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For voters who turf out an appalling government, there can surely be no bitterer pill to swallow than the realisation that the ousted have laid landmines of debt for decades to come. While the late, unlamented pollies continue to bank their fat, taxpayer-funded pension, the rest of us are paying for their political flights of fancy.
Julia Gillard’s NDIS was sold as compassionate reform and has become a $35-billion-a-year black hole of fraud, rorts and exploding costs. Malcolm Turnbull’s Snowy 2.0 was a modest $2 billion pumped hydro fix that somehow metastasised into $42 billion and won’t be finished until 2032, if ever. The long hangover of Jacinda Ardern’s Covid lockdowns continues to nobble New Zealand’s economy. Not to mention her socialist flights of tilty-headed fancy, from the abysmal failure of KiwiBuild to the Auckland City Rail Link, which delivered the usual cocktail of ballooning costs, delays and zero accountability while the punters paid.
The pattern is clear: Politicians of the uniparty announce shiny nation-building vanity projects with other people’s money. Costs explode. Reality bites. Then they flounce off to their indexed pensions while the next government is left holding the bag and accused of ‘fiscal vandalism’ for even considering the plug.
Consider the obvious vacuity of this ‘analysis’ from Woketoria’s lefty bible, the Age.
Is it possible that the next Victorian government, if indeed we have a change of government in November, could scrap a project that has already cost taxpayers $6,683,115,000?
That all sounds all very serious, until, deep in the article, he words it in another way, which puts it so plainly that the stupidity of his arguing is glaringly obvious.
Is the Liberal Party prepared to burn $7 billion to save $40 billion?
If you were teaching your kids how to save money, the answer is so bleedingly obvious that it escapes the brow-furrowing Age. Arguing otherwise is so obviously dumb that it is has its own entry in the Big Book of Stupid Arguments: the Sunk Costs fallacy, that peculiar form of economic insanity where good money is hurled after bad simply because ‘we’ve already spent too much to stop now’.
The sunk cost fallacy thrives in politics because admitting error looks like weakness. Politicians treat public money as their own ego fund. Scrapping a failing project invites accusations of ‘vandalism’. Continuing it lets them cut ribbons and claim legacy while someone else foots the final bill. Infrastructure Australia’s own reports highlight optimism bias and poor procurement. Yet the megaprojects keep coming: Inland Rail doubling to $31 billion and North East Link at $26 billion and rising.
The deeper rot is ideological. These projects are rarely judged on economics. They’re virtue signals – ‘nation building’, ‘renewables transition’, ‘equity’. When reality intrudes, culture and ‘progress’ become shields. Question the SRL and you’re anti-vision. Doubt Snowy 2.0 and you’re anti-climate. The punters footing the bill? They’re just background noise.
Economists call this throwing good money after bad. Savvy taxpayers call it robbery. The remedy is brutal but simple: ignore sunk costs. Evaluate future costs against future benefits. If the project doesn’t stack up, kill it. Every dollar saved is a dollar for debt reduction, tax relief or actual priorities like hospitals and roads that work.
Victorian taxpayers are about to learn this lesson the hard way. By June 30, $6.68 billion will have been poured into the Suburban Rail Loop, with tunnels already being bored beneath Melbourne’s suburbs for Daniel Andrews’ vanity megaproject. The Age is clutching its pearls at the prospect that an incoming Liberal government might actually have the spine to scrap it. “Is the Liberal Party prepared to burn $7 billion to save $40 billion?” the paper wails, as if basic arithmetic were some kind of moral failing.
Anyway, this is Victoria, where such stuff is just a Friday afternoon in the political-media cycle. This is the same state that cheered Andrews tearing up the East-West Link contract at a cost of $1.1 billion for a road that was badly needed but nobody got, then blew $589 million cancelling his own Commonwealth Games fiasco. Now the SRL, originally sold as $34.5 billion, is heading for $50 billion or more – this being Victoria we know, as surely as a bikie gang holding out its hand for a secret payout, that it’ll be more.
Even the Age knows that Victoria is as broke as it is woke.
If the coalition won’t scrap the SRL, what else are they planning to fix a budget groaning beneath unsustainable health costs, ongoing cash deficits and an interest bill that by 2029–30 will soak up 10 per cent of all government revenue?
So far, the only savings measure offered by [Liberal leader Jess Wilson] since the budget was tabled is her cap on public service executive salaries and a restated pledge to tear up the state’s historic treaty and abolish Gellung Warl, a newly established, statutory body representing First Nations people.
The Age’s devotion to left-wing sacred cows is almost touching. Tut-tutting at Jess Wilson’s promise to axe a race-baiting statutory Frankenstein nobody voted for and Victorians resoundingly rejected at the 2023 Voice referendum. Scrapping it might save a ‘mere’ $100 million a year, but apparently that’s ‘mean spirited and insulting to Aboriginal people’. Funny how $6.68 billion already sunk into a white elephant gets a shrug, but trimming a symbolic bureaucracy is an outrage.
And nothing says ‘Victoria’ than that $100 million is a mere rounding error in the government-caused bill. Astonishingly, it’s even less than the weekly interest bill on the state’s debt.
Never before, anywhere in Australia, has a government pulled the pin on a major project after tunnel boring machines were already in the ground.
Well, it’s about time someone did. Sunk costs are sunk. Throwing another $40 billion after $7 billion because ‘we’ve already spent a fortune’ is the logic of a degenerate gambler, not a responsible treasurer. Use the tunnels to house a Museum to Government Stupidity, with Dan Andrews’ promised bronze statue on a massive plinth out front.
Jess Wilson has at least signalled a pause and review. She should go further and scrap the lot. Use the savings to repair the budget black hole left by decades of Labor incompetence: unsustainable health costs, cash deficits and the endless welfare traps that actually hurt the people they claim to help. The only problem is that we know the Victorian Liberals Wilson leads are just a pale, blue-green shadow of Labor. Kennett-style fiscal discipline would require these ‘moderate’ invertebrates suddenly evolve a collective spine, which should happen sometime after pigs evolve wings.
Still, should such a miracle occur, the Age thunders that it would prove “public administration in Victoria is barking mad”. As if we didn’t know that already.
