Well I admit it. I'm starting to warm to Ted, moderate leftie though I am. The trigger is the new Premier's recent more-than-perfunctory, warmly human and gracious comments on his predecessor's legacy and the intersection of their lives. And yet these very remarks arouse the cynical voter in me, and I suspect numerous others.

The open question now is whether Mr Baillieu as Premier will resist the politics of personalised spin and invective patois played ad nauseam by modern day opposition leaders, himself not least. We now wait to see whether civility in Victorian political discourse has come to stay, or whether the Premier's grace will display all the persistence of Tony Abbott's "kinder and gentler polity".

You've started well, Ted. The rest is up to you and your colleagues.