Hansard debates

Mr McGUIRE (Broadmeadows) (15:49): John Cain modestly changed Victoria forever. A visionary reformer who placed the public interest first, his commitment to equality, fairness and integrity defined his time as Victoria’s longest serving Labor Premier.

The most significant legacy of the Cain government, from 1982 to 1990, is its continuing influence, shaping the quality of our lives today in ways we often take for granted but should never forget. Seminal investments helped Melbourne evolve into the epicentre of Australia’s international leadership in medical research and sport. The sophistication of our science has grown today to help pave the way for a vaccine against the latest deadly infection causing a global health emergency, the coronavirus. He secured the Australian Open’s grand slam status and built a new stadium for the tournament’s home, culminated at the weekend in another sporting, tourism and financial triumph. As well, he won the battle to retain the AFL Grand Final at the MCG—because he always called it the people’s ground. By liberalising liquor laws, Melbourne’s style matured beyond the 6 o’clock swill and suburban beer barns into the cosmopolitan cafe society we casually enjoy and other cities crave. Strategic investments in Victoria’s competitive advantages remain a blueprint for economic development. Counting cranes on the skyline is still a key performance indicator of economic activity. Heritage conservation remains the touchstone. Victoria led national employment for 84 consecutive months under John Cain’s premiership, a record that the Andrews government strives to replicate.

The Premier has revealed that, with tears in his eyes, John Cain told him on the eve of the 2014 election about the privilege he was about to inherit, emphasising the responsibility in typically forthright fashion: ‘You cannot—you must not—waste the opportunity’. Such driving commitment has been admirably honoured. Emblematic causes ranging from protecting the safety of workers, our children and the environment have progressed, but none seems more fitting to me than the landmark legislation reducing the gender pay gap for women and boosting women’s participation in the workplace set to pass this house this week.

Harking back to the liberalising changes John Cain pioneered simultaneously as Premier and Minister for Women defines why the past is never dead and buried—it is not even past. These juxtapositions highlight the ebb and flow of history, the constancy of purpose required for reform, especially progress for women, and why Labor governments matter.

Intelligent, erudite and independently minded, John Cain grew up in a political household in times of depression, war and furious political turmoil:

Like all people my beliefs and commitments were fashioned by my environment, but it was my father’s philosophy about society which, more than anything else, helped to establish my outlook. The lifelong credo that emerged was that for society to function smoothly government had to provide stability, decency and integrity, and it had to act to protect those values.

And that is precisely what John Cain did. These ideals made John Cain a change agent, not just for his times but for the ages. The vicious Labor Party split that brought down his father’s government in 1955 denied Labor power for 27 years in Victoria, the state Henry Bolte dubbed the jewel in the Liberal Party’s crown. A suburban lawyer, John Cain became an activist in the Victorian ALP, then run by what was described as a dictatorship of unions regarded as placing a higher priority on exercising power within the party than on delivering Labor to power in government. Like-minded Participants, including John Button, Richard McGarvie, Barry Jones and Michael Duffy, combined in the mid-1960s to open up the party to wider membership and to broad-ranging policy debate, building support in the party branches and then lobbying for the democratisation of the entire Victorian branch. National ALP leader Gough Whitlam challenged the Victorian branch with his ‘Certainly, the impotent are pure’ speech. Federal intervention followed, but the ALP remained in the political wilderness until Whitlam eventually crashed through in 1972 with the ‘It’s Time’ election.

Victoria had to wait another decade before John Cain’s mantra, ‘Labor will always give you a fair deal’—first publicly heard at the age of 14 before his voice broke—finally resonated. The son rose to match his father’s destiny with a tightly organised set of bold, targeted policies. Insightful commentator on Victorian politics Tim Colebatch, a former economics columnist for the Age and biographer of Liberal Premier Dick Hamer, noted:

By nature a loner, he nevertheless reached the top by working closely with and ultimately leading teams of talented individuals bent on following their own paths. Those paths often clashed with those of powerful people and interest groups—not least, then-treasurer Paul Keating—but his government’s achievements speak for themselves.

John Cain promoted and encouraged talent, and it delivered results. Larger-than-life characters drove defining causes for the Cain government. Health minister David White, whose father died from emphysema, introduced the world-leading Victorian Health Promotion Foundation, whose leadership in campaigning against cancer from cigarette smoking continues to save lives.

For too long Melbourne had turned its back on the Yarra River. Planning minister Evan Walker brought a dash of Pierre Trudeau-style urbanity to directing the conversion. The Southbank precinct defined the signature change to modernising environment, converting derelict factories, warehouses and used car lots into a complex of restaurants, bars and shops embracing the river.

Tom Roper confronted deinstitutionalisation, and it is pertinent that the Andrews government has initiated a royal commission to establish the next defining era of mental health reforms.

Tough-minded Scot and member of Mensa Steve Crabb was an ideas man and an enforcer whose gunslinger style stretched all the way to his snakeskin boots.

Joan Kirner would become Victoria’s first woman Premier.

A narrow third-term win coincided with a series of financial collapses, which have been mentioned. John Cain was clear eyed and a realist, and he acknowledged, ‘We were, like every government, good and bad mixed together’. But I want to go to Tim Colebatch’s perspective, because I think it is important to analyse this period. He said:

As opposition leader during the 1990–91 recession, Jeff Kennett blamed Cain’s government for every business collapse in Victoria and branded Labor as ‘the guilty party’. Labor certainly made economic mistakes, but it also became the fall guy for mistakes made by others—the Reserve Bank, Keating himself, and those running the businesses that collapsed. It was guilty of contributory negligence and poor budget management under pressure, but that was it.

Conventional history praises the Hawke-Keating government’s economic achievements, but forgets that the state that led the nation out of recession in the 1980s was Victoria—mainly because the state government stimulated economic activity, reformed its own role, created incentives for economic development and gave the state a coherent blueprint for growth.

Between the ideal and the reality falls the shadow, and in politics that shadow can be factionalism. John Cain warned of its corrosiveness, and that underscored his demand that Labor must focus on the advancement of ‘our people’.

I first met John Cain when I was a reporter here, observing from the hardwood balcony up there and looking to see who was making a contribution worth reporting on in the daily news. He would reach out in that style with his hand—that defining pose captured in that larger-than-life statue on Premiers Way. He was prosecuting his case in opposition in his relentlessly rational, practical way. He adopted the same approach with cabinet colleagues, requiring more evidence and deeper consideration to win their arguments.

He also stretched out with this engaging gesture to people whose voices are rarely heard and who have little power. When we asked him to become part of the advisory board for the Global Learning Village in Broadmeadows, long after the hubbub of the Premier’s day had faded, he did it with that classic John Cain enthusiasm. He welcomed people. He intuitively understood how important it was that they got lifelong learning to deny that miser fate. In one of his last public appearances we had the opportunity to invite John and Nancye to the opening of the $25 million redevelopment of the town hall in Broadmeadows. I was able to make the point about how this matters, to acknowledge the premiers—Dan Andrews for his commitment, Steve Bracks, John Brumby and John Cain—and to note what it means to have that constancy of purpose to address the social determinants of life so that people can thwart that miser fate, to give them the chance for better health, for lifelong learning and for jobs and meaning and to connect the disconnected to opportunity.

It gave me the chance to thank Nancye. For her contribution, Nancye Cain is a state treasure. It is as simple as that and as significant as that.

Today I would like to also acknowledge Joanne, John, James and the extended family for all you have done and all that has meant. I say vale to a man who had the courage to live his convictions and vale to one of the Labor Party’s truest believers, whose legacy lives. Vale, John Cain.