Rita Panahi:
Joining me now is NewsCorp’s senior writer, Patrick Carlyon, and Institute of Public Affairs research fellow Colleen Harkin. Patrick, business leaders seem increasingly nervous about the Albanese government’s management of the economy, including the lack of planning. They don’t seem to be prepared at all for any disruption in the fuel supply.
Patrick Carlyon:
That’s right. You really want a firm government in times of uncertainty. And Chris Bowen coming out and saying on the weekend, “Well, maybe work from home is a good thing.” Well, it brings in the question, do we have a crisis? And how big is that crisis? They don’t seem to be managing certainly the PR of it very well. And people like Chris Lucas, he was one of the strongest voices during the lockdowns back in COVID against Dan Andrews. I listen to people like Chris Lucas. They know what they’re talking about. They understand the economics of these things in a way that Chris Bowen certainly doesn’t seem to at the moment.
Rita Panahi:
And Colleen, people like Chris Lucas have skin in the game. They actually employ people. They run businesses, and they can see the impact of these policies. Well, I know there’s business leaders. I’ve spoken to many, many business leaders who are shying away from investing in Victoria because of our work from home laws that are going to be enshrined.
Colleen Harkin:
Yeah, correct. And look, the government has no place to tell business to encourage their employees to work from home. What they should be concentrating is on the supply chain issues, and making sure that now and in the future we have energy sovereignty, and fuel sovereignty and all those things that the government can do. It is not their place to stick their finger in a local business. Some of these businesses are only just recovering after COVID because of the work from home scenario. Families are already under stress dealing with the whole range of cost of living issues. People do not need to be told, “Oh, it’ll be fine to stay at home.”
Rita Panahi:
To stay at home. Yeah. That is really almost a comical response to the crisis we find ourselves in. You mentioned the cost of living crisis. That’s about to get worse. Another wave of skyrocketing fuels, with interest rates, power bills, and health insurance premiums all set to jump next week. New data from Compare Club shows the average household faces more than $2,000 in extra annual costs from April 1. Patrick, this cost of living crisis is only getting worse. We were expecting during that last election, consecutive interest rate drops. We’re going to get some relief from that.
Patrick Carlyon:
That’s right.
Rita Panahi:
It’s gone the other way, plus we’ve got all these additional costs.
Patrick Carlyon:
And we’re looking at potentially $4 a litre for petrol and fuel. I think that $2,000 is probably at the lean end of where it might end up being, depending on where the war goes and for how long it plays out for. It’s going to be a really tricky time. And that’s because we came into when the start of the war in a perilous position when it came to we have low productivity, we’ve got rising inflation, we’ve got interest rates going up. It is a perfect storm.
Rita Panahi:
And we are completely dependent on foreign oil. That is the shameful thing here. And that’s something that’s happened over decades of bad policies. But on this particular set of bills that are about to increase April 1, Colleen, I wonder how many people are going to drop their health insurance? Because that’s set to jump, and that’s just going to put extra pressure on the public system.
Colleen Harkin:
It’s one of the first things that go when people are under financial pressure. The other thing to note here, to a point that you just made earlier about the cost of doing business in Victoria, and how many businesses will actually pursue their infrastructure here, and whether it’s just easier not to do it interstate. There was a survey that came out the other day that said a third of Victorians are thinking of leaving. This is all very serious warning signs for what’s going to happen. If people can’t put food on the table because of the way that our state is being run, they’re very likely to look elsewhere. Businesses will find it much easier to deal with doing business interstate. These are all warnings about what’s coming up for the next two years, three years.
Rita Panahi:
Patrick, that data was in the Herald Sun yesterday.
Patrick Carlyon:
Yes.
Rita Panahi:
I want to say it even shocked me. To have, I think it was 36% of Victorians, and we’re talking about across metro and regional areas, young and old Victorians saying they are wanting to move. That’s a drastic move, but pulling up and moving into state or to another country, that’s not something you consider lightly.
Patrick Carlyon:
Look, older Victorians have seen good times in Victoria. Through the ’90s, we came off a recession. That came good, through the 2000s. Victoria was a happening place. It was a good place to be. It felt like it was dynamic and growing. And you have that counterpoint now where everything seems to be shrinking. Everything seems to be harder. The government doesn’t have a clue what it’s doing. It’s incompetent on so many levels. It’s not a happy place to be. It doesn’t feel like it’s progressing, does it?
