EARLIER this year the Brumby government released an 87-page document that few people bothered to read. It was classic Labor: photographs of happy kids and plaudits about Victoria's strong economy and quality of life.

But contained within these pages was an important story about this 11-year-old Labor government and its priorities. For the first time, the Brumby government had published a report card on one of its most fundamental goals: making Victoria a fairer place.

This state election, social justice will be one of the few policy areas of potential difference between the two major parties.


Ted Baillieu, fighting against memories of Kennett-era cutbacks to government services, talks of a ''stronger, fairer, safer'' Victoria and has promised to review the child protection system. Community services spokeswoman Mary Wooldridge told The Sunday Age the Coalition would ''retain existing initiatives and funding and build on them''. But the Coalition is yet to release or cost any big vision of how it will look after the state's most disadvantaged.

The government, meanwhile, will be judged on its record: more than a decade of social and community investment - including $1 billion a year for the past five years under the Fairer Victoria package. Premier John Brumby says fairness is ''right at the centre'' of the government's vision for the state. So, after 11 years of Labor, is Victoria a fairer place?

Yes it is, according to the government and its Fairer Victoria report. Using national surveys, departmental data and Australian Bureau of Statistics reports, the government published 27 indicators of fairness. These are indicators of early childhood development, access to education, health and well-being and liveable communities. Other indicators, of course, could have been chosen, but overall these are reasonable indicators of how far we've come.

Compared with 2000, just after the Bracks government settled in, Victoria has improved on all but five of these indicators. Children are healthier, more pupils are staying on for year 12, we are less distressed and tend to smoke less. Homelessness is down, along with the crime rate, and people believe they have more of an opportunity to have a say.

On the downside, more of us are fat, too lazy to exercise and drink at risky levels. Membership of organised groups - a measure of community health - is down also, and despite the efforts of the Bracks and Brumby governments, four-year-old kindergarten attendance has declined.

University of Sydney's Professor Tony Vinson, who has written the most comprehensive national study of disadvantage, says that Labor's policies are ''associated with'' less marked differences between the haves and have-nots, compared with other states. He chooses his words carefully because, compared with rest of the country, Victoria has lower levels of indigenous disadvantage and fewer remote places where the tyranny of distance contributes to poverty.

One of the architects of Labor's Fairer Victoria package - an umbrella of investment across vulnerable communities, childhood development, education opportunities, mental health and disability services - agrees that Victoria is nationally ''just ahead of the game''. Professor David Adams, now Tasmania's social inclusion commissioner, said Victoria invested in a more co-ordinated and preventive way.

But it's far from all rosy. Some of the big-picture social problems, such as basic poverty and mental health problems, have not shifted, Professor Adams says. ''When you stand right back and say have the big indicators of disadvantage been significantly changed in the last decade in Australia, the answer is probably not,'' he says. ''Victoria's investment in Fairer Victoria has made the state, relative to Australia, a fairer place, but it has slowed the growth of disadvantage and exclusion, rather than knocked it on the head.''

The human story is, of course, more complex than a bunch of numbers. There's always more the state can do, and then, on the other hand, only so much state governments can control. Some things - such as income tax and rising house prices - are beyond their reach.

But as The Sunday Age spoke to Victorians last week about fairness, several gaps emerged in Labor's record. Some of them are old problems that should have improved under a Labor government: under-investment in maintenance and provision of public housing and, as the Ombudsman and the media repeatedly highlight, a broken child protection system. Some of the gaps are emerging: poor support for the rising number of women coming out of prison (and poor accommodation for men, too) and a time-bomb of disadvantage developing in outer-suburban growth areas such as Whittlesea that are starved of services and showing what Victorian Council of Social Service chief executive Cath Smith calls ''hair-curling'' levels of youth unemployment, disengagement and mental illness.