Ted Baillieu has resigned as premier of Victoria, with Denis Napthine sworn in as his replacement overnight, amid mounting turmoil in the state government.
Baillieu’s resignation came after Coalition backbencher Geoff Shaw announced he was quitting the Liberal Party and moving to the cross benches, potentially causing a hung parliament.
Poor opinion polls, a failure to communicate major government policies, recent leaked tapes featuring senior party officials discussing the resignation of former Victoria Police Chief Commissioner Simon Overland and the referral of Baillieu’s chief of staff to the state’s anti-corruption body have been cited as reasons for the resignation.
Leighton Holdings chief executive Hamish Tyrwhitt claims the worst is over for the engineering firm, following major write-downs on the Brisbane Airport Link and Victorian Desalination Plant projects.
“We sit across a portfolio of about 450 live projects, so there will be things that happen on some projects that are negative. But there’s also things that happen on some projects that are very positive and that weighs itself out,” Tyrwhitt said.
“What are the chances of another Airport Link or VDP within the business? Absolutely zero. Because we do not have any $4 billion or $5 billion jobs in our portfolio.”
Robert Pepper, the former head of policy development at the US Federal Communications Commission, has warned the federal government to put other key policy concerns ahead of revenue-raising in its upcoming spectrum auctions.
The warning from Pepper, a senior executive at tech giant Cisco, comes ahead of the federal government’s proposed auction of 700Mhz band and 2.5Ghz band spectrum, which will be freed by the end of analogue television broadcasts in Australia.
“My philosophy, when I was at the FCC, was not about the money. In fact, in the US, we are prohibited by law to take into account how much money is raised from spectrum,” Pepper said.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average added 0.5% to 14,317.42. The Aussie dollar is down to US102.35 cents.
Andrew Sadauskas is a former journalist at SmartCompany and a former editor of TechCompany.
