We have seen a version of this movie before. In 1990, the Victorian Labor government of John Cain Jr was dying on its feet. Cain’s premiership had been history-making. He was the state’s first Labor leader to win consecutive elections; indeed, the only previous time the party had enjoyed a term of majority government was under his father, John Cain Sr, in the 1950s, and that administration was prematurely terminated by the great Labor split.
Cain Jr’s government had established a formidable modernising reformist record. He remains the state’s most impactful Labor premier: only Daniel Andrews competes with him for that title.
In its third term, beginning in 1988, however, things went deeply awry for Cain’s government. The state was consumed by financial calamities, the most spectacular of which was the State Bank of Victoria tottering under a sea of bad loans. Cain Labor was not solely responsible for these developments; much of the problem originated with the financial deregulation policies of the Hawke-Keating federal Labor government and the scandalous practices of entrepreneurial buccaneers.
