Overseeing a state’s slide into penury is quite an achievement. It’s one that appears to have come quite naturally to Victorian Treasurer, (The Hon.) Tim Pallas MP.

To rest one’s eyes on Tim, you are left to wonder if he’s enjoyed the trashing of an economy and the reputation of the state that feeds him.

Comical in both appearance and utterance, Pallas has, astoundingly, presided over the Victorian Treasury for no less than a decade, while simultaneously overseeing a ballooning in the public sector workforce, severe haemorrhaging in state indebtedness, and cost blowouts in all the government has touched.

Fond as politicians are of sheeting home blame for fiscal calamity to others – Pallas has no such option while delivering his tenth state Budget.

The financial quagmire facing Victorian taxpayers, at least for the next two political cycles and probably much longer, is all the work of Pallas coupled with the efforts of the current Victorian Premier, Jacinta Allan, and the previous and widely detested Premier, Daniel Andrews.

These three loathed Labor identities want taxpayers to believe – if the government keeps spending – the good times will keep rolling. They won’t.

If you can stomach the ‘back-slapping’ and images of political artifice during the Budget – take a pew and watch a pantomime of grotesque self-justification unfold. Labor hacks were at it all night, tricking us into believing the garbage.

In time-honoured fashion, there have been Budget leaks and even a few ‘cameos’ by our timid, shadowy Premier saying how alert she is to the ‘cost of living’ crisis. Bunkum! This outfit has richly earned for itself the epithet ‘fiscal clowns’. They have long ago run out of our money and now they want to plunder other peoples’.

The repugnant Labor cycle of unfunded projects, cost blowouts, schedule overruns, and broken promises reached stratospheric dimensions under Andrews and shows no sign of changing under the factionally ‘left-lite’ Allan and Pallas. The Budget made that clear.

The fraud committed on Victorian voters in regard to the Commonwealth Games cancellation is proof enough of the treachery of this clapped-out administration. Notwithstanding the cancellation and the resultant conflagration of Victoria’s reputation – the regions will pocket some $2.6 billion of borrowed money to ease their pain. So described by Labor, ‘middle-class wealth’ will pay for this through iniquitous land and payroll tax imposts.

Riven by puerile factional imperatives and union alliance obligations – the festering Allan-Pallas outfit – instead of setting a new and more restrained path – has simply driven further into the putrid sludge of debt and political manipulation to promise more and deliver less.

Look out if you’re a public servant in the state. There are face-saving (mercifully savage) cuts into the obscenely bloated public sector.

You’ll doubtless recall how the superbly managed Covid crisis in Victoria occasioned the hiring of tens of thousands of extra public servants. Not better public officials – just more of them! Having now added some breathing space between then and now – Pallas has finally figured out that these people didn’t actually do much. Many of them will go, as they richly deserve to.

But ludicrous promises remain such as the continued support for the $125 billion Suburban Rail Loop (albeit with delays) and the ongoing massively politically aligned removal of rail crossings around Melbourne and the outer suburbs. Despite the futile efforts of the Spring St spin-meisters to polish Budget announcements – Victoria will be left with at least the following:

• State debt at or about $135 billion in 2024-25, heading towards $175 billion in two to three years.
• A $10 billion blowout in a single road project northeast of Melbourne.
• No rail link between Melbourne city and Tullamarine Airport. (Horseback would be quicker on a Friday night.)
• Tax increases across the forward estimates hitting low-income earners hardest – in the middle of a cost of living and housing affordability crisis.
• A housing crisis about which the government is comprehensively clueless.
• Massively under-funded public hospitals in which patients are dying while waiting for admission.
• Some of the worst rates of mental ill-health in the country.
• School performance rates rapidly heading south.
• Crime figures which are terrifying – with house invasions and drug-related law-breaking at an all-time high.

Hopefully Tim Pallas is delivering his tenth (and last) Budget.

The wise, and eye-wateringly wealthy, Warren Buffett once said, ‘Do not save what is left after spending, but spend what is left after saving.’

I very much doubt that Tim Pallas or Jacinta Allan even know who Warren Buffett is.