1 month ago
7
January 29, 2026 — 5:00am
Is good government possible any more in Victoria? It is a question as much for electors as our elected. If, in a democracy, people get the government they deserve, the shallowness of what passes for contemporary political debate says as much about us as the people we send to parliament.
Reflect for a moment, on the raggedy start we’ve had to this election year. While wildfires burnt across the state, Victorian politics was consumed by an unedifying spat about CFA funding which resolved nothing and served only to push people into opposing corners on an issue where there should be common ground.
CFA funding hasn’t “only ever gone up”, as Premier Jacinta Allan selectively contends. Nor has it been cut year on year, as Opposition Leader Jess Wilson says with matching selectivity. The truth is less contentious – CFA finances fluctuate according to the state’s perceived fire risk, emergency service activity and accounting but have stayed roundabout the same for five years.
And there is no evidence – at least none produced so far – that a lack of CFA funding has hampered the response to this year’s destructive bushfire season or increased the risk to firefighters.
The biggest story of these fires isn’t the average age of CFA trucks attending them. It is that miraculously, only one person has so far died from a rolling firestorm that has engulfed more than 430,000 hectares and destroyed more than 400 homes.
This owes far more to the willingness of ordinary Victorians living in fire-threatened areas to heed warnings and evacuate their homes than the balance sheet of the CFA. Since the horrendous events of February 7, 2009, when 173 people perished in the Black Saturday infernos, Victoria has gone through a profound change in how we think about the bush and changing climate and how we manage the threat of fire.
Besides, whether you are leading the government or aspire to lead the next one, it does no one credit to descend into a liar, liar, pants on fire argument when large swaths of the state literally are. Having spent the scorching start to this week obsessively watching the BOM app, my forecast for the election year is plenty of heat and not much light.
Politics in Victoria used to be done better than this. There is no stronger example than the constructive bipartisanship that resulted in the creation of the Victorian Health Promotion Foundation, better known as VicHealth, nearly 40 years ago.
It is timely to reflect on this now because, for reasons that Health Minister Mary-Anne Thomas has not adequately explained, the Allan government is planning to abolish VicHealth, the state’s internationally renowned preventative health agency, as an independent, statutory body and fold its operations and $45 million budget into the Department of Health.
The founding purpose of VicHealth was to break professional sport’s smoking habit by replacing tobacco advertising with government-funded health promotions. The agency was established with its own, legislated funding drawn from tobacco excise. It’s operations, although not wholly independent of government, are not subject to ministerial direction.
It was a pioneering and celebrated reform of the Cain government, one which has since been adopted in other Australian jurisdictions and around the world. But as David White, the Labor health minister who introduced it, reflects, it wouldn’t have happened or endured without the support of the then Liberal-led opposition.
White, who was convinced of the need to tackle the rising cost of tobacco disease after his father died of emphysema, says it took him two years to similarly convince Cain. Meanwhile, he enlisted the help of his shadow, the opposition’s spokesman for health, Mark Birrell, to get his side of politics onside.
While this was happening, the then editor of The Age, Creighton Burns, agreed to help build the case for reform by commissioning a series of stories in the newspaper about the harm and cost of smoking. The stories were timed to coincide with the government’s cabinet deliberations.
White says he also approached the respective editors of The Sun News-Pictorial and The Herald, the city’s morning tabloid and afternoon broadsheet. He assured the editor of The Sun, Colin Duck, that getting rid of cigarette advertising was a hard-headed reform and not “namby-pamby” over-reach. “He was kind enough to say he wouldn’t eat my head off when we announced it,” White says.
Such was the strength of the political and public consensus behind VicHealth that by the time its enabling legislation was introduced to parliament, the tobacco lobby was snookered. The agency’s early work, including funding Quit campaigns, contributed to smoking rates halving in Victoria.
Five former chairs of VicHealth, including Birrell, have written to Premier Allan, Treasurer Jaclyn Symes and Health Minister Thomas urging them to reconsider their plan to abolish it. Victorian Opposition Leader Jess Wilson has said little about VicHealth’s plight other than to frame it as “yet another real-world consequence of Labor’s financial mismanagement”.
If there is a consensus in today’s state parliament, it appears to be a preparedness to let VicHealth die, along with more people from preventable disease.
Government moves much faster today than it did 40 years ago and the power of the major political parties – not to mention newspapers like The Age – to shape public opinion is diminished from what it was.
It is also difficult to imagine a disciplined, bipartisan, two-year reform campaign on anything in a state where there is furious disagreement about what is clearly printed in CFA financial reports.
Chip Le Grand is state political editor.
The Opinion newsletter is a weekly wrap of views that will challenge, champion and inform your own. Sign up here.
