It took a while, but we have now escaped Victoria to spend the winter months in Queensland. It took longer than we expected to quit the joint and the cold weather had well and truly arrived. Heating turned on, heavy doona found.

Living in Melbourne is like hanging out in a once grand mansion that is falling apart. The windows are cracked; the paint is peeling off; and the whole structure is in danger of collapse. It has become increasingly difficult to subsist in Batman’s legacy – Naarm if you are woke and love Jacinta – but plenty of people do, including many recently arrived migrants.

What amazes me is the degree to which so many Victorians refuse to see what is apparent to me – that the state is broke; that the politicians regularly lie and obfuscate; and that a day of reckoning will come.

Take the annual budget that was handed down while I was still in town. Okay, it does admit that state government debt is heading towards $200 billion but by using sleights of hand – assuming that nominal growth will be higher in Victoria than in the country as a whole and that population growth will also be relatively higher – we can all relax because in four years time, government debt as a proportion of gross state product will fall, ever so slightly.

Take it from me, this is just assumption on assumption. It has no credibility but is fed to a fumbling, wet-behind-the-ears treasurer by cynical bureaucrats because they know the boss will lap it up. Of course, the ratings agencies see through this stuff very quickly, but their firm view is that the federal government will bail out Victoria if the brown stuff really hits the fan. In fact, the feds are already standing surety for the state by topping up the GST revenue and generous infrastructure grants.

Perhaps what astounds me even more than the extremely parlous budgetary position of the state is the absolutely insane energy policy that has been pursued for well over a decade. The fact that the country’s most incompetent energy minister – I know, I know, she has other things in her title including the mandatory climate change – Lily D’Ambrosio has been in her job ever since Dan the Man awarded it to her for factional reasons. This tells you pretty much everything you need to know.

She doesn’t have a clue, doesn’t know her alternating current from her direct current. But what the heck, she has learned her lines about renewable energy targets, lower prices and leading the world in climate change action. Evidently, Victoria will reach net zero emissions by 2045, with emissions down by 75 to 80 per cent from the 2005 levels by the middle of next decade. This is all set down in legislation and Lily is not for budging.

Of course, there is one possible scenario under which these outcomes could occur. Almost everyone has left the state, turning off the lights as they go. All manufacturing and other business activities will have ceased prior to this exodus.

But let’s get back to Lily and her recent fibbing about the cost of the additional transmission required to support renewable energy, which will be rolled out across vast swathes of regional Victoria. She claims that she wasn’t being ‘dishonest’ when she stated that the cost would be a tad over $4 billion, even though the more accurate estimate puts the cost of the new transmission and associated infrastructure at $20 billion.

She might have wanted to read a recent report of the Australian Energy Market Operator – does she have the time for this stuff? – that showed that the construction cost of new transmission systems has risen by between 25 and 55 per cent since 2024. That’s right, in one year.

All those previous cost-benefit tests, which are extremely slanted to generate project approval, are out the window because of these massively higher costs. But Lily isn’t too worried. ‘If we don’t build transmission, I can tell you what happens. People’s lights go out and power prices will go through the roof. People need to understand that transmission is an investment that facilitates the build of replacement electricity.’ Oh please.

It’s getting desperate in Victoria right now with the news that the state used 13 per cent of the state’s annual gas budget in just three days to keep the lights on. The combination of partial shutdowns of two coal-fired plants and the close-to-complete absence of wind and solar output led to the inevitable reliance on gas.

Let’s not forget here that Lily has waged an anti-gas campaign for her entire tenure as energy minister. She was the one who blocked the inclusion of gas in the Energy Security Mechanism which is designed to deal with the intermittent nature of renewable energy, including longer periods during which it fails to generate meaningful amounts of electricity.

She has also overseen the effective ban on the exploitation of known onshore gas reserves in the state on the basis of the hopelessly optimistic and unrealistic assumption that renewable energy plus storage will generate more than enough energy while putting downward pressure on electricity prices. In her dreams, I say.

In the meantime, the state continues to be bankrupted by the Big Build program and the ludicrous Suburban Rail Loop, the first part linking two suburbs of Melbourne between which no one ever travels. The Allan government is trying to make the case that it’s not really a rail project but a housing project, with massive unliveable high-rise apartments to be constructed at the stations.

Even though property developers and the Labor government mainly have a close, symbiotic relationship, if you know what I mean, the housing proposal surrounding the rail loop is failing to attract any interest. The developers claim that the land is too expensive and, in any case, they can’t offload many of the apartments that have been built because they are too expensive for the average punter.

The roads continue to go to hell in a handbasket with massive chaos occurring recently on the main road from the west leading into the city. Evidently, a metal plate covering an expansion joint had come loose after recent road works and no one had noticed. Several serious accidents occurred, and motorists were delayed by up to two hours.

But it’s not as if this was an isolated incident. The thing about Melbourne’s road system is that it is beginning to show signs of inadequacy for the number of motorists, which has exploded in recent years with the surge in migration. As long as there are no major accidents or breakdowns, the system can work reasonably well if you avoid the potholes. But it quickly descends into complete disarray with any disruption.

With the Victorian Liberal opposition doing a convincing impersonation of a comedy troupe, it looks as though the Allan Labor government is here to stay for some time. Taxing everything that moves as well as a few things that don’t has its limits, with people leaving the state and associated weak investment in the private sector. Still Allan and her buddies think they can overcome any difficulties while imposing their hard-left agenda.

But as Hemingway wisely told us many years ago, there are two ways to go broke: gradually and then suddenly.