Victoria’s economic statement is mostly a cosmetic exercise that glosses over the structural budget problems facing Australia’s most indebted state government. The 36-page brochure launched on Tuesday by Premier Jacinta Allan and Treasurer Tim Pallas seeks to put out a business-friendly, red-tape-cutting welcome mat to encourage investment in Victoria. It’s pushing back against economist Saul Eslake’s sobering audit of Victoria’s finances published by this masthead in November.
That audit showed Victoria has run the biggest deficits in the country since the Labor Party came to power in 2014, combined with a “Big Build” infrastructure pipeline that has blown out the state’s net debt pile to $135 billion. Eslake warned that Victoria’s unsustainable fiscal trajectory would inevitably mean higher taxes at some crunch point to repair the public balance sheet.
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