Victoria’s budget shelved some big ideas from the Andrews era. It begs the