It is still over a year before the 2010 state election is due, but election fever is on the rise in Victoria and appears to be affecting the state Labor party in particular.

The signs of election fever include usually reasonable people losing their sense of perspective while, in the background, one can hear the sound of eggs being cracked with sledge-hammers.

The Brumby government’s decision to dissolve the Brimbank City Council following a report from Bill Scales in to the council’s operation has all the hallmarks of election fever.

As a result of Mr Scale’s inquiry, the government has decided to sack the elected councillors and replace them with administrators who will stay in place until the next council election, due in November 2012.

According to Mr Scales, the crime of the current council was that it was not behaving in ways qualitatively different from the previous council.

The pre-2008 council, of course, had been the subject of a critical report following an inquiry by the Office of the Ombudsman.

Given that the current councillors had been in office for less than 10 months, it has to be concluded that Mr Scales was looking for instantaneous behavioural change but didn’t find it.

Mr Scales also discovered more evidence of ‘outside interference’ – this time, in the form of a local branch of the ALP writing to ‘Labor councillors’ asking that they take the branch’s view on a planning matter in to account before casting a vote in council.

One would have thought that politically active citizens seeking to ask councillors to take their view in to account when deciding on matters is a practice that occurs across all of Victoria’s other 78 councils.

The stated grounds for the Brumby government’s intervention in Brimbank are clearly specious.

The real reason for the government’s actions has more to do with sorting out some internal factional matters ahead of the 2010 election.

In particular, the government is clearly keen to sort out the brawling that erupted over the Kororoit by-election that was held in June 2008.

Most of the voters who live in the state seat of Kororoit are also citizens of Brimbank.

This was the by-election in which the Labor candidate was going to be a Ms Natalie Suleyman – the daughter of the same Hakki Suleyman referred to at length in the Ombudsman’s report – until a break-down in local factional agreements led to the endorsement of Ms Marlene Kairouz, who subsequently won the seat.

Those factional players outflanked by the Kairouz endorsement have been agitating for revenge ever since. Some of these aggrieved personnel are people of high standing in the ALP. Their names can be found in the Ombudsman’s Report.

Premier Brumby was clearly tired of this locally-based factional brawling and has sought to terminate it at its source ahead of the next state election.

The premier’s mood was doubtlessly also affected by a recent attempt by one of the players mentioned in the Ombudsman inquiry to derail the replacement of state party secretary Steve Newnham with Mr Brumby’s preferred candidate, Nick Reece.

Mr Brumby is clearly in no mood to tolerate any more shenanigans in the western suburbs of Melbourne.

Meanwhile, the list of casualties from the Kororoit by-election grows ever longer. It includes Theo Theophanous MP for Keilor, George Seitz and Ms Suleyman of course.

It now also includes the entire Brimbank Council. Then there are all the councillors who work for state politicians who now have to decide whether they want to be councillors or have a job, for the law as it has been recently created by the Brumby government doesn’t allow such people to do both any more.

Perhaps the voters of Brimbank are also casualties, although it remains to be seen if the government’s decision to appoint administrators to run the council proves to be unpopular or not.

The Labor government knows that it can treat Brimbank in this way because the state seats involved in this matter are very safe for Labor.

The really key question, however, is whether sacking the council will bring the factional instability to an end. With an election a little over a year away, Mr Brumby will certainly be hoping that it does.

Dr Economou is a senior lecturer in Politics at Monash University.