John Brumby wants his Victoria to be about balance - competing globally and preserving community institutions, writes Paul Austin.
IT'S A fair bet that of the 85,497 people who were at the MCG to watch Geelong beat Collingwood last month, John Brumby was the only one who spent some of the afternoon thinking about olive trees. Why he did so gives a pointer to the sort of Victoria the new Premier wants to create.
Brumby is a Collingwood fan, but he's also a Thomas Friedman fan.
Friedman, the pro-US, pro-markets columnist for The New York Times (whose work sometimes appears on this page), has claims to being the most influential international affairs commentator in the world today. Certainly he's helped mould Brumby's thinking, especially through his stunning turn-of-the-century book The Lexus and the Olive Tree, which attempts to define and understand this thing called globalisation.
Francis Fukuyama, the American intellectual who gave us the phrase "the end of history", says Friedman's book "comes as close as anything we now have to a definition of the real character of the new world order". Brumby, less grandiosely, says he thinks about the book a lot — even at the footy ...
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