Discussion: Jeffed?

Jeffed?

Shorthand reference to a certain former Premier whose government closed a lot of schools (and other things). Bell Street in our part of town is particularly well-endowed with monuments to this era, with a Harvey Norman which used to be a school and a hotel which used to be a hospital (although the latter may not have been a great loss, judging by the number of medical negligence cases from there which featured in the studies of my law-student former housemate).

Interestingly I had originally intended using the number 7 on the map as a route choice but instead used the park to the north. I only just noticed via your comment that it's not a laneway after all.

djalkiri tells me her parents used to call their dog's deposits on the ground 'Kennetts.'

Like George W. Bush, Jeff seems more reasonable with the benefit of hindsight. Or maybe absence makes the heart grow less unfonder. Maybe he is less absent for you in his football role, and the tribalism of two-party politics has transferred to the tribalism of the two great sides of the 1980s.

The Kennett era also gave rise to expressions such as "I've had a Jeff of a day" (meaning: a really crap day) which my Melburnian friend's father, also named Jeff, found a bit hard to take at times...

Jeff is also the orienteer who can't orienteer very well.

One aspect of Jeff which does seem more reasonable with hindsight is that he was relatively socially liberal, and in particular strongly anti-racist, which contributed to Pauline Hanson never getting much traction here. There is, however, a pretty strong case that his government's hollowing out of Victorian government service delivery capabilities (which subsequent governments have done little to reverse) came back to bite us in a fairly significant way last year....

He had a relatively brief post-politics career as a talk radio host. One of my colleagues did an interview with him and was pleasantly surprised that he asked intelligent questions and appeared to be genuinely interested in the answers (maybe that's why he didn't last long as a talk radio host).

He also tried his hand as a newspaper columnist, but that didn't last long either. Certainly he's one of the better Liberal premiers of Victoria, though as Blair says that's partly because he got to carry out some of the worst aspects of that party's ideology.

I would always prefer a Liberal Premier who did nothing. The most recent one comes to mind.
In the immediate post-Jeff days I had a consultancy task that included identifying all the small rural schools that experienced a Jeffing. Turned out to be very few. The Eastwood kidnappings resulted in many of them being closed in the Thompson era.