As new year unfolds, we will celebrate Victoria’s successes and speak plainly of its flaws

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This new year in Victoria is, in one respect, very different from those that preceded it.

For the first time in the state’s history, we have access to records of the deliberations of cabinet. Thirty years after the Public Records Office was entrusted with them in 1996, the papers of the Cain and Kirner governments of the ’80s and early ’90s are in the public domain.

Joan Kirner and John Cain walk along St Kilda beach for an ALP environment policy launch in 1988.

As our state political reporter Kieran Rooney notes, there is much in their pages that must strike us as eerily familiar: “A Labor government challenged by record debt levels, a rogue construction union requiring an external administrator, a female premier given the difficult challenge of righting the ship and winning a historic fourth term in government.”

Reading on, we are confronted with dilemmas Victoria is still struggling to resolve.

The papers take us back to the first major rollout of poker machines in the state and the debates around their regulation. Then-attorney-general Jim Kennan’s hope that bet limits would “inhibit a ‘flutter’ from becoming heavy gambling” must remind us of this year’s trial of cashless pokies, engulfed in controversy over its failure to include mandatory loss limits.

A map of an early-1990s proposal for Docklands – including a university and casino.

The vision of Docklands as it might have been from the archives – with a technology hub, university campus and low-rise housing – has echoes not only in the present-day development problems of that much-maligned suburb but also in the failure to realise the potential of districts such as Fishermans Bend, where similarly ambitious plans for apartments and a campus of the University of Melbourne are now in limbo.

As Joan Kirner discovered just days into her premiership, long runs in office give governments baggage, some of which may sink them. But is there an equivalent of the State Bank debacle somewhere in the cupboards of the Allan government? Will the Suburban Rail Loop and its peculiar genesis in the Andrews years come back to haunt Labor?

As we enter this election year, there is no shortage of intractable issues, from the size of the public service and its politicisation to the debt burden and continuing calls for more to be done on crime. When the Commonwealth Games open in Glasgow in July, the spectacle should serve as a bitter reminder of the flawed modelling and failure to heed warnings about costs that left Victoria’s taxpayers $589 million out of pocket. Indeed, some of that money will be paying for the event to be staged in another country. Jacinta Allan was minister for Commonwealth Games delivery when the plug was so abruptly pulled.

Premier Jacinta Allan announces the opening of the West Gate Tunnel project in December.

But the government will also have successes to spruik, from the Metro and West Gate tunnels to the historic treaty with this state’s First Peoples. The real question will be whether the opposition can find a message of its own to present to voters as a more compelling choice.

After a decade of tumult, 2025 was the year when the Victorian Liberals failed to get started. Brad Battin finally snared the leadership as 2024 drew to a close, but from the outset there were questions about his all-male leadership team, and when he tried to rectify this with a reshuffle, he ended up clearing the path to his own overthrow. Like John Pesutto and Michael O’Brien before him, he departs without having contested an election as leader.

With their shrunken party room and years of internecine scar tissue, are the Victorian Liberals capable of communicating to the voting public what a government run by them would do? And can they summon the unity, experience and organisational machinery necessary to put them in government in the first place?

If the major parties have their way, the election will be fought on transport, planning, housing affordability, the economy, healthcare and crime. These are policy areas that define life in our state and dominate discussions about where we are heading.

But this week’s historic release of Victorian cabinet papers should remind us of John Cain jnr’s role as the architect of our freedom of information laws, and the abysmal state into which they have fallen in the intervening decades. It was a matter the man himself lamented, and which The Age is determined to put at the top of the agenda in this pivotal year. Securing accountability from all sides of politics depends on it.

At local government level, it is surely time to root out the kind of corruption identified by our reporting and explored in the Independent Broad-based Anti-corruption Commission’s Operation Sandon investigation. If this level of government is to secure public confidence and defend its role in shaping the state, its house must be definitively set to rights.

As was the case in Cain and Kirner’s time, when Victoria struggled to shed the “Rust Bucket State” label, there is also an urgent need for visionary thinking to explore new economic opportunities. Building transport infrastructure is laudable, but building pathways to future prosperity in a time of rapid technological change requires imagination from those who would lead us.

The Age will seek to drive constructive conversations in these crucial areas of our public life in the year to come. We will celebrate Victoria’s successes and speak plainly of its flaws. We invite you, the reader, to join us in that conversation. We look forward to hearing from you.