Make no mistake: Dan Andrews absolutely will survive the debacle of the Commonwealth Games cancellation. This is Victoria, after all: the Stockholm Syndrome State. The state where a premier mired in multiple scandals and corruption investigations, who unleashed the world’s longest lockdowns and the worst Covid figures in the nation, sailed above it all on a cloud of propaganda and robotic adulation. Kim Jong-Un can only envy Dictator Dan’s domination.
Everywhere beyond the tram tracks, though, the issue just gets more and more damning for the Teflon Premier, as his excuses come more unstuck by the day.
Chief among them is Andrews’ pontification that he did it to save the state money that could be ploughed into other projects. As it turns out, the brutal reality is that not only is Victoria too broke to pay for circuses, let alone bread, it doesn’t even have the clowns or bakers to do either.
The decision to dump the Commonwealth Games came amid warnings that the workers, raw materials and government cash needed to deliver the 12-day event would come at the expense of efforts to tackle housing affordability.
Which raises the question of where Andrews is going to find the same for his hundred-billion dollar “Big Build” election promises.
And as for the claim about saving money…
But the move – which the state government has blamed on a massive cost blowout – won’t improve Victoria’s already stretched finances, according to a leading credit rating agency.
On Wednesday, Premier Daniel Andrews promised to redirect $1 billion of Games cash already factored into the budget bottom line into a regional housing fund to invest in 1300 permanent social affordable housing units in regional Victoria.
Which works out, then, to $777,000 per unit. For that sort of money, you could buy a luxury apartment at Docklands and still have enough left over to buy a small fleet of EVs.
Either way, though, Andrews is spending $2.5 billion that the state can ill afford. Although, when state debt is heading well into the hundreds of billions, what a bill or two more?
According to Treasury’s latest budget predictions, net debt will grow from about $135.4 billion next year to $171.4 billion by 2026-27.
Even after imposing $8.6 billion worth of new taxes over four years in the budget, net debt as a proportion of the state economy is expected to keep rising, hitting 24.5 per cent by mid-2027, compared with 20.6 per cent expected by the end of the current financial year.
Even with a billion-dollar windfall, the reality of Dictator Dans’ volkshomes is about as likely as Kiwibuild.
Federal government advisory body Infrastructure Australia in December warned that Victoria may need to postpone major infrastructure projects in light of labour shortages, rising material costs and limited construction industry capacity.
Cath Evans, the Property Council of Australia’s Victorian executive director, said the residential construction industry was also feeling that pressure as it battled for workers and materials against Big Build projects, such as the West Gate and Metro tunnels.
If Andrews couldn’t find the workers and materials for the Games, or the money to pay for it all, the question naturally is: will his Big Build suffer the same fate? Similarly, will it suffer the same cost blowouts? After all, the West Gate Tunnel alone is already slated to cost more than twice its original figure — and be delivered eight years late. If the Games cost was able to blow out threefold in just a few months, what about the rest of Andrews’ grandiose projects?
[Moody’s analyst John Manning] said it was unclear exactly how the cost of putting on the event had tripled since the May state budget and therefore difficult to know if other infrastructure projects were coming under similar cost pressure.
The Age
It’s also been revealed that this is not the first big sporting event Andrews has suddenly pulled the plug on, in recent months.
Premier Dan Andrews’ shock decision to axe the 2026 Commonwealth Games came nine months after the Victorian Government secretly pulled the plug on a major world championships lead-up event in Torquay that left one Australian sport scrambling to salvage its’ international reputation.
Volleyball Australia president Craig Carracher has revealed the Victorian Government cancelled a commitment to host the 2025 beach volleyball world titles last October – claiming they pulled the pin just two weeks after agreeing to a deal worth $15 million.
Coincidentally, a fortnight later, the Victorian Government funded a $15m bailout of Netball Australia.
The Australian
The picture that’s emerging is an alarming one for any business contemplating investing in Victoria: this is a state that’s broke, continually robbing Peter to pay Paul, and prepared to summarily rip up any contract to do so.
Would you invest with anyone like that?