A memorable front page of The Age, published on Monday, August 27, 1990, featured a telling photograph of Victorian Premier Joan Kirner and Federal Treasurer Paul Keating.

Neither appeared willing to even look at the other, as if they were deep into the final property carve-up of a vexatious divorce.

Joan Kirner and Paul Keating appeared less than happy to announce that the State Bank of Victoria was to be sold.Credit: Age archive

They were sitting at the same table – not together, exactly – to announce what had been unthinkable in Victorian circles.

The venerable State Bank of Victoria – the fifth-largest bank in Australia – was being sold by its owner, the Victorian government.

The Commonwealth Bank would buy it, and 30 per cent of the Commonwealth Bank would be privatised to finance the deal.

Victoria lost the lot, and Keating’s push towards privatisation was supercharged.

Bank workers protest the proposed sale of the State Bank of Victoria to the Commonwealth Bank in August 1990.Credit: The Age

The state Labor government – Kirner had been premier for only 17 days – was effectively finished, though the election to formally put it out of its misery and install Jeff Kennett’s Liberals was still two years away.

There was no choice, Kirner said, but to sell the state’s bank, which in one form or another had held the savings of Victorians since 1842, when it began as the Savings Bank of Port Phillip.

It faced collapse because of risky loans, particularly those of its failed merchant arm, the freewheeling Tricontinental.

It would be an ignominious end to a decade of Labor rule, and the memory of it still weighs heavily on the legacy of the governments of John Cain jnr and Kirner.

John Cain in his office.Credit: The Age Archives

But as the release of cabinet papers from the administrations of Cain and Kirner prove, the Labor period that began in 1982 was for much of its existence one of wide-ranging reform that changed Victoria’s political and social landscapes in ways that........

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