'Tanty Ted'
January 30, 2011
Baillieu is starting to show signs that he's struggling with the reality of being premier
LAST Sunday, Ted Baillieu anchored a media event about Australian tennis players raising money for flood victims. After his spiel, the new Premier took questions from the assembled political reporters.
And that's when things turned strange.
The media's questions were not unreasonable. Was $50 million too much for the Grand Prix ? Robert Doyle estimated the event would soon cost $70 million. Was that too much? Did the race have a future in Melbourne? For the first time as premier,
Baillieu lost his cool. In a worrying sign that he is yet to fully come to terms with the demands of being the state's leader, he was deflective, angry and condescending.
He refused to answer questions from the Herald Sun's Stephen McMahon about whether $50 million was an acceptable taxpayer loss.
He talked over the reporter's attempts to ask the question and dismissed them as speculative and hypothetical. ''I appreciate that's your stock in trade,'' he told McMahon, ''but I am not going to comment further ..."
The Premier is still on his political honeymoon. He's got his training wheels on, and the media is in a forgiving mood. But it won't last forever. After Sunday's performance, one reporter was already referring to the premier as
Being ready to govern, being premier, is not like being opposition leader, where the media may shrug at some sidestepping of questions.
Being premier does not mean hiding behind excuses such as ''that's speculation'' or ''that's hypothetical''. And it certainly does not mean dismissing issues that affect Victorians because they gestate in the federal realm.
Ignoring these realities is a fundamental mistake, one that John Brumby, for all the electoral backlash at November's election, rarely made.
Full article ...
http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/politics/ted-on-the-tear-20110129-1a8yp.html