No critic can deny the Bracks Government strong marks in its first 200 days. It has hastened slowly on the issues like the Snowy water while making sympathetic noises. It has offered no comfort to the Save Albert park wowsers. Above all, it has brought down a budget worthy of the State's best ever Treasurer, Alan Stockdale. And in the budget, it produced a surplus while sterilising one billion dollars in the Infrastructure Reserve.
Some disturbing trends are however emerging.
The ban on smoking in restaurants is a typical 'nanny state' action. It forces people to do what the political elite thinks is good for them. Similarly, the knee jerk reduction in speed limits on urban roads does not appear to have been taken with the benefit of a Regulation Impact Statement, which used to be an insurance against superficially attractive measures that turn out to be rotten. But it is in the company Labor Governments keep that have traditionally brought their downfall. It was Paul Keating who noted that whenever Labor got elected to Government a whole set of people, with claims to have provided assistance, fell out of trees into lucrative taxpayer funded jobs.