The Allan Labor government in Victoria and the Albanese Labor government are locked in a race to be the most hated in Australia. Anthony Albanese is so disliked in West Australia that voters are more likely to see Albo’s mug on opposition campaign material than his WA state Labor counterparts. In Victoria, Jacinta Allan’s position is so catastrophic that Labor desperately needs preferences to cling to the formerly rusted-on seat of Werribee by less than a per cent. This is a seat that has voted solidly Labor since 1979.
Allan has the electoral cooties so bad that, when she goes cap-in-hand to Canberra, federal Labor screams, ‘girl germs!’ and runs away.
Victorian federal MPs and ministers who fear the Allan government’s unpopularity will fuel a federal election rout in Melbourne are pushing for the state to agree to different transport projects to counter Opposition Leader Peter Dutton.
The coalition lost four seats in Victoria at the last federal election: three of them to Labor. Between Albanese’s falling poll numbers and last weekend’s Labor rout in Werribee, Peter Dutton is hoping that the Libs can pick up at least four, maybe eight seats in Victoria. That alone would put them within seven seats of claiming government. With federal Labor falling behind in NSW, Queensland and WA as well, Dutton has a fighting chance to consign Labor to being only the third one-term government in Australia’s history – all of them Labor, as it happens.
Victoria has not factored into electoral calculations to this level since 1990, when Bob Hawke lost nine seats. Labor losing its dominance has brought into play new Labor versus Liberal contests while newer Labor versus Greens and Liberal versus teal contests mean more electorates are up for grabs. The Liberals lost Kooyong, Goldstein, Higgins and Chisholm in 2022, leaving the party with only a handful of Melbourne seats.
So the last thing Labor in Canberra need is to be tainted by associated with Labor in Melbourne.
It is expected that a previous $2.2 billion [Suburban Rail Loop (SRL)] allocation from federal Labor will soon flow into state coffers, but federal officials are resistant to Allan’s demands for billions more. The stand-off is delaying a broader deal that could free up funds for more immediate projects such as an airport rail and upgrades to the Western Highway and other roads, which federal Labor MPs view as crucial in a tightening contest with Liberals […]
Four sources briefed on tense negotiations between the prime minister, Infrastructure Minister Catherine King and Allan said the Victorians were refusing to sign on to a broader package of projects unless the federal money included a top-up for the $35 billion first stage of the contentious rail loop.
Infrastructure and budget overruns are two tightly interwoven scandals in Victoria. A decade of pork-barrelling by former premier Daniel Andrews is coming to roost. Victorians who fell for ‘Dictator Dan’s’ big promises are daily seeing the reality of choked highways running alongside construction zones which have barely budged, while hundreds of millions of dollars drain out of the state every day for tunnels and rail loops that are no nearer to completion than they were at the last election.
Even the Allan government is internally at war over infrastructure. Some within Labor see the SRL as a wasteful boondoggle. Especially while Melbourne remains one of the few big cities in the world without a rail link to its international airport, largely thanks to Jeff Kennett, who lured private funding to the Tullamarine Freeway upgrade with the promise of no future competition from rail.
Deputy Premier Ben Carroll, asked if he supported the project, told 3AW he supported investment in public transport but emphasised a rail connection to the airport rather than the Suburban Rail Loop’s first leg through Melbourne’s east.
“It’s no secret that I am a big fan of making sure, making sure that Melbourne’s western suburbs and northern suburbs are connected to a suburban rail loop by the Melbourne Airport,” Carroll said.
All the while Labor squabble, Dutton is sitting back and having a quiet chuckle.
“On cost of living, on infrastructure, on community safety, Jacinta Allan and Anthony Albanese just don’t have the answers,” Dutton said. His party is working on billboards and ads displaying Albanese alongside Allan […]
State Labor’s primary vote is 22 per cent and the federal vote is at 25 per cent, according to this masthead’s Resolve Political Monitor, both of which represent historic lows. Other polls have Labor slightly higher in Victoria.
Even Labor’s winning vote in 2022 was its second lowest on record. In a normal election, it would have consigned them to a landslide loss. But, with the fracturing of the two-party system, more voters are choosing minor parties and independents. So every vote in Victoria is going to count come May.
