Victorian election badly needs a vision of something beyond the parochial
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Version 0 of 1. Eighty days from the election, I’m still trying to get my head around Victorian politics. Federal politics is so dominant in the media and for good reason. For all its bluster, many of the issues challenge you to think about what sort of country this is and what we want it to be. Higher education, tightening welfare, the treatment of asylum seekers, the balance between civil liberties and preventing terrorism, the challenge of climate change – all require some sort of philosophical stance to be taken. They’re about real-world things, but they’re also about your worldview. State politics, by comparison, seems to have shrunk in the past 20 years. Canberra has muscled its way in – Julia Gillard’s Gonski proposal for a new school funding model was in an area traditionally controlled by the states. State revenue sources are limited compared with what people expect governments to provide, which is everything. We want great schools, hospitals, roads, police forces and “world-class” facilities, but we don’t want to pay more taxes. There is rarely an acknowledgement of that fundamental contradiction between what people demand of governments and what can be afforded with current revenue. And so the state political debate is dominated by heart-sinking clichés, pronounced with more force and greater certainty the less there is at stake. The government has “lost its way”, says Victorian Labor. We had to “fix Labor’s mess”, says the government. As if the challenges for Victoria after 29 November aren’t going to be pretty much the same whichever party forms government. Before the 2010 election, the Coalition promised 1,700 more frontline police officers. Leader Ted Baillieu said the state was being “eaten from within by the cancer of sickening violence”, hyperbole at best. Labor at first said such numbers were unnecessary, then matched them. Baillieu thundered that Labor was copying Coalition policy. All very well, but it was difficult to get excited about. State governments are primarily about service delivery and that is critically important. They traditionally, too, are policy “incubators”, trying out things that can be adapted for other states. But there are big issues that require some kind of vision, some kind of discussion with the public about where Victoria might be headed. Melbourne is likely to be home to almost 8 million people by the middle of the century, a thought its residents are not entirely comfortable with. The city is changing quickly; for instance, planning minister Matthew Guy is approving skyscrapers at an unprecedented rate around the CBD. Melbourne City council’s finance chairman, Stephen Mayne, calls it a “ binge of skyscrapers ... 50,000 apartments by the time he’s finished, 25 years of supply”. Mayne wants Guy to release advice provided to him by public servants on skyscraper applications. It’s an idea unlikely to be embraced. Guy tweeted this week about the new suburb of Fishermans Bend. Every apartment approved in Fisherman's Bend is one less apartment approved in a quiet, suburban street. Remember that when you vote. It was a reasonable point. This election is an opportunity to debate how to make a growing Melbourne livable for people on ordinary or low incomes, as well as on high incomes. It’s early days, but so far the campaign is following a familiar script. Lots of thudding insults and lots of tiny announcements in specific electorates. Here’s a couple from Wednesday: There’s nothing wrong with these promises, which are no doubt vital for these communities (sometimes promises are not delivered, of course). But at some point, the story of this election has to be about something other than what’s in it for my electorate. What is this election about beyond which major party will win? If elections are a snapshot of a community’s hopes, ambitions and and fears, what are they? That’s my thinking-out-loud over. What do you think? |