As new year unfolds, we will celebrate Victoria’s successes and speak plainly of its flaws
As we enter this election year, there is no shortage of intractable issues facing Victoria.
As new year unfolds, we will celebrate Victoria’s successes and speak plainly of its flaws
Editorial
January 2, 2026 — 7.46pm
This new year in Victoria is, in one respect, very different from those that preceded it.
For the first time in the state’s history, we have access to records of the deliberations of cabinet. Thirty years after the Public Records Office was entrusted with them in 1996, the papers of the Cain and Kirner governments of the ’80s and early ’90s are in the public domain.
Joan Kirner and John Cain walk along St Kilda beach for an ALP environment policy launch in 1988.Credit: John Lamb
As our state political reporter Kieran Rooney notes, there is much in their pages that must strike us as eerily familiar: “A Labor government challenged by record debt levels, a rogue construction union requiring an external administrator, a female premier given the difficult challenge of righting the ship and winning a historic fourth term in government.”
Reading on, we are confronted with dilemmas Victoria is still struggling to resolve.
The papers take us back to the first major rollout of poker machines in the state and the debates around their regulation. Then-attorney-general Jim Kennan’s hope that bet limits would “inhibit a ‘flutter’ from becoming heavy gambling” must remind us of this year’s trial of cashless pokies, engulfed in controversy over its failure to include mandatory loss limits.
A map of an early-1990s proposal for Docklands – including a university and casino.Credit: Public Record Office of Victoria
The vision of Docklands as it might have been from the archives – with a technology hub, university campus and low-rise housing – has echoes not only in the present-day development but also in the failure to realise the potential of districts such as Fishermans Bend, where similarly ambitious plans for apartments and a campus of the University of Melbourne are .
