Yet Labor has simply continued privatisation, even going as far as privatising public housing. They’re knocking down public housing and replacing it with a mix of “social and affordable housing” which they’ve contracted out management of to a company called Building Communities for the next 40 years.

Neither party has a good record on infrastructure. Cain had a policy of “no road overpasses”, leaving us with all the railway grade crossings and killer intersections on arterial roads.

Labor left the Upfield line with manual gates at level crossings, and hand operated miniature lever frames with rotting 1910s-vintage 2-aspect somersault type semaphore signals. It was Kennett who put in the automatic boom gates and 3-aspect colour light signals.

Going back further, it was the Liberals who introduced the “new deal for country rail”, finally updating the steam-era timetables for more efficient use of diesel traction.

Kennett’s implementation of privatised metropolitan rail was stupid. He seemed to be trying to imitate London in ways that don’t fit Melbourne. The train network in particular doesn’t lend itself to an east/west split. The terms of the deal effectively ensured the refurbished Comeng fleets would be incompatible, and the new trains would need to come from different suppliers. We’re still paying for the inefficiencies that caused. The way revenue and maintenance was split effectively doomed M-Train from the beginning.

Labor appointed a series of incompetent transport ministers. For example Batchelor with his claim that the Liberals’ plan to abolish Metcard zone 3 would “cause too many people to catch public transport”. I mean, you can say the infrastructure wouldn’t be able to meet anticipated demand without upgrades or something, but if more people use it, it’s doing its job.

Labor’s back to breaking promises on infrastructure. Signaling and trunback upgrades for the western lines have been cancelled, capacity upgrades for Upfield (e.g. Gowrie turnback) have been cancelled. Additional track on the corridor to Ballarat (at least as far as Melton) has been cancelled. The airport train will likely never happen. Yet somehow there’s money for elevated rail through Brunswick (scared of losing to the Greens) and more upgrades for the sand belt (more marginal seats).

As far as I can tell the state Liberals don’t really have a coherent plan for anything at this point.

If you compare Victoria’s toll roads to NSW, CityLink is somewhat comparable to the M5 and M4 tollways built by the Liberals. Labor promised to pay tolls for residents of areas served by these roads. They actually did it. With increasing density, the cost eventually became excessive and the Liberals removed the tolls on these roads altogether. The Liberals also removed the surcharge from suburban stations on the airport line, and put a weekly cap on airport station surcharges that kicks in after one return trip (so airport workers are only hit worth about $20/week). Victorian Labor has no intention of winding down CityLink tolls, and put in a very generous extension for Transurban as part of the WestGate Tunnel deal.

Fundamentally, I see Kennett as a symptom rather than the actual disease. Labor ran up crippling debt with little to show for it, and Kennett was elected on the promise of sorting out the state’s finances. His plan to do that was to sell everything. With the way Labor is running up debt again, it’s only a matter of time before the next Kennett is elected, but this time there won’t be anything left to sell. I’m not looking forward to it.