The downfall of Baillieu: how a Premier lost a state
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Why did Ted Baillieu resign as Victorian premier? Crikey outlines the ups and downs of the Baillieu government, from TAFE cuts to nurse protests and teacher disputes.
Victoria woke up to a new Premier today — confused about just how it happened? Crikey maps the last two-and-a-bit years of Ted Baillieu’s government for clues on where it all went wrong …
December 2010: Baillieu sworn in as Premier, ending 11 years of Labor control in Victoria by narrowly defeating John Brumby. Just days before the election, Newspoll had the Coalition just ahead at 51.1-48.9, while Bailleu’s own personal rating was 44% approval and 44% disapproval.
January 2011: Government announces trial of 400 grazing cattle in Victoria’s Alpine National Park, despite being removed back in 2005 after a Labor government taskforce found they significantly impacted the environment.
July 2011: Negotiations begin with the Australian Nursing Federation (Victoria branch) over the public sector enterprise bargaining agreement. Nurses seek a 18.5% wage increase; the government offers 2.5% for all public sector workers.
August 2011: Wind farms become near impossible to build in the state, after new laws are implemented that give veto power to any households located within two kilometres of a proposed turbine. Wind farms are also banned from whole regions: the Great Ocean Road, Yarra Valley, Mornington Peninsula and the Macedon Ranges.
The first Newspoll since the 2010 election shows Baillieu enjoying a decent honeymoon period. The Coalition sits at 57-43 and Baillieu’s approval rating is 52%, with 57% picking him as preferred premier over new opposition leader Daniel Andrews.
November 2011: Nurses vote to take protected industrial action as part of their EBA fight. A leaked cabinet document in the Herald Sun outlined Baillieu’s plan to cut nurse numbers, including news of reduced nurse/patient ratios and the use of lesser-trained assistants to perform some nursing duties.
December 2011: The government announces 3500 public services jobs are to be cut in a cost-saving drive.
January 2012: Federal Environment Minister Tony Burke refuses the Victorian application to allow cattle grazing in the Alpine National Park.
The first poll that reveals a statistically significant drop in support of the Baillieu government lands: Newspoll has the two-party preferred at just 51-49 and Baillieu’s personal approval ratings dropped three points to 49%.
March 2012: Over 1000 nurses take part in rolling work stoppages at 15 public hospitals across Victoria, with rallies held continuously outside hospitals. The Baillieu government threatens legal action against nurses using the ANF Facebook page to organise or discuss protests, after the Federal Court ruled ANF stop its industrial action.
Baillieu’s cousin, former federal Liberal MP Marshall Baillieu, flips the bird to nurses protesting outside a Baillieu family book launch.
The wage dispute is finally settled, with nurses winning a pay increase of 14-21% and nurse-to-patient ratios remaining so that no nurse treats more than four patients at once.
April 2012: The pre-budget polling shows the number of people satisfied with the Premier’s performance has dropped 16 points in six months, according to Newspoll.
May 2012: May budget announces a massive $300 million in cuts to the TAFE sector, sparking protests and outrage from students and teachers. Several hundred courses are to be cut, up to 2000 teaching positions expected to be made redundant and several campuses are to be closed.
June 2012: Up to 30,000 public school teachers strike as part of their bargaining negotiations, with the Australian Education Union fighting Baillieu’s proposal of a 2.5% rise plus a performance bonus for teachers. One of the union’s key arguments is Baillieu promised prior to the 2010 election that Victorian teachers will be “not the worst paid [but] the best paid teachers in Australia”.
A proposal to sack the 5% worst performing teachers forms part of the government’s controversial education paper.
August 2012: The Coalition loses its small lead over Labor, with a 50-50 two-party preferred result in Newspoll.
September 2012: Over 1500 protesters rallied outside Baillieu’s office over TAFE cuts, as teachers and education workers staged a 24-hour stop-work protest.
October 2012: Teachers begin a series of state-wide strikes and refuse to write comments on student report cards in protest of their conditions. The Australian Education Union demands a pay rise for teachers of 30% over three years and to scrap Baillieu’s plan of performance-based pay for teachers.
Labor steams ahead in Newspoll with a strong lead of 55-45 in the two-party preferred. Baillieu’s own disapproval ratings sit at 53%, a rise of 24% in a year. He leads as preferred premier over little-known Andrews 39-30, however Baillieu dropped 17 points in a year, while Andrews gained 10.
December 2012: Essential Research’s November and December polling shows the Coalition and Labor at 50-50, with the Coalition’s primary vote at 43%.
January 2013: The Federal Court dismisses the Victorian government’s appeal over alpine grazing.
Newspoll shows Labor remains ahead at 55-45, with only 33% satisfied with Baillieu’s performance in the top job.
