Not Even Cain Screwed Victoria like This

Thirty years ago, a Labor government all-but bankrupted the state of Victoria. Against a torrent of hate and vilification from the left, Jeff Kennett and Alan Stockdale did the hard yards of rebuilding the state’s economy.

And Victorians promptly elected another Labor government. In fact, Labor have run the state for all but four years of the past quarter-century.

Should anyone be surprised that the state’s rooted again? To the staggering tune of $165.9 billion: nearly three times the debt (adjusted for inflation) at the end of the Cain-Kirner disaster.

“Dictator Dan” Andrews is trying to blame it all on Covid, but that’s only a fragment of the truth.

Foreshadowing “difficult choices” ahead of next Tuesday’s state budget, Daniel Andrews on Thursday talked up the pandemic as the key cause of the state’s financial woes.

But analysis of previous Victorian budgets, budget updates and financial statements demonstrates $25.3bn, or more than 40 per cent, of debt accrued by the Andrews government since 2019-20 is unrelated to Covid.

Andrews has already tripled the debt of the early 90s economic collapse — and he’s not even finished, yet.

The situation is also set to get worse, with state debt projected to increase by another $49.9bn by 2025-26, amounting to an extra $75.2bn in debt accumulated in the six years from 2019-20 that was not part of the plan ahead of the pandemic, but is not Covid-related.

By that time, the state debt will be nearly quadruple that of the last Labor disaster.

No wonder Andrews is trying to fudge the numbers, to try and blame it on Covid.

On its dedicated website for Covid-19 financial reporting, the Victorian Department of Treasury and Finance attributes a total of $35.8bn to “coronavirus-related costs”.

But those supposedly “coronavirus-related costs” include”

Some of the expenditure included in the $35.8bn of Covid costs is likely to raise eyebrows, including $690m for the government’s “big housing build”, $110m for $250 “power saver” vouchers for households and $94m for community sport.

Other initiatives classified as “Covid” spending include $67m on solar homes, $38m on other clean-energy projects and $30m on “industry energy transformation”.

Just like John Cain, Andrews splutters that he’s “building” the state. In reality, he’s simply buying off an entire class of taxpayer-funded leeches.

A key contributor to the debt is the ballooning public service wage bill, which at $33.4bn for 2022-23 is $7.2bn or 27 per cent higher than the $26.2bn forecast for in the 2019-20 budget […]

Mr Andrews denied choices his government made ahead of the pandemic had put Victoria in a more vulnerable financial position. “No, no. We went to the election in 2018 with a clear plan to borrow more to build more, and just as future generations will make a contribution to paying off things like road and rail, hospitals and schools, they’ll benefit from that.,” he said. “That makes the economy bigger.”

The Australian

Until Labor run out of other peoples’ money.

Again.

Is it even worth bothering trying to save Victorians from themselves, yet again?