ON A warm, windy morning, Steve Bracks stands on the steps of the two-storey curved salmon brick police station at Frankston a few hundred metres from the bay on the Mornington Peninsula.
The Premier is announcing another law and order policy - 600 more police over the next four years - in another marginal seat. But he looks more as if he's posing for a TV commercial for sophisticated men's wear with the police station as the tough backdrop for all that style. Tall, dark and handsome. It's a perfect image. A well-cut suit, resolute face with half-smile ready on demand, neat, black hair with the occasional white streak through it.
Nearby stands Bob Smith, a fellow Labor pollie - far more typical of the breed, complete with a shirt straining over tummy, an indifferent suit, and a bluff, ex-union blokes' style.
"What's not to like?" Smith beams. "He looks good, he takes his boys to the footy, he's a nice bloke. What you see is what you get. He's well-balanced; he listens."
And as for all that criticism that Bracks is a little too busy consulting and listening to actually do much?
"He replaced a regime that didn't consult at all. It was like Ramses II," says Smith. "We all accept consulting slowed the process down but you need to re-establish democracy. And we weren't quite as prepared as we needed to be ... There'll be a lot more action in the second term."
Perhaps.
But the most striking thing as Bracks prepares to meet the judgement of the electorate, is how far an appealing personal style can carry you in political leadership terms these days. It's a hard, bitter lesson that Simon Crean is now learning and John Howard grimly managed to ignore, courtesy of determination and his party's desperation.
For Bracks, it's certainly a quality that has managed to salvage and redirect a party that only a few years ago was every bit as despairing as the current federal ALP - along with facing a seemingly impregnable opponent.
Instead, Bracks proved the surprising and perfect antidote to the stridently aggressive style and forced changes and cuts of the Kennett era. Labor's win in 1999 was so unexpected it earned Bracks the title of the Accidental Premier, a label that is slightly less common now he is expected to win again - but clearly no less irritating to Bracks.
"It's an easy way of describing something some people found hard to describe because they didn't understand," he says. "They didn't understand that Victorian families were suffering. They just weren't where the public was.
"We would not have won if we hadn't developed strong alternative policies on health, education, public safety and the regions."
Which is precisely why he is standing on the police steps at Frankston spruiking the good news. Police at that station walked out on the eve of the last election in protest at the Kennett cuts to numbers. Bracks is back to reinforce the message that his Government believes in providing more services to people - not fewer.
On the nightly news, he gets the perfect grab across.
"We'll only promise what we can deliver and we'll deliver what we promise," he says.
Is that enough? Across town, Jeff Kennett, the one-time colossus of Victorian politics, is reduced to being a drive-time radio show announcer with low ratings while he watches Labor spend the surplus and benefit from the economy that his government did so much to re-engineer. Such is political life.
And it demonstrates that nothing lasts indefinitely. Yes, Labor is the favourite this time around but the experience of Kennett - not to mention the fate of state governments expected to narrowly hold the last elections in Western Australia, South Australia and the Northern Territory - demonstrates the risks of political probability.
Bracks has only had one term but courtesy of an unfavourable redistribution and Labor's need to rely on three independents to form government, he is also in the rare position of having to win more seats this time to stay in power. Nor are many of the seats the party did win in regional Victoria natural Labor constituencies. That means it has to hold on to them, pick up several more in the middle-class suburbs of Melbourne's south-east as well as holding off the Greens from taking any seats in inner Melbourne where their support base has broadened to include plenty of Labor voters against wars and detention centres as well as for trees.
It's a big ask, even for such a popular premier. Bracks is good at making it all look pretty easy.
Internal polling shows Labor comfortably ahead in two-party preferred terms - and that was before the self-imposed disaster of Robert "Oops-I-forgot-to-register" Deans whose ignominious end to his political career as shadow Treasurer has also now derailed any momentum for the Liberals.
"I think it's important you don't lose touch," Bracks tells the Herald. "You won't do your job effectively if you do lose touch. I just try to be myself. I like people and you can't lose sight of the fact that what concerns they have at a particular moment are the most important things in the world to them. Otherwise you lose sight of what politics is all about."
No danger of that here. Labor's campaign slogan is "Steve Bracks. Listens. Acts".
The last word is designed to steer the public away from any suspicion that the passionate, frenetic nature of the Kennett era - the "Victoria on the Move" slogan - has been replaced by an ever-so pleasant, well-meaning drift: "Victoria Standing Still."
"It's not about icons in the centre of the city," insists Bracks. "It's about growth in the regions and in services where improvements are noted over time."
But even though the memories of the disastrous economic policies of the Cain and Kirner eras were long since overwhelmed by the onslaught of the Kennett juggernaut, Bracks knows he can't afford any suggestion that the Victorian economy is getting the staggers again.
It's one more reason he chose to go a year early while he can still boast about Victoria's reduced unemployment levels and a generally healthy economy - with growth figures for last financial year revised up again a full percentage point this week to be double that of NSW.
And it's why - on the day after his foray to the police station - he is standing with his predecessor as Labor leader, now Treasurer John Brumby, inside the offices of Vision Systems, a successful exporter of fire alarms and biomedical instruments.
Brumby was certainly never a success as leader of the opposition but he is now regarded as the engine room of the Bracks Government, keeping it on financial track so Bracks can keep sounding reasonable and responsible.
Bracks - right next to his "Listens. Acts" poster - is talking about his determination to foster innovation and exports, to create 150,000 new jobs in Victoria over the next four years and to increase immigration levels. The grandson of a Lebanese immigrant, he certainly doesn't share Bob Carr's aversion to increased immigration and population levels. Anything but.
"I think it's important as a government that we set targets and goals for ourselves," Bracks says.
Unfortunately, Daniel Grollo, head of the nation's biggest privately owned building company, Grocon, is more interested in the realities of the present. He has just called the Victorian construction industry a basket case due to union thuggery and standover tactics, complaining construction costs are 20 to 30 per cent higher in Melbourne than Sydney.
Bracks insists it's "entirely understandable" that in a buoyant building industry, big construction firms would seek to get a better deal from unions, but it's unconvincing rhetoric and he knows it.
It also gives Robert Doyle, the very new leader of the Liberals, one of the few weapons he has available to beat over Bracks's smooth head. Doyle is a former private-school teacher who sounds and looks like the slightly pompous toff the Labor Party is so keen to cariacature, even though he's the son of a hairdresser.
He's only been in the job three months, after the party realised it didn't even have a hope with his predecessor. Doyle at least offered hope - though his ebullient, barrel-chested style are no match for the Premier, and he's still having trouble getting traction.
His slogan is "Real leadership for our state" to try to break through the attractive Bracks image and suggest Bracks's approach is to dither. His main focus is talking about how the Labor Party is up to its old tricks of spending too much money. The last thing the Liberals needed, then, was the Deans fiasco.
Gross incompetence, the Labor Party smugly declared. And Bracks didn't even have to "Think. Act." to look good by comparison.