February 2013: Once again 30,0000 teaching staff strike, with 13,000 marching to state parliament in protest on February 15.
The all-night arts extravaganza White Night, one of Baillieu’s election promises, is held with 300,000 people spilling in to Melbourne’s CBD for all-night cultural performances and exhibitions.
March 2013: The Herald Sun breaks the news that secret police tapes revealed a payout and job offer was made that resulted in Baillieu having to refer his chief of staff and the Liberals’ state director to the new Victorian corruption commission.
Baillieu resigns.
AMBER J: Thank you for an informative article. But perhaps you should have made the point that Ted Baillieu wouldn’t have got into power without the NCP’s Peter Ryan’s seat. As a dutiful servant, Baillieu brought more than the alpine grazing matter onto the menu, (no pun intended.) He encouraged the sporting (?) shooters to massacre ducks and allowed farmers in East Gippsland to annihilate geese and swans which were feeding on some of their grass. Done under the aegis of the Victorian Department of Environment and Sustainability. Ha!
All these issues are very close to the Nasho’s hearts and I hope Ted Baillieu chokes on his breakfast tomorrow.
Some other points for the chronology:
I think they settled police pay negotiations relatively quickly and generously before the nurses’ negotiations? And also there was public service pay deal that was settled after action and appearances at fair work and acrimony prior to the announced job cuts
I don’t know about the rest of you but can I say, thank Christ that’s over
Ted’s big failure was to recognise what a dire state Bracks (when he finally got over having no plan to govern in 1999) and Brumby had left Victoria in with the dollar killing the large foreign student market (and a bit of aggro in the ALP’s heartland western suburbs wrt Indians) and the huge revenues from stamp duty on land and house sales to an expanding population about to collapse. It wouldn’t have been so bad if nearly every major project, railway upgrades, MCG upgrade, desalination plant and unused Goulburn pipeline hadn’t suffered huge cost overruns (even when needed projects) arising mainly from Labor’s union dependency. If Baillieu could have sold that truth and then set immediately about remedying it with loud publicity, Kennett style, he wouldn’t have been where he is now.
WARREN J: For heaven’s sake, don’t you Liberal/Coalition supporters ever give up? Ted Baillieu has had two years to learn how to do something positive; has he? Apart from establishing an inquiry into paedophile priests he has done nothing but what Peter Ryan tells him to do. (see my comment above.)
Warren Joffe
I was and am no fan of Brumby but he did leave Ted a state with triple A rating and a budget surplus . Ted had ministers who kept bungling the message . A treasurer who in his first budget claimed false figures and got caught out . A health minister who tried to sell the feds as the bad guys for taking 100 mill out of health while the minister took out 600 million . A planning minister caught out doing a financial backer a deal and then backing off when a pop star made the issue viral on the net . A cattle grazing trial that had no science or pre trial observation of the test area . A police minister and deputy caught out interfering in police management and denying it then the release of those tapes .
It wash,t the truth that Ted failed to sell it was ministers trying to conceal the truth that hurt the govt. Shaw being protected by Ted hurt the most and the irony of Shaw bringing the premier down is unbelievable .
Warren, you should do some homework.
The strong dollar has a small effect on international student choice. The real killer was a change in Commonwealth rules around the MODL (Migration Occupations in Demand List). Simply, overnight a door which allowed students to remain in the country, closed.
There is a very small correlation between the dollar and the decline. We draw students from 165 countries you would have to look at the AUD against many source country currencies and the picture is far from a uniform rise in the relative value of the dollar accompanied by a corresponding drop in enrollments - Enrollments from Pakistan for instance are growing strongly.
Victoria suffered because the Commonwealth changes had a stronger effect on the VET market (particularly from India) of which Victoria has the largest share.
The rest of your comment is as susceptible to the application of fact and analysis.
I’m still scared of a party based on a tiny clique of union oligarchs buying votes with professional precision from the expanding numbers of those who (as human nature dictates in all of us to some extent, though some can afford to stand back and apply the sceptical brain) can be made to feel entitled to something others have produced.
Mind you the constraints on a state catch up before too many years have passed - unless it is Tasmania - so I am more worried about the same phenomenon in the federal sphere. John Howard was far from guiltless, and Costello has to bare some of the blame though he did seem to try to put aside some of the surpluses, because only strategic vote buying would justify giving so much to retired people when a national disability scheme would appear to be a greater priority: i.e. a greater priority than allowing quite prosperous people to get the old age pension and corresponding health care benefits with the ultimate result that our promising superannuation arrangements as begun under Keating and Kelty have little to do with keeping down the OAP bill in the future, and indeed won’t do that.
