I remember back in the early 1980s, when the voters of Victoria returned the Government of Premier Dick Hamer despite the land scandals and other failings of his government, I remember actually standing up at my microphone  at 3AW’s LaTrobe street studios and thundering: ‘You have been sold the Brooklyn Bridge. You have been sold the Brooklyn Bridge’.

I’ve felt that way a few times lately and most specifically with the sudden, puzzling, really unexplained, resignation of Steve Bracks as Premier.

This was only a few months after Bracks had gone to the polls and beseeched to re-elect the team you could trust. The Bracks Team.  It wasn’t an appeal to vote Labor, it was an appeal to vote for Bracksie.

And then within months he showed you his Brackside and quit. I can sort of understand his deputy John Thwaites going the same day because he’d looked at the numbers. He wasn’t only NOT going to be the new Premier. He would even lose the Deputy Leaders’ job.

Bracks said at the time he was leaving for family reasons.  The current get out for most politicians. Spend more time with the kids, I’ve neglected, they deserve better etcetera.

But Steve Bracks within weeks took on a job as adviser to the East Timorese government and now he’s been given the first of Kevin Rudd’s  ‘jobs for the boys’.

He’ll head up a committee to review the automotive industry. And he’ll be paid between $3000 a week and $10,000 a week depending whom you believe.

What he knows about the car industry, apart from driving one, and his son driving one badly, I’m not sure. But he does barrack for Geelong and that make cars down there.

Shadow Treasurer Malcolm Turnbull says the Productivity Commission should be holding the review, not a former Labor politician.

‘To put Steve Bracks - with no knowledge of economics, no expertise of the car industry -- to put him in charge of this is just jobs for the boys, and it really is a shocking start for the jobs for the boys Labor season which has just begun’. He’s right but John Howard was pretty good in the ‘jobs for the boys’ department.

One ominous thing out of this was the shifty way the new Treasurer Wayne Swann tried to duck it by misleading Parliament on the very first day yesterday.

He said he knew nothing about the appointment. Which was either a fib or he’s a mushroom. Does he seriously want us to believe that he knew nothing about an appointment to such a serious position reviewing a major industry? That the announcement hours later confirming it was made with his knowledge?  Gimme a break.

 But back to Bracks. Obviously there is life after politics. And he is still young. And he’s entitled to make money.

But you can’t convince me that he woke up one morning and thought ‘I’m sick of this’. Surely it is the duty of any politician, especially a premier, to consider whether or not he’ll go a full term if re-elected before going to the polls.

It was a joke when Kevin Rudd during the federal election kept saying that a vote for Howard was a vote for a man who wouldn’t stay the course.  At least Howard said he would go and anointed his planned successor. Labor’s Carr and Beattie and Bracks  didn’t.

And while going on about politicians’ obligations to their voters.  Bracks and Thwaites caused expensive by-elections. And you get fined if you don’t vote.

And on the federal scene we’ve got Costello, and Downer and McGauran about to walk away. Funny. Only a couple of months ago they were pleading for your vote. It wasn’t conditional. None of them said ‘vote for me… but I won’t stay if I don’t get the perks of being in Government’. They really are a self-serving mob.

Thursday, February 14, 2008