Combine the Windsor Hotel balls-up with revelations the former head of Steve Bracks’ media unit Sharon McCrohan has re-emerged as a flak for the Country Fire Authority and it seems the Victorian Labor spin machine is shifting into high gear. But it’s an election year — and that means the spin is flying from all sides with Baillieu’s Libs zoning in on Victorian schools as a battleground in the propaganda war.

For those that missed it, The Age splashed twice last week with an insidious Brumby government masterplan to use schoolchildren as ciphers to promote renovations to an oval (Thursday) and spruik an upcoming community cabinet meeting (Friday). According to The Age, the ads were inserted, with the apparent collusion of Labor-leaning principals, into school newsletters.

But as we revealed on Friday, the source for the first story had far from pure motives — the concerned “parent” was actually Felicity Wilkeson, a senior Liberal spin doctor during the Kennett era. Wilkeson had emailed the Premier and her old boss’ factional ally Ted Baillieu detailing her complaint, which immediately found its way into the hands of Age scribe Paul Austin.

After the first story appeared, the Libs gleefully ambushed Brumby in question time, brandishing another flyer plugging a community cabinet meeting held last year at Mordialloc College. Cue The Age‘s follow-up yarn the next day.

But like the Kennett connection, the story of how the Mordialloc brochure gained traction is laced with intrigue.

A quick Google search shows upper house Liberal Inga Peulich serves as a “community representative” on the Mordialloc College school council and that the flyers had been raised months before, by Peulich, in state parliament.

In the Legislative Council on September 17, Peulich accused the government of abusing children and of saddling schools with extra costs– but failed to disclose her connection to the College, which had hosted the community cabinet a month earlier.

“I have been inundated with complaints from parents that this is an abuse of their children and that children should not be unwitting participants in government propaganda and schools should not be politicised in such a blatant way,” Peulich thundered.

The issue lay dormant until last week, when the Liberals, and The Age, decided to revive it.

Peulich denied any connection to last week’s ambush when contacted by Crikey. She said she failed to mention the school because it was “not appropriate as a member of the school council for me to use the school in that manner.” Not appropriate, it seems, until her colleagues decided to name the school to exploit the news cycle.

Peulich suggested, like the Moorabbin story, that a concerned parent may have alerted the Libs to the outrage.

But Mordialloc College principal Lorraine Harris said that she wasn’t aware of any complaints from parents, and that the flyer’s resuscitation in state parliament was “surprising”. Harris said that as the leader of a government school she was not sure whether she should distribute it. The other Mordialloc flyer mentioned by The Age, promoting the federal government’s stimulus spending, had been sent to secondary schools across Victoria.

Last year, Peulich said school principals like Harris were a soft touch because they were “in a position of limited power” over the cabinets. “No school council and no school principal is going to decline. It is not usually a request; they are unequal partners in this,” she said. But Harris could have simply been batting for the wrong side. On Peulich’s website, under a section entitled ‘Education News’, the member rails against Labor for “gagging principals” who dare to “speak out against the government”.

Way back in November, the Department of Premier and Cabinet responded to Peulich’s claims: “Flyers are given to the school principal as a courtesy, either in electronic form or hard copy as requested by the school…it is totally up to the discretion of the principal if they wish to circulate the flyers to their school community.”

Peulich did not attend last Thursday night’s school council meeting due to parliamentary commitments. Her two-year elected term concludes next year, and sources close to the council say she may struggle to hold her position.