The Budget, the blowouts and the battlers
The Victorian Government’s self-serving Budget blows financial decency to the winds of change. By Beverley McArthur.
This week’s Victorian Budget has neon-lit the contempt the Premier, Daniel Andrews, has for the state he pretends to care about.
His gentle, gentle words have lulled the southern land.
Not only did he lock up its past few months – and wave the fear of fines should a gasp of fresh air be dared – he has also locked up its future.
It wasn’t that people were religious in their adherence, they had no choice.
It is an appalling budget for our children and theirs.
It has blown any shred of financial decency to the winds of change – and change they will.
The near zero lending rates currently offered will not last forever. When they go up – so too will the beads of sweat across the brows of the battlers in this state.
Daniel Andrews will triple Victoria’s debt within three years to $155 billion. Sensible Victorians – those who will actually pay for this - will be hoping the adage of `three strikes and you’re out’ will apply.
If recent polling figures are any indication, it’s unlikely.
Those untouched, in fact those who benefitted from the Andrews’ lockdown, the bureaucracy and the boffins, will keep sailing along and ticking the Premier’s boxes for him. After all, he has given them a pay rise just as private industry can hardly pay to stay open.
The blur of zeros in this budget is beyond anything Victorians have seen.
Once upon a time, millions of dollars for a project was a lot of money. Now we talk in billions. For the nation, the talk is trillions.
Do we even understand what this means? Do people care? Is it just too much to take on board?
There’s a good chance this is the case. In fact, the Treasurer Tim Pallas and the Premier are banking on it.
Ignorance is bliss – and it is why one of the most anti-democratic cover ups has been ever-so-quietly delivered by the Top-Two this week.
The decision to completely remove one of the most important documents from this year’s budget papers is breathtakingly damning. The audacity is real.
Budget Paper 4 is the item in focus. This week, Andrews didn’t bother with it. Dismissed it.
Budget Paper 4 is perhaps the most critical of the papers – it defines the major projects in the state and presents where they are up to and what is happening with their costs.
Are big projects on time and on budget?
We will never know. The financial silence is deafening. It is also outrageous. It is contemptuous. It is quite simply wrong.
This Premier is hoping that if he puts his head in the sand – that Victorians will join him. A cough and splutter or two later and all will be forgotten. Nothing to see here.
We are, after all, in this together. Aren’t we?
The binning of Budget Paper 4 would bring a big smile to the face of the Transport Infrastructure Minister, Jacinta Allan. Her projects are exhibit A, B C and D in the budget blowout they don’t want you to know about.
Allan is touted as a replacement for the Premier should he decide to pack up his office one day and enjoy his annual $300,000-plus taxpayer superannuation. It’s an appropriate reward for a state leader – but a sickening reality to those 800 families in Victoria who lost a loved one this year directly because of his incompetence.
Despite the absence of Budget Paper 4, we do know this much: that level crossing removals have gone from costing about $60 million each to $250 million.
The Herald Sun talks about a ‘Blowouts bonanza’ listing 10 infrastructure projects where the blowouts – not the full costs – have escalated to $6.4 billion. The time frames are another subject altogether.
The West Gate Tunnel – whose contaminated soil the Government has okayed to dump near key productive farmland in regional Victoria – has blown out by $1.2 billion, to an estimated $6.7 billion. The Metro Tunnel is up by $2 billion to $13 billion.
Is it even possible then, to imagine what the la-la-land suburban rail loop announced during the last election will ultimately cost? It was touted as a $50b project – jaw-dropping enough – but if that goes the same way as level crossings, the final cheque will be closer to $200b+.
It won them an election. That’s probably all that does count in a budget of this ilk.
Yet things that should – and could – have been in this budget are not.
A once-in-a-generation opportunity to build a tunnel to create efficient and fast rail to regional Victoria was lost in the Melbourne Airport Rail project.
Even $300,000 couldn’t be found for a simple Fire Tower at Mt Gellibrand near Colac. For three years, this Government has sat on a report identifying engineering issues with the structure.
It is pivotal to the early spotting of fires in the Western District. It is life-saving.
Instead of investing in this tower, the Government will close it down.
Instead of backing country Victorians – those people who solved their own Coronavirus outbreaks when the Government couldn’t – Andrews has dismissed them.
Then again, they’re outside the tram tracks this Premier and his shoddy team fail to see beyond.
This is a budget that has used the Coronavirus for self-serving purposes.
Had this Andrews Government kept the virus locked up, as other states did, the excuses and billions assigned to the virus recovery, could have been saved.
There’s plenty to see in Victoria, they just won’t let you see it.
Andrews’ amnesia and arrogance are quite the combination.
Beverley McArthur is a member of the Victorian Legislative Council.