Politics & Council
2 August, 2026
Tide of discontent started with tax
IT’S JUST 13 months ago that local MP Jacinta Allan ventured to the Loddon reaches of her Bendigo East electorate.
IT’S JUST 13 months ago that local MP Jacinta Allan ventured to the Loddon reaches of her Bendigo East electorate.
The premier who had seen off rumblings of discontent, Labor’s Victorian performance in the federal election a month earlier silencing the internal critics of her leadership.
That visit to turn the sod of the long-promised Serpentine fire station came as the bush revolt against her party was escalating.
Premier Allan’s advance scouts made sure the station site was clear of protesting CFA volunteers and placards - the hugely unpopular emergency services tax that would hit rural landowners hardest had already seen country anger erupt on to the steps of Spring Street.
So wanting to avoid any encounter with more hostility, Ms Allan didn’t even invite the media to witness the official start on a new station that had been promised years earlier.
Cultivation of country voters was the strategy that has seen Labor dominate Victorian politics for almost three decades.
Jacinta Allan, herself, was one of the first beneficiaries, snatching the Liberal seat of Bendigo East in a string of surprises that saw Jeff Kennett lose government at the 1999 election.
And that’s the paradox of Ms Allan’s rise through Labor ranks to the state’s top job that she held since being anointed by Daniel Andrews ahead of his abrupt exist from Parliament just under three years ago on this Tuesday.
The seeds of country discontent were already germinating in 2025. The hell-bent imposition of renewable energy transmission lines through prime agricultural land was already underway when Ms Allan assumed the mantle of leadership.
But it was that whack on farmers with the emergency services tax that really triggered Labor’s version of the bush revolt experienced by Kennett. It was not just farmers. CFA volunteers - home owners, business owners. Yes, farmers were to be given a temporary stay of execution yet they remain unconvinced to this day that the government will drop the whole idea.
That tide of country anger was the start of a tsunami of disasters that have engulfed Ms Allan and her government - claims of union corruption on Melbourne construction sites, the ballooning state debt where every promise has been put on the credit card for future generations to repay, more backflips and side steps than a ballroom dancer or gymnast on crime and bail laws, potholed and crumbling roads long the bane of country people. All now on the radar of city folks. Not that Melbourne would admit it, but outside of suburbia is where Premier Allan and her government first came undone - it just needed the other 75 per cent of the state to start having doubts for power brokers to move as they did this week against a leader viewed by many, according to the polls, as a liability.
The rise of the country voice also showed other Victorians that it was more than okay to speak up, and out, about the decisions and actions of the Government. People can disagree and in numbers, too,.
Ms Allan, contrary to her regional roots and intimacy with Labor’s regional and rural strategy of wooing country areas, was now on the electoral nose.
Whether Ms Allan makes one final visit to the rural reaches of her electorate - there’s that fire station at Serpentine still to be officially opened - remains to be seen. It would mean travelling one of the worst sections of the Loddon Valley Highway, afterall, and putting her government vehicle at risk of damage.
When Ms Allan became premier, I wrote that time would tell whether she would be a Bolte or Dunstan (long-serving and electorally-popular premiers who hailed from country Victoria) or fail to make the distance as befall Denis Napthine who inherited the top job from Ted Baillieu in that four-year interregnum to Labor rule.
Before the people of Victoria were given the chance to make official judgement, the fate of the member for Bendigo East has been decided by those in her own party who had lost faith.
Read More: Loddon Shire