The Dead Roo

I was a child of the Kennett years. I was just old enough to know what was going on as Kennett slashed and burned pretty much everything much everything that required public funding in the early 1990s. My teacher parents saw several of the schools they had taught at closed, many of their colleagues forced out, and soon chose to jump on the bandwagon and get out while they could. I remember the stakes going into the 1999 election - on a statewide level, we had madness like the partial privatisation of schools, and on a local level back in Geelong, we had the environmental-disaster-in-waiting of the Belmont Common rowing course development. I barely knew who Steve Bracks was, and I certainly didn’t expect Labor to win that year.

I don’t think I’ll ever forget September 18, 1999. There had been a joke going around in the preceding weeks about the Victorian Labor Party, the Carlton Football Club and the Melbourne Storm all being doomed in their encounters that weekend. (They all won.) Then it came clear that Kennett was indeed gone - in one fell swoop, the school privatisation was dead, the Belmont Common fiasco was dead, and Labor were finally back in government - something sealed by the Frankston East by-election a couple of weeks later.

Throughout the first term, between 1999 and 2002, I still had pretty high hopes for the Bracks government. Some of the excesses of the Kennett years were repealed, funding was re-injected into most sectors to undo some of the damage. We saw clear progress like the reopening of the Bairnsdale and Ararat rail lines, promises to extend and reopen several more, and progress on badly needed infrastructure projects like the reconstruction of Spencer Street Station. We saw small progressive steps on queer issues, a real attempt at saving the Snowy River, and improvements to laws prohibiting discrimination and vilification. It wasn’t radical, but at least it was progress.

Going into the 2002 election, I was still well on board with the Bracks government. I remember cheering as the sheer depth of the electoral rout emerged on election night, as my hometown seat fell into Labor hands for the first time in history, and for the first time, Labor wrested control of the Legislative Council from the Liberals. This paved the way for the one big success of that term - Bracks’ commitment to reforming the Legislative Council, and doing so in a way that allowed the minor parties into the game for the first time in Victoria’s history. It’s probably that, I think, that Bracks will be most remembered for. Apart from that, however, progress stalled in the second term. Most of the rail infrastructure projects wound up on the backburner, we had utter fiascos like the “road to nowhere” Geelong bypass, and I can barely remember any notable legislative progress at all. Bracks and his ministers developed the sort of arrogance we’d previously seen in the Kennett years. We saw utter inaction on abortion and gay rights, and saw the bizarre sight of the Liberals threatening to out-left them on both (and even, bizarrely, the DLP on the latter). It was this sort of inaction and arrogance that saw me preference the Liberals in 2006 - something which I’d have never expected to do four years earlier.

This final term was shaping up even worse, and I can safely say that my opinion of Bracks couldn’t have gotten much lower. However, in his last days in office, we did see him having the strength to stare down the Commonwealth over control of the Murray-Darling Basin, which was great to see. It doesn’t change the fact, however, that Bracks will leave behind a legacy of inaction and missed opportunities. All of this said, however, I’m a bit uncertain about what lies ahead in the wake of his departure. While I’m tempted to say “good riddance” about losing Bracks, Brumby is very much an unknown in terms of leadership potential - no one thought he had a snowball’s chance of hell of winning government from opposition, and Bracks’ departure was so sudden that I don’t think anyone has given much though as to what sort of Premier Brumby might make.

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