For years, Victorians have suffered from Stockholm Syndrome when it comes to the state Labor government.
Victoria’s nine-month lockdown during the pandemic was one of the longest and most severe in the world.
The state government’s incompetence with hotel quarantine and draconian enforcement ought to have scared voters away. Yet, Labor was voted back into government with an increased majority.
There are cost blowouts everywhere and billions of dollars of infrastructure waste. These have plunged Victoria deeply into debt, with the lowest credit rating in the country.
The Suburban Rail Loop (SRL) is the worst state infrastructure project I have ever seen, projected to cost more than $200 billion.
The SRL makes no sense, fails to pass any objective cost-benefit analysis, and is opposed by almost every infrastructure expert and Victoria’s Auditor-General.
Despite this, the Victorian government signed the SRL contracts, trapping residents into generations of severe debt.
The massive funding of the SRL will also divert precious funding away from Victoria’s growth areas, starving residents of vital infrastructure and services.
Already, we have seen massive cuts to hospital and health spending across the state to make way for the SRL, which nobody wanted and isn’t needed.
Former Treasury economist Stephen Anthony accurately summed-up Victoria’s predicament as follows:
“Victoria is on a suicide mission to record borrowing, just as global interest rates are about to hit 5%”.
“Potholes can’t get filled, emergency departments can’t afford clean linen, primary schools can’t fix heaters”.
“Things are about to get very ugly”.
Finally, after years of political and economic abuse, Victorians have grown tired of the Labor state government.
Exclusive polling by Resolve Strategic for The Age showed that Labor’s primary vote had fallen to just 27%, the party’s worst result since Resolve began polling three years ago.
The Coalition, which has been ahead of Labor since March, now holds a 10 percentage point lead over the government with a primary vote of 37%.
Premier Jacinta Allan’s support has also plunged by 12 percentage points.
“When you are getting a primary vote below 30, you are really pushing a rock uphill”, Swinburne University senior lecturer in politics and public policy Damon Alexander said.
“If you track this trend back to the transition period, you can almost see voters initially gave Jacinta Allan the benefit of the doubt but those people who had stuck by Labor are now looking for another alternative”.
However, the swing away from Labor does not mean that the Coalition would take office at the next election, since minor party preferences are likely to flow to Labor. It would be a close result.
One of the main reasons Labor has remained in power for a decade is that the Liberal opposition is ineffective and seems incapable of organising a chook raffle.
As a result, the Victorian Labor government has been permitted to fail upwards and remain in power despite its horrific incompetence and waste.
Sadly, with the signing of the contracts to build the SRL, the financial damage has already been done and looks irreversible.
Living standards will continue to collapse under the weight of extreme population growth, ballooning debt, and declining infrastructure and services.
The cutbacks to hospital spending amid the population boom are only the beginning.
