On Saturday, most Victorians will probably struggle to remember a single election policy from either Labor or the Liberals. Voters will be aware that the parties are promising to spend a lot more money on a lot more things, but this will be the full extent of their knowledge.
Regardless of who becomes premier, the majority of the electorate will be relaxed about the outcome. Sometimes in elections, the parties attempt to be different from each other. During this campaign we've had the reverse.
The fact that we are in such a situation is not necessarily something to complain about. We're lucky that for the moment, at least, our economic and political circumstances are such that to many voters the election is irrelevant.
The question for the future is whether state elections will ever be relevant. State elections don't matter any more because the traditional policy battlegrounds of health, education and transport are now outside the control of state governments.
The decline and fall of state elections is not only the result of the centralisation of power in Canberra.
Since the 1980s, state governments around Australia have allowed the private sector, competition and market forces to play a much greater role in the provision of key social services. Although Spring Street still provides the funds for services, how that money is spent is increasingly outside the authority of public servants.
Health services are delivered by autonomous hospital boards. In education, while the curriculum is still determined by the government, self-management in the government sector and the growing non-government sector restricts the ability of education ministers to direct what actually happens in classrooms. Nearly every aspect of public transport has been privatised, with transport policy now being almost exclusively about new road building. Policing is one of the few areas that has remained relatively unchanged.
During the election campaign, the parties have been happy to tinker at the edges of health, education and transport policy. In the years ahead, the driver for improvement of these services will be more competition and more privatisation, measures that as yet no party is willing to contemplate. And of course, more competition and more privatisation will take services even further out of the reach of government.
It's quite likely that in the future, state elections will matter even less than they do now. This is because state elections are about what state governments do or not do. However, the answers to many of the problems governments try to solve rest with individuals and communities, not government. Often the answer is less government, not more.
For example, the "obesity crisis" is not the fault of the state government and it is not within the power of the state government to fix it. Labor has promised to give students from prep to grade 2 fruit every Friday. (How the Education Department will get the students to eat their fruit is not clear). The responsibility for overcoming obesity in children rests with their parents and their families, not with government. Talking about free fruit on Fridays is easier than explaining hospital waiting lists.
Another case is mental health, with both major parties making major commitments to the issue. The ALP has said it will appoint a mental health minister and will spend an additional $130 million, while the Liberal Party will spend an extra $222 million. These policies are fine as far as they go. But the reality is that some of that money will merely go towards attempting to fix the tragic problem that state governments themselves have created.
De-institutionalisation was a bipartisan policy motivated by the best of intentions. However, it was implemented without adequate resources and without acknowledgement of the pressures it would place on the community. The product of the policy can be witnessed daily on our streets and in our jails.
Overwhelmingly, it is family members who provide the care for their loved ones suffering from mental illness. State governments are failing because they continue to impose a one-size-fits-all approach to mental illness. Giving families what they want has its political perils. Families might not want a new health centre that can be opened by the local MP in a blaze of publicity. Instead, they might want additional funding for extra hours of specialist medical treatment. Unfortunately, empowering individuals and families with both resources and the choices that resources provide, isn't the neat solution beloved of bureaucrats.
No party has ever tried to be elected with a slogan of: "Don't trust us to fix your problem -- because we don't know how". Voters are wise enough to realise the limits of government, and across a range of policy areas they are looking for answers that go beyond what governments have the capacity to do. When the political parties learn this lesson, state elections will start to be relevant.
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