Yep. Left wing unskilled socialist wind bags cant run anything. Further proof of dumb and dumber hard at it.


NSW just elected a bunch of these guys who immediately hooked the public servants up to a pay rise.
Socialists wants something for nothing until other peoples money runs put. Cant wait for the taxes to hit down there. Ideologues are not free.

Albanese must say no to bailing out Andrews

Instead of bailing out the most fiscally profligate left-wing government in Australia, the prime minister needs to focus on getting on top of the spending pressures on the federal budget.

When state governments locked down their people during the pandemic, the federal government picked up most of the bill for holding up the economy. The danger now is that this moral hazard will become double indemnity if the May federal budget includes a bailout out for Victoria.

When flagging the challenges facing the Victorian budget last week, Premier Daniel Andrews warned Victorians that the state’s tens of billions of dollars of pandemic debt that protected health and saved lives now has to be paid back. But as we report on Tuesday, Mr Andrews has confirmed that he is talking to Anthony Albanese about federal financial support.

If Mr Albanese has any genuine commitment to fiscal prudence and budget repair, he must immediately say no to using the taxes paid by all Australians to rescue Victorian Labor from the financial consequences of imposing lockdowns that were too long, too hard, and too political.

Victoria’s parlous financial position is not just the result of a once-in-a-century health crisis, nor should it be blamed on Victoria supposedly being dudded on Scott Morrison’s GST distribution deal with Western Australia. The forecast expansion of Victoria’s state debt from $115 billion to $165 billion over the next four years will collide with rising interest rates and will push up the cost of servicing the debt to more than $7 billion a year by 2026.

The state budget is being hit by the escalating price-tag of Labor’s massive debt-funded infrastructure program amid continued cost blowouts on major projects under a state government controlled by the party’s Socialist Left faction. Under Mr Andrews, Labor tolerates the law-breaking CFMEU and its thuggish construction division secretary John Setka.

After Labor doubled Victoria’s debt ceiling from 6 per cent of gross state product before the pandemic in 2018, all references to that benchmark have been erased from Victoria’s budget papers. With debt soon to hit 25 per cent of gross state product, what can’t be disappeared down the memory hole are the rating agencies that wrote down the state’s creditworthiness during the pandemic.

RISING WAGE BILL

Standard & Poor’s double-notch slashing of Victoria to AA was more severe than NSW’s downgrade from AAA to AA+. Ironically, the change of government north of the border has done Australia’s most indebted state no favours. NSW Labor Premier Chris Minns’ scrapping of the state’s 2.5 per cent public sector wage cap in response to high inflation has forced Mr Andrews to lift Victoria’s wage cap from 1.5 per cent to 3 per cent.

But that may not satisfy the public sector unions that are pushing for bigger pay rises that would further blow out the state’s wages bill. Amid reports of planned cuts of 10 per cent across the public sector and talk of one in 10 public servants losing their jobs, the more politically palatable alternative is for Victoria to go cap in hand to Canberra to avoid so-called “austerity”.

Victoria’s problem is that history is repeating itself as the Andrews government’s big spending approaches the financial mismanagement of the Cain-Kirner era. The problem for the federal budget is that Mr Albanese has already proved a soft touch, after promising during the federal election campaign to write a $2.2 billion cheque for Mr Andrews’ signature Suburban Rail Loop project that has had neither a proper cost-benefit analysis nor a tick of approval from Infrastructure Australia.

Mr Albanese’s backing of gas as a crucial energy transition fuel has distanced federal Labor from Victoria’s highly ideological anti-gas stance. Yet Victoria still drove the decision to exclude gas from the National Electricity Market’s capacity mechanism to provide reliable back-up power. Letting Victoria call the shots risks the grid going dark.

Federal Labor should not now allow Victoria to drive national finances deeper into the red by bailing out the most fiscally profligate left-wing government in Australia. Instead, Mr Albanese needs to focus on getting on top of the spending pressures on the federal budget, such as by reining in the out-of-control National Disability Insurance Scheme.