Almost exactly a year after reviled Labor leader Daniel Andrews resigned his post as Victorian Premier – his legacy continues to humiliate the state. The stench of his political carcass remains pungent.

Andrews squirmed out of his Spring Street bunker on September 27, 2023 leaving behind him a state in chaos and its finances in terminal decline. His work was done.

Victoria’s approach to grabbing global attention is surely unique, even in the pantheon of useless governments of the last hundred or so years.

With confirmation that Victoria will fork out more than $200 million to enable Glasgow to host the 2026 Commonwealth Games, the scorn heaped upon us by the sporting world is richly deserved.

This single fact says it all about the Spring Street ‘strategists’ who concocted the swifty on the taxpayers. The state will now underwrite another city on the other side of the world, displaying Victoria’s total idiocy at a global level.

You can hear the Brits laughing from Land’s End to Loch Lomond. Voters here are shaking their heads in disbelief.

Daniel Andrews, whom I like to call Victoria’s grand architect of failure, trumpeted the Games in a hastily convened media briefing at the world-famous Melbourne Cricket Ground in April 2022.

Naively, voters took the announcement to mean Victoria would host the 2026 Games and would do so across a number of regional centres throughout Victoria. How wrong they were.

While the world is galvanised on unwanted wars, the US election, and failing global leadership – here in Victoria we are left to live our lives in what often feels like a failed state. Then we have the decisions of Daniel Andrews continuing to trash the Labor brand even from his political grave.

In March, the Victorian Auditor-General’s Office announced the state government’s decision to pull out of the 2026 event had cost it $589 million.

Of that, it said $380 million had been a ‘settlement payment’ made with several organisations, including CGA. Glasgow will now host a ‘scaled-back’ Commonwealth Games, with the Scottish government making a limited financial contribution towards the cost of the event.

Labor’s central rationalisation of the decision to scrap the Games was that there would be a substantial saving of taxpayer funds as a result. This kind of convoluted, idiotic thinking is what has driven Victoria’s fiscal catastrophe since the day Labor occupied the government benches.

Vast numbers of Victorian taxpayers are ashamed to call themselves Victorians. This detestable government continues to exploit the general apathy of voters towards government generally and this government in particular.

So utterly exhausted by the Andrews years in office, voters have turned elsewhere in search of leadership and inspiration.

As for the current Labor ‘leader’ Jacinta Allan and her hapless Treasurer, Tim Pallas, voters would welcome never seeing or hearing from either of them again.

Never before has the political outlook appeared so profoundly dispiriting as it is in Victoria at present. And rarely has the economy appeared so fragile.

Usually, political vacuums throw up unexpected people and opportunities for political renewal and economic revival. Here in Victoria, the vacuum remains and shows no sign of being filled any time soon.

It really is a race to the bottom and it appears the bottom will be very deep indeed.