The normiecon legacy media are busily creaming themselves over new Victorian state Liberal leader Jess Wilson. But while they’re falsely claiming she has single-handedly turned around the party’s fortunes – when, in fact, deposed leader Brad Battin had been steadily and incrementally doing that for the last six months – just what exactly is Wilson promising to do any different to the cavalcade of loser fellow ‘moderates’ who’ve preceded her?
Let’s face it: Victoria is an unusually target-rich environment after 25 years of Labor rule, broken only briefly by a single-term Liberal interregnum. Housing crisis, violent crime waves, collapsing infrastructure, corruption, third-world roads and record-high debt exceeding even the darkest days of the Cain-Kirner collapse in the early ’90s.
Pick a target, any target.
A Victorian coalition government would launch a royal commission into the CFMEU’s influence over the state’s Big Build program, with new opposition leader Jess Wilson vowing to drag into the open how $50bn in cost overruns has bled from Victoria’s infrastructure projects.
Credit to Wilson, this is going for the big guns. The openly criminal CFMEU is a political force unseen since the days when Norm Gallagher’s BLF ruled Melbourne’s building sites and filled the union bosses’ pockets (surprise, surprise, also under a Labor government: who’dathunkit?). Even more crazy-brave, the Big Build has been Labor’s signature programme: kind of a bread and circuses with shiny, cripplingly expensive bridges and tunnels. ‘At least Dan got rid of the level crossing!’ Victorians witter, which they think is just the best thing since that funny Italian bloke made the trains run on time.
But the Big Build has come at a big, big, BIG cost.
In an interview with the Australian, Ms Wilson said a royal commission was essential to uncover the true extent of corruption and criminal infiltration on the $100bn Big Build and to reveal how much public money had been wasted.
A royal commission with powers to compel witnesses, seize documents and require evidence under oath could force Premier Jacinta Allan and her predecessor, Daniel Andrews, to reveal what they knew, and when, about corruption allegations on Big Build sites.
Just how deep they were in it (while Andrews was premier, Allan was responsible for infrastructure portfolios) can be gauged by how fiercely they’re resisting just such an inquiry.
Ms Allan has rejected calls for a such an inquiry into alleged rorting, intimidation and kickbacks on major projects, despite being backed by the likes of the former head of Victoria’s anti-corruption watchdog, Robert Redlich.
“We’ll undertake a royal commission into the CFMEU’s involvement in government-funded major projects on Big Build,“ Ms Wilson said. “It’s contributed to over $50bn over the course of this government, and that’s why we need to get on top of any potential corruption, any potential links to organised crime – not to mention the bullying, the standover tactics, the misogyny on these sites.”
That last one might seem a bit odd, until you realise that Wilson is pitching herself squarely at winning back all those Victorian women who got wet around the knickers for ‘Dictator Dan’ during Covid. Andrews’ social media army were notoriously feral, swarming even the mildest online criticism like a pack of screeching maenads.
The Australian reported last month that confidential emails showed Ms Allan was sent ministerial briefings detailing CFMEU misconduct on Big Build projects more than a year before the militant union’s behaviour was widely exposed. Ms Allan, who was minister for infrastructure and transport under Mr Andrews, has said she passed on corruption allegations to relevant authorities but did not follow them up.
Ms Wilson suggested the royal commission would target everyone, including companies, who had committed wrongdoing.
That would include the criminal bikie gang members who, previous investigative reports have exposed, were paid vast taxpayer-funded salaries to not do any work at all on building sites. Apart, that is, from bashing anyone who got in their way.
Scrutinising the Big Build also parlays directly into the state’s staggering debt, of which Andrews’ and Allan’s infrastructure boondoggles are responsible for a huge slab. Not to mention Allan’s time as minister for Commonwealth Games, a portfolio so hilariously mismanaged that Victorians ended up stiffed over half a billion for a games that never happened. Victorian Labor stuffed it up so badly that the games simply walked off and relocated to Glasgow.
Ms Wilson said she was committed to a “forensic look at the budget, line item by line item” to understand the true state of finances. Asked whether this would take the form of an independent commission of audit – like Jeff Kennett and Tony Abbott undertook after coming to government – she would not be specific on the form it would take.
Ms Wilson also vowed to remove “incredibly opaque” budget procedures that she said had become worse over the course of the Labor government which she believed were hiding the true extent of the deficit. This included being transparent about on-budget and off-budget programs.
“This is a government that is, by every opportunity, trying to be tricky with its accounting and trying to provide less and less transparency for Victorians.”
Which raises the likelihood that the currently assumed budget deficit of $250 billion might turn out to be ludicrously optimistic.
It also makes Allan’s attempted attack, claiming an ‘$11 billion black hole in the coalition’s policies’, a colossal exercise in pot-kettle-black. When it comes to Victoria’s staggering debt, $11 billion is a rounding error.