Rita Panahi:
No. And we’ve been demoralised by just little cuts as well. We lost the Grand Prix down in Philip Island. There’s now talk today that the Avalon Air Show may also be stolen by South Australia. And these are just little cuts. It’s reminiscent-
Colleen Harkin:
Death by 1,000 cuts.
Rita Panahi:
That’s it. It reminds me of those Kane Kerner years where we really were in a lot of trouble. Perhaps we’re in more trouble now, but certainly in a lot more debt. More good news coming up. Tens of thousands of Victorian teachers have walked out of the classrooms in their first strike in over a decade. Parents received mixed messages on Monday afternoon as schools advised families to keep their children at home. While the government insisted it had the workforce to keep schools open, most schools today operated in a supervisory capacity only. Patrick, the teacher’s union is pushing for a 35% pay increase and improved work conditions. I know there are Amber claims, but goodness me, they are pushing for some extraordinary increases here.
Patrick Carlyon:
Look, I think surprisingly, having said that, I agree. It sounds extraordinary, that amount of a pay rise. But Victorian teachers are the lowest paid in Australia. There is some sympathy for them, and there’s a lot of antipathy towards the Allan government over this and so many other things. It’ll be interesting. I see this as just another symbol of an incompetent government, really. They’ve been negotiating, there are negotiations with nurses, and police officers and so on all the time. The fact that it’s actually got to the point of a strike is just another black mark against the competency of this government, I think.
Rita Panahi:
Colleen, they have been offered what I would consider a pretty significant jump in earnings already, but this is going to be at first, well, they are striking first time in 10 years, and it is an election year. If you’re going to strike, it’s the time to do it.
Colleen Harkin:
Look, I have a slightly different view. We all want teachers to be paid well. Patrick’s right that the Victorian teachers are the lowest paid in the country. We do want them to be paid well for doing a good job, but there is another question mark here about return on investment. 10 years ago, teachers, our student ratio was about $11,000 per student in a state budget. It’s now at $21,000 per student. And we’re not getting the results for that. About a third of our students are failing to meet minimum standards.
So I’m all for paying teachers well. They have an incredibly important job. But I also want to see a focus on their core purpose, and that’s to make sure that our kids can read and write, and become independent citizens themselves. And that’s the gap that we have. I also am not a big fan of the Australian Education Union who’s running this because they seem to be much more focused on classroom activism than they are on actually making sure that the kids can read and write. So we want the teachers to be paid well, but I want them to be able to do their job.
Rita Panahi:
Colleen, what you identify is a nationwide issue. Our spend on education has gone up across the country, and yet the results are going backwards. But Patrick, interestingly, the responsible minister here in Victoria may be our next Premier. We had more polling out today showing Jacinta Allan is hugely unpopular and perhaps with Ben Carroll in the top job, they could be reelected Labour.
Patrick Carlyon:
Look, Ben Carroll’s a bit more right. He’s not as ideologically zealous, if you like. He occasionally makes common sense statements that are at odds with the Allan government line. I think he’d be far more palatable as a leader than Jacinta Allan, but there are so many dynamics in play at the moment. You look at One Nation in South Australia, One Nation in Victoria, you see the Liberal Party with Jess Wilson. The liberals have been messing it up for a decade or longer. They’re finally starting to get it right. There are so many factors in play here. It’s very difficult to predict what will happen.
Rita Panahi:
Yeah. Well, you mentioned One Nation and Pauline Hansen has revealed her policy focus as the party prepares for its membership base to exceed 50,000 people. Hansen has promised to replace large scale renewable projects with coal and nuclear, and deliver tax incentives to help protect the family unit. She has also pledged to abolish the Department of Climate Change, telling the Australian newspaper there’s unknown quantity of monies that have gone into this bottomless pot that the government’s been thrown into to keep the renewables viable. Colleen, she also said she’s heading to Victoria. What impact will the party have in the Victorian state election coming up in November?
Colleen Harkin:
Look, I think that the One Nation impact will be quite significant. What we’ve seen in South Australia is large swings, swings of somewhere in 30% in some of those seats. And even in very safe labour seats, Melanocas’ own seat had about a 9% swing against him. And the wording here is that Victoria is very different to South Australia, which sure it is. We have a very unpopular Premier, but that actually makes One Nation more palatable in my view because the frustration in Victoria is that the coalition haven’t been seen to be doing anything and providing an opposition. So One Nation stepping up with very strong, clear, steadfast policies is what Victorians have been wanting for a long time. So I think the challenge for the coalition is to claw back relevancy.
