Time for some Baillieu bravery

Time for some Baillieu bravery. As John Brumby keeps digging a deeper hole for himself and begins to annoy his fellow Labor Premiers with his stand against the federal health proposals, the time is right for Victorian opposition leader Ted Baillieu to emerge as a friend of the Prime Minister. On his website, the state Liberal leader makes a good and pointed attack on the Brumby health record that makes a mockery of the claims that Victoria is somehow better than all the rest when it comes to managing hospitals.

As he points out, because of Labor’s incompetence, Victorians are forced to rely on less public hospital beds and less public dentists per head of population than their interstate counterparts. The Brumby government has been caught out deliberately manipulating waiting list data to make Victorian public hospitals’ performance appear better than is actually the case.

Now is the time to point out that the increasingly unpopular Premier (his approval rating as measured by Newspoll has dropped seven points to 45% in the last year) is just grandstanding in the hope that appearing as the tough guy standing up against Canberra will give him a popularity boost as his re-election bid gets closer. I doubt that the attempt will work and the more likely result of the Brumby intransigence is that the Liberals will end up with a real chance of victory.

That chance will be improved by Baillieu pointing out how great will be the financial cost for Victorians in the years to come of rejecting the Kevin Rudd proposals.

Traditional values alive and well. From this morning’s Northern Territory News:

Traditional values ending. From this morning’s Gold Cost Bulletin:

Searching for policies that don’t cost dollars. It’s on in the UK now and in Australia tomorrow. Look for some wholesale lifting from what works in the UK as our leaders confront the same problem as Gordon Brown and David Cameron — how to make vote-winning promises that don’t involve spending.

The Conservative leader Cameron made a bold attempt at it overnight with his manifesto calling for what the Daily Telegraph called an ambitious plan to roll back the size of the state. The Tories envisage a Britain in which communities — rather than government — work together to solve shared problems. I can well imagine Tony Abbott in a few months similarly calling for the role of the state to be scaled back, as he seeks, like  Cameron, to establish a philosophical divide with the government after 13 years of public sector expansion under Labour.

It’s time in many languages. And now for a golden oldie:

My thanks go to John Fenton for sending a translation along with this extract from his local paper. In his words: “I thought that some of your older contributors and readers might be amused by the attached item from the front page of the leading (and pinko, metaphorically and literally) newspaper in Vienna, Der Standard from today  April 13, 2010. It shows the newly elected Hungarian leader at a podium with the words in Hungarian (“Itt az idö!”) that the paper translated into German as “Die Zeit ist gekommen!”. In English that is “It’s Time!”, which to Australians conscious in 1972 is very well known. Nothing new under the sun.”

Insular news sense. One of our Asian neighbours is currently going through a political crisis that potentially threatens the security of the whole region but you might not know it if you relied on Australian newspapers. This week as demonstrators and soldiers die in the streets of Bangkok the turmoil is being relegated to pages well inside. On Monday the Sydney Morning Herald did report the deaths with a picture on page one while The Australian had a little box on the front warning Australian tourists of the danger. Since then even the so-called serious broadsheets have acted as if what happens in Thailand is of little or no importance.