@SBH Thanks for a no-doubt-accurate nitpick. But it is a nitpick in terms of an analysis which depended on Baillieu and co underestimating the bad state of the Vic econonmy.
I hope Tim Colebatch’s and other’s recommendation to forget the AAA rating if that is going to stop them borrowing cheap to build infrastructure which will pay off in the end. Keeping traffic flowing, and quick rail movement, around Melbourne is probably key to the economics and continued liveability of a city which should be able to do well in the modern world of big city concentrations of talent and opportunity for everything.
Occasionally Ken Davidson has made valid points and if one can get oneself to believe in politicians and bureaucrats planning and organising something that might pay off cheap borrowing by governments can make sense. I hope that, on reflection, the anti-deficit fanatics of early GFC days have become more nuanced and understand that it is one thing to try and keep down public sector employment and expenditure for both political and economic reasons (which intertwine) but not spending on projects with a big payoff in a timely way (not too early is important too: please take note those who think wind farms yesterday were a good idea) but refusing to borrow money for projects which will pay off big time is also a serious matter. Of course Ord River schemes and even the Snowy Mountains mega-project when looked at with a dispassionate economist’s eye may take one back to the costs of Stalin’s transformation the Soviet economy and imagine a 1960 educated Moscovite saying “well, it was sad, but what’s a few million starving peasants then against a pretty good life for me now”. Still, really rapid transit to and from Tullamarine would surely stack up???
WARREN JOFFE: I’m scared of a tiny handful of mining and media magnates receiving carte blanche to dictate the terms of governing Australia with the permission of the so called Liberal Party. Ditto National Country Party.
Equally, I am scared to see the clout coming from all the emergence of far right wing religious groups-together with established but reinvigorated Parties such as the DLP- as they all preference Tony Abbott. Unionists are
amiable kittens compared with these self-righteous vultures.
I think you are a bit out of touch or out of date Venise Alstergren (probably all of us who comment on Crikey are).
The “far right religious groups” I suppose we would both agree are undesirable are those who would recriminalise abortion and so on. (One of the worst would be Joe de Bruyn of the ? Miscellaneous Workers Union - not exactly your standard right winger in old-fashioned terms - actually Shop Assistants I think). And as I can’t help regarding them as presumptively stupid and certainly distorted in their priorities I was always worried when their influence in the NSW Liberal Party began to grow. Ted Baillieu always resisted that lot in Victoria. But the idea that they are of any importance to what will happen under an Abbott government I regard as quite fanciful.
One good thing about mining “magnates” having influence is that a lot of Australians saving for their families and their own futures benefit from the profits generated and dividends paid. Unions who are effectively in favour of making non-members pay for their members (a small minority in the private sector now)getting more of the world’s good things at the expense of others and at the expense of productivity while using their union platform to get themselves into parliament or on to superannuation boards where they end up at least in the top 5 per cent for income and wealth…. well, I don’t see the side benefits in their activities though they sometimes still do a worthwhile job on workplace safety - sometimes.
Abbott is DLP in all but. Name . BernardiIs similar but weirder , creepier ? I,m puzzled at how you seem to have confused roles . Did you mean non union people benefitting from union wins in wages flowing on to them ?
Geomac62, I don’t know about DLP but I would source some of Abbott’s economic instincts (though able presumably to grasp the advice he gets now intellectually) to Bob Santamaria’s influence. Mind you that wasn’t all about settling good Catholic peasants on small holdings where they could bring up 15 healthy children but included a strong suspicion of Wall Street bond traders as responsible for much of the world’s evils (what would he have thought now of the joint effect of Chinese Communist lenders and Wall Street intermediaries?)
My probblem with the oligarchy which is the tight little group of unionists whose social conscience is more likely to have derived from being good public (private, still nominally Christian) school,boys like Bill Shorten with his Xavier background than from any shared lived experience of lower socio-economic class deprivation. Union leaders who have got on in the ALP have included a lot of cynics (my grandfather quoted one union leader MP as referring to the “so-called ****** working class” in a very derogatory way in private conversation)as one might expect of people who have organised people who, on average, are not nearly as smart as they are and use their support to get on in life. Now we just have a free floating little group of would-be oligarchs who are basically educated middle class people on a career path. Absent the traditional Labor causes thanks to the welfare state they can’t afford principles as they manoeuvre to put together majorities out of an even more desperately collected bunch of minorities than the Libs and Nats have to put together. And practically none of what they use to distinguish themselves from the Libs and Nats is good for the economy, or the people who pay taxes and might even be independent of taxpayer support (major health care excepted) n retirement. As with Howard’s middle class welfare splash, and Gordon Brown’s excesses in the UK (though he was a much more traditional Labour type than our lot) they will trade on the good times to find the money or credit so they can buy votes. And isn’t a National Disability scheme lovely, and the Gonski proposals which, magically, are going to conjure thousands of excellent teachers out of thin air and give “every [sic]child” what total humbug describes as a first class education. And then there is the competition with the Greens on real and pseudo green issues which, being in government, Labor has to try and squeeze within the bounds of economic responsibility/realism - almost impossible if it is the Greens they have to compete with.
