In this article, Adam Creighton contextualises and disseminates the IPA’s research into the economic and societal decline of Victoria since 2014.
Any notion that Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan was governing more respectfully of taxpayers’ money than predecessor Daniel Andrews ended this week after her government revealed its pathetic response to a long-awaited review of its bloated public sector.
It was very disappointing to see words such as “slashed” and “axed” used in the media to describe a plan to trim the state’s bureaucracy headcount by 1000 people over four years. This is a government with consolidated state debts on track to exceed $230bn within a few years, and one that should be doubly frugal amid speculation interest rates could rise next year.
Victoria’s bureaucracy under Andrews and now Allan has swollen 51 per cent since 2015 to 57,345 last year. The broader public sector workforce has similarly grown at multiples of population growth, by 38 per cent, to 382,823. Over the same period the total cost of public sector wages and salaries has roughly doubled to $40bn. Almost one in 10 Victorians work directly for the government. Given all this background, does a 1.7 per cent reduction over four years sound like “slashing” or “axing” to you?
Indeed, the supposed “cuts” were even more paltry than the headline suggested after CPSU Victorian branch assistant secretary Mitch Vandewerdt-Holman told The Guardian that 619 of the 1055 jobs to be removed had already gone. Shockingly, even he, a public sector union chief, conceded there was “definitely more room” to cut the number of senior executives, whose ranks had tripled since 2014, when Andrews came to power.
Allan clearly wasn’t fibbing when she revealed last month in an interview that she regularly sought advice from Andrews. He may have resigned as premier in 2023 but his governing philosophy, including a thriving contempt for taxpayers’ money, lives on.
A new book, launched this week in Melbourne, The Dark Legacy of Daniel Andrews, is a timely reminder of just how socially and economically destructive Andrews has been, and clearly, continues to be. Andrews became deservedly infamous around Australia and the world for his draconian response to Covid, which must figure as the biggest peacetime policy disaster in Australian history once all the costs are appropriately accounted for.
Who can forget the rubber bullets fired at Victorians protesting against lockdowns and vaccine mandates, the pregnant woman arrested for her Facebook posts, or the absurd daily press conferences where “doughnut days” were the only thing that mattered?
But the book’s nine chapters, including one by me on fiscal policy and one by Peter Jennings on foreign policy, make clear how damaging Andrews’s impact has been across practically every dimension of public life.
Former Public Service commissioner John Lloyd in his chapter outlines how the once impartial Victorian public sector became politicised and divorced from economic reality.
Its 2020 enterprise agreement, for instance, included 27 different types of paid leave: gender transition (four weeks paid), cultural and ceremonial leave (four days paid) and (separately) First People’s Assembly attendance leave (10 days paid). No wonder the number of Australians claiming Aboriginality has exploded! And naturally this comes on top of the right to work at home two days a week for Victorian bureaucrats.
Meanwhile, the union movement has become so powerful within the government that the Victorian Trades Hall Council was approving government contracts to security firms, as revealed in the Covid-19 Hotel Quarantine Inquiry. Andrews’s energy policy has been a disaster too and provided a taste of what was to come nationally once Labor returned to power federally in 2022.
Victoria once enjoyed among the cheapest electricity prices in the world, thanks to its plentiful reserves of brown coal, but that natural advantage has been squandered. The sudden decommissioning of the Hazelwood coal-fired power station in 2017 triggered an 85 per cent surge in wholesale electricity prices and permanently higher price volatility. The Andrews government also brought forward the closure of the giant Yallourn power station from 2032 to 2022, and Loy Yang A from 2045 to 2035, both of which could easily have been extended to provide many more years of relatively cheap power.
These closures are meant to pave the way for the scientifically and economically unattainable goal of “net zero” emissions in Victoria by 2045. There is even a state plan for 95 per cent of electricity to be generated by “renewables” by 2035 – that won’t happen but the damage caused in trying will surely be significant.
Andrews’s war on gas included dumping in 2022 the requirement for new dwellings to be connected to the state’s gas network, which had been introduced years earlier to ensure households could avail themselves of the state’s large, accessible gas reserves.
Indeed, his government also introduced a constitutional ban on fracking in a state with extremely plentiful gas reserves – enough to power every home in Australia for 94 years, according to separate IPA research, not to mention generate much-needed royalties for a heavily indebted state. The book, edited by Morgan Begg and launched by Peta Credlin on Wednesday, catalogues Andrews’s pernicious influence in law and order and education too.
It can’t be denied that Andrews won three elections, but his political success serves as a reminder that destructive policies can be wildly popular. Political observers have often declared something like “voters get it right in the end”. Well, they certainly didn’t in Argentina, where voters for decades supported big-spending socialist governments that destroyed their nation’s prosperity.
They clearly haven’t in Victoria either, and if Andrews’s legacy isn’t retired to the history books at the next state election in a year’s time they will have erred again. A better aphorism is voters get the governments they deserve.
