’t hesitate to pressure minority Labor to put these policies into practice wherever they can and, should they also have the balance of power in Victoria’s upper house, there’ll be no moderate – let alone conservative – brake on their extremist lunacy.

The Australian reports senior Liberal sources saying that the Greens have ‘matured’, and it’s now reasonable to a deal with them to do over Labor.

Matured? Crap.

There are four words in response to these deluded fools.

Lidia Thorpe. Adam Bandt.

That’s the level of intelligence and integrity of the Green fire some Liberals are playing with.

Former Liberal premier Ted Baillieu had many faults as a politician. But lack of integrity wasn’t one of them.

When Victoria went to the polls in 2010, some very senior Liberals wanted the party to do exactly the sort of preference deal, to ensure Labor lost seats to the Greens.

But Baillieu, to his immense credit, saw it differently. He understands that a Faustian pact with the Greens might – only might – achieve short-term gain for the Liberals, but ensure long-term pain as the Greens, never grateful for any break they’re given by their opponents, entrenched themselves.

Baillieu also understood the Victorian voting public would see such a preference deal as a de facto Liberal endorsement of radically extremist Greens policies. He wouldn’t have a bar of it, publicly rejected the idea, and his principled stand actually helped the under-prepared Liberals to an unexpected win against a complacent and arrogant Labor government.

If, as the polls indicate, there is to be a minority Labor government in Victoria dependent on the Greens, it will be pulled even further to the Left. It could even become unelectable in 2026. But the Liberals should stand by and let it happen, and focus, to the extent they can in the last fortnight before the election, stress sound and tested centre-Right values and policies, instead of trying to outflank Andrews from the Left.

On Wednesday afternoon, the Victorian Greens denied they are talking to the Liberals, and insisted they will always preference Labor. Perhaps that’s true, but honesty isn’t a core Green value, and their statement doesn’t prevent the Liberals from opportunistically preferencing the Greens in those Greens-winnable seats regardless. So the question – what will the Liberals do? – still applies.

Liberal leader Matthew Guy and state president Greg Mirabella should – must – disown this cynical and unprincipled political ploy. Today. If they let it happen, it will be their sealed train moment.

And Guy and Mirabella also shouldn’t forget blue and green mixed together make Teal, and such a preference deal could actually cost the Liberals seats in its own Melbourne heartland, already ravaged federally in May.

It might make Andrews’ political life miserable for a while but ultimately, the Liberal party, and the millions of centre-Right Victorians who are desperate to break the Left’s perennial hegemony in what was once the jewel of the Liberal crown, will be betrayed by their own.

Is it really worth it?

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