Rita Panahi:
And I’ve long said, if Victoria wants to be an economic powerhouse, again, if you want to pay back the massive debt, the biggest in the country, then we’ve got to look at gas exploration. We’ve got to really capitalise on the natural resources we have in this state, Patrick. And the Libs don’t talk about that at all. And they don’t talk about having any alliance, a preference deal with One Nation. In fact, they’ve come out and rejected that again at state level.
Patrick Carlyon:
Yes. Look, you’ll hear this a lot this year. You’ll hear the Libs come out and say, “A vote for one nation will be a vote for Labour.” And I think I agree with everything you just said there, Colleen, but I think if Jacinta Allan goes to the election or this government, whether it’s her or not, goes to this election, there is a really strong desire to get them out of government. How One Nation plays into that is fascinating, and it’ll keep on changing through the year. In South Australia, it was a much more simple dynamic. No one thought that Melanowskis was going to be unelected. In Victoria, we have a government that has a huge number of seats in the parliament to be dislodged, which a lot of people want, will take a massive push that’s going to be got to be coherent from the conservative side of politics.
Rita Panahi:
I just think this current strategy is foolhardy from the liberals. You look at the polls, even here in Victoria, One Nation are often out-polling the liberals. So they can’t afford to just treat them as the redheaded stop child that is to be just dismissed. And yeah, they’re not the enemy. Their policy positions are far more in line with traditional liberal values than some would argue the modern liberal parties.
Colleen Harkin:
Yeah. And I think there’s a real danger here. I’ve seen a Liberal MP yesterday make comment about how they’re concerned about the voter doesn’t really understand what they’re doing. You never tell the punter that they don’t know what they’re doing. Correct. And I think part of this component is that the liberals have to, as I said, find relevancy. And what is their purpose with integrity? Because they’ve had opportunity that they’ve squandered. And so telling One Nation people that you don’t know what you’re doing and you need to stick with us because we know better than you is very problematic, particularly to the One Nation voter.
Rita Panahi:
It is. It’s patronising and it’s really… Australians don’t react well to that. And I would say that people who are looking at casting the vote for One Nation for the first time are fairly politically engaged. They’re not doing that out of nowhere. They’re doing that because they are paid attention and they’re not happy with the major parties. Now, before you go, Patrick, I want to get your reaction to this column in the Sydney Morning Herald with the headline, Multiculturalism is Booming in the NRL While the AFL is Getting Whiter. The piece states that in the NRL, 51% of the playing population is Pacifica or Maori, and a further 12% is indigenous. Meanwhile, in the AFL, about 14% of the league have parents born overseas or were born overseas themselves, and only 7.5% are indigenous, which is a 20-year low.
And Patrick Neil Breen also writes, “The question for the AFL is, why are clubs shying away from highly talented indigenous players and instead targeting ready-made private school kids?” Incredibly, a little more than 70% of all AFL players were privately educated. Patrick, I would think there’s some fairly obvious reasons for that, including that boys are good at football, tend to get scholarships to private schools, and hence they’re the ones who are recruited. But how do you see this issue? In all those figures stated for both the NRL and the AFL, there’s an over-representation of indigenous players compared to the population.
So I really can’t see what the issue here is and what the obsession with the colour of the players is.
Patrick Carlyon:
Well, look, indigenous players have made the AFL go around for generations. They are being shut out of this private school industry that really has… It is very professional and very mobilised now in such a way that any kid with any talent from the bush or wherever, gets dragged to Xavier College or wherever on a scholarship, it makes the school look good. And it becomes the pathway, the preferred pathway, because they get a good education, it’s good for them.
Rita Panahi:
They’re used to city living, and then the pressure of training and football.
Patrick Carlyon:
And the group that suffers for that are those indigenous players who don’t get scholarships, who are very, very talented, probably need a lot more help in terms of life skills, and the pressures and all the rest. This system, this private school system has really just taken over the AFL.
Rita Panahi:
And I would also argue the AFL’s obsession with race, and some of the issues we’ve had have actually been hugely counterproductive for indigenous players who are looking to be recruited. The NRL doesn’t seem to have those sorts of obsessions. Patrick Carlyon, Colleen Harkin, thank you so much for your time.
Colleen Harkin:
Pleasure.
This transcript with Colleen Harkin talking on the Rita Panahi Show Sky News Australia from 24 March 2026 has been edited for clarity.
