Victoria on the Move! First Essendon veteran Kevin Sheedy, now this. Perhaps it was the hangdog spectre of the sacked Essendon coach that hastened Victorian Premier Steve Bracks’ decision to resign, a moment that led to this morning’s rare spectacle of a senior political figure going out on his own terms and on top of his game.

You’d have to say that history looks likely to be kind. Elected on what was almost the subconscious impulse of Victorian voters wearied by Jeff Kennett, the three-term premier parlayed his unexpected elevation into something close to a significant governmental epoch. All this despite an almost complete absence of the traditional political gifts of verbal fluency and public guile. He won three elections and now his party, presumably under the direction of former failed Federal member and born-again fiscal conservative John Brumby, looks good for another against an opposition as shambolic and undermanned as any other state Liberal franchise.

Will others in the Bracks cabinet take this moment and move on too? Transport minister Lynne Kosky perhaps? Almost certainly deputy premier John Thwaites, a man sullied by recent controversy and pointedly disinherited in the Bracks press conference today: ”John Brumby would make an outstanding premier,” said Bracks. ”I will have a single vote for that position.”

It will go to Brumby, ”the best Treasurer Victoria has ever had”, the man who has been the brains in the Bracks operation, the slick suit who has done as much as anyone to help Bracks achieve one of his proudest boasts: restoring Victorian Labor’s reputation for at least maintaining the appearance of solid economic management.

And now Bracks can add another, of a man who walked away from the blandishments of senior public office for the benefit of his family and the possibility of a new and private life. What a guy.