I agree that the Labor Party ought to be criticised for specific promises it has not kept. I am sorry: I misinterpreted your comment as a more general claim. I said seven years ago that Labor had to, not just meet its specific promises, but also give country people a better life.

I accept that the local MPs played a part in the Diamond Creek and Hurstbridge emergency services stations, but I think they were promises by the whole government earlier.

And I come from Lower Plenty, so I know about the stuff in DC and Hurstbridge. I atribute that more to Steve Herbert and Danielle Green working as a team then directly to Steve Bracks.

But the Libs had exactly the same line against Labor in WA in 2005. Colin was to be a man of action not inaction. Would be about delivering not about thinking about reports. I guess Labor had an accidental win and certainly wasn’t ready to hit the ground running, but as you observe it was still a stupid accusation.

The line that Steve Bracks “hasn’t delivered” was one of the standard anti-Labor lines trotted out to stop it winning in 2006 and is now being trotted out to stop Labor winning federally, but the line doesn’t work because there is so obviously so much that has been delivered – extra police, extra nurses, 5,193 extra teachers, schools funded to cap prep to grade 2 classes at 21 pupils each, the Victorian Institute of Teaching to uphold professional standards and ethics, academic subjects like history and geography back in the curriculum instead of the Liberal government’s SOSE mess, $1.4 billion already invested in capital expenditure on schools, the auditor-general as a constitutionally protected parliamentary officer, a reformed and democratically representative Legislative Council. In the area I come from and will return to, there is a brand new CFA/police/ambulance station at Diamond Creek, and a brand new police station and a brand new CFA station at Hurstbridge.

Those who want to strike an effective blow against the Victorian Labor government need to be specific. The “do-nothing” tag which some apply is just nonsense.

This is why Rudd will win. He has made the ALP credible and so now there is a real alternative.

Victorian teachers have been under federal awards and agreements since 1992, when they fled the truly nasty and dishonourable Kennett government for AIRC protection. Des Moore, then of the IPA, revealed before the election that the Liberals should get rid of 5,500 teachers. They denied they would do any such thing, and then got rid of 9,000. To get away with this, they had to break legally enforceable industrial agreements which set teaching loads, class sizes and so forth. Luckily for them, they weren’t ordinary employers who – prior to the current federal IR laws – were bound by the law of contract, but a government which gets to make laws, and they had no interest in the old-fashioned principle of sovereign risk. They passed retrospective legislation in the form of the Public Sector Management Act, which was used to increase teaching loads and class sizes and thus reduce the number of teachers required. While teachers won an interim order, the AIRC in the end ruled in favour of the government, and despite seven years of Labor, teachers have not got back their stolen conditions.