Having been an advocate for elements of the National Disability scheme many years ago, though carefully attending to affordability and the problems of moral hazard, I only wish that governments had been more prudent managers of money so that such schemes were affordable without damage to the economy or people’s reasonable expectations about the income and wealth they would be allowed to keep unplundered. (It always seemed clear to me that every quadriplegic should be given the sort of help that would make it possible to live in a family house and not depend on parents or spouse or siblings sacrificing everything to care for them. Moral hazard isn’t a problem and risk taking by the young which could be regarded as stupid isn’t a problem which can be dealt with usefully by deterrent callousness. Which would be one’s next priority on the gradual progress towards helping the truly unfortunate I don’t know but simply deciding that we have got a nice big mining boom and so can spend up as if good times are permanent is not on. And i trust the Libs and Nats to be bit more prudent on the whole. True Abbott’s Santamaria influenced Catholic background might push him in the same direction….
I take the point some have made that the Libs have, in recent years of declining party membership, suffered to some extent from the same diseases as Labor. But there are fewer careerists who have never earned a cent by providing goods and services in the competitive market place and the religious nuts are peripheral (usually single issue and unsuccessful) and probably small business people whose simplistic ideas don’t do systematic harm to the economy.
WARREN J: Perhaps I haven’t expressed my concerns properly. Although it’s late at night I’ll endeavour to explain one or two points then I’ll give up trying to be reasonable.
Not for a moment do I consider the mining industry to be all bad. However, the people who own the mines tend to have a rapacity which is unpleasant to the point of anti-environmental practices. (The timber industry possesses a similar mentality-as does the fishing industry as represented by the giant trawler, the Abel Tasman, which planned to mine fish.) I was, however, referring to the owners of these companies, who are few, but use their vast wealth to throw behind the Coalition. I have no particular brief for the unions. But I am in no way against them either.
The world is presently in a major right-wing convulsion. And, as with America-we always follow the Americans, do we not? There are many revitalised and new religions. Religions which should have no import nor input into a secular society like Australia. Amongst them being the ugly remnants of bog-Irish forefathers who came to this country and whose natural environment is the law. These people gravitate to national politics and have undue leverage over the rest of us. I single out the leader of the Liberal Party, Tony Abbott, who is, along with at least a dozen of his inner circle, DLP, through and through.
One of the major problems of this country is that the Labor
Party swung to the right to grab votes from the Coalition. In the ensuing meleé the voter was left with no choice, or chance to vote for a real Opposition Party. Disenfranchised voters swung to the only real opposition Party being the Greens-who at least have some ideals.(But not enough power to be a viable left-wing party.) It was the old axiom. When two dogs fight over a bone, a third dog often comes by and grabs it.
We are heading for a Coalition government-aided by the mega billionaires, and dozens of bigoted religious nutters-I include the DLP in this catagory-who look to be set to decimate the Labor Party in the September elections. (None of these groups are likely to preference any Labor candidates.) This will knacker said Party for the next ten (minimum) to twenty years.
You may enjoy the ensuing hegemony of a one party state. I do not. You may consider the Union movement to have more clout with the Labor Party than the mining magnates, the religious fundamentalists, the well funded right wing lobby groups, the churches, and the deadening influence of the “Politically correct” groups, the censorship brigade, the sporting shooters, and god alone knows whatever crackpot organisation that lobbies the Liberal Country Party Coalition. I do not.
What is needed is a Labor party with the courage to track to a political position which would guarantee the Australian electorate a genuine choice. A choice between he Coalition headed back to become ever more influenced by the political position of Australia in the 1950s, and a Labor party looking towards the future. The chances of this happening would be about 100-1 against.
WARREN JOFFE; Continued: About two years ago I read an article in The Times-on line edition. It was to do with the amount of carers, doctors, nurses, etc, etc which are needed to look after people in old folks homes. In it they came to the alarming conclusion that it took three adults to keep one old aged person.
Working on the assumption that a lot of these elderly people are being supported by the public purse. Add to that all the disadvantaged people, also supported by the public purse. Taxpayer funded institutes of sport, athletes, Grand Prix races, R E L I G I O U S institutions. There must be hundreds of different groups; the Arts, the ballet, the opera quite rightly receive public funded support. Think of the money given to retired members of Parliament.
What happens to your Welfare State when the money runs out?