Victorian lefties have some things to be thankful for

Well, Victorian lefties should be rejoicing in the election loss of a right-wing government that abused FoI, had sham consultations, threw a cloak of secrecy over everything, spent huge sums of public money on party-political propaganda, handed over information on citizens from police files to private consortia, reeked of dodgy deals with developers, didn’t consider cheap water from stormwater reclamation and injection into the water table, …

The list of Joh Brumby’s sins against lefty goodness goes on and on and on… even before we get to the apolitical issues like incompetence writing specifications for contracts, meaningful penalty clauses, and manage the contract so that there is even a moderate resemblance between actual delivery costs and timeframes to what was presented to parliament and public.

OK, the Ballieu libs have some wrong-headed policies, are not likely to be as progressive as the universally respected liberal Dick Hamer, have pushed the Laura Norder furphy, but at least there is a promise to open up the books (if only to discover and release details of Brumby shonkiness).

OK, it could have been better, the Greens could have had a seat in the lower house to minimize the damage of the defacto right-wing coalition getting a 100% majority…

Maybe, just maybe, there’ll be a purging from the ALP of the right wing nasties, especially the backroom operators… but if this hasn’t happened federally, no right-wing heads on pikes in Canberra after the last federal election… optimism on that matter is unjustified.

I do, however, have a little optimism that Ballieu might be more transparent, more able to manage contracts, and able to do the forensics on the stuff that didn’t get shredded so that things are put in place to prevent any government risking such incompetence, such stench of dodgy deals against the public interest, for a long time.

What is needed, of course, is a public reform of the ALP, a return to principles, and a big row of faceless-men with heads on sticks the whole length of Spring St.