Joan Kirner

Joan Kirner was an ex-schoolteacher who became Victoria's first female Premier. It would be fair to say that the Australian Labor Party handed her a "poisoned chalice", given the massive unpopularity of the Cain government (see John Cain Jr.) due to the economic woes the state experienced in the late 1980s.

Given her left-wing credentials she was not about to institute the harsh programme of economic rationalism that many people called for and was defeated at her first election by Jeff Kennett.