A while back, under Steve Bracks, Victoria was the policy dynamo of the country.  With the Howard government in decline and relying on a cowed, unimaginative public service, the Bracks government, supported by high-quality bureaucrats, led the way with with visionary and strategic public policy, particularly in health, where it drove a strong agenda of increased productivity and participation benefits flowing from a healthier population.

Under John Brumby, that reputation has suffered a serious decline.

It hasn’t helped that Kevin Rudd has rejuvenated the Canberra bureaucracy with an infusion of Victorian talent — starting with Terry Moran, Bracks’ long-serving department of Premier and cabinet secretary.  Some of the best minds in the Melbourne bureaucracy moved to the APS or became ministerial advisers to Rudd government ministers.

But Brumby appears to have gone out of his way to cultivate bad and parochial policy.  In November 2008, he announced a local-preference deal in government purchasing that blatantly breached the Australia-US Free Trade Agreement and committed Victorian taxpayers to paying up to 10% more than they should in heavy manufacturing procurement.

The biggest impediment to a national water market — which should be one of the signature reforms of the Rudd government — remains Victoria’s anti-competitive, distortionary 4% trading camp, which is still years away from being removed.  The cap infuriates the South Australians and prompted NSW to put its own cap in place to prevent NSW irrigators becoming the only sellers in the water market.

And far from reducing Victoria’s dependence on its heavily polluting coal-fired power stations, earlier this year Brumby oversaw Alcoa’s locking-in of coal-fired power contracts, which will prop up the nation’s dirtiest power producers for at least another quarter-century.

Brumby likes to claim he has the nation’s best-run hospitals.  But according to one Crikey reader and health researcher, when it comes to co-operating nationally, the Victorian health system leaves much to be desired.  A National Health and Medical Research Council attempt to establish a simpler and uniform process for obtaining ethical approval for health projects has foundered because the Victorians ignore the NHMRC-developed approval form in favour of multiple versions of their own.  The Victorians have also recently pulled out of submitting their death data to the National Death Index.

It’s no wonder therefore that the parochial Brumby is the most obstinate hold-out against the federal government’s reform plans, insisting that Victoria be bribed well beyond what other jurisdictions are receiving in order to sign up.  Brumby’s own 50-50 plan — which would nicely cement cost-shifting between jurisdictions into place for decades to come — was backed by the coalition’s former bureaucrat of choice, Ken Baxter, who was Moran’s Kennett-era predecessor.

Incidentally, if you thought grocer Roger Corbett offering his views on hospitals reform yesterday was strange enough, note that Baxter used to be an executive with Philip Morris, which I guess means he has some experience of health issues, just not at the right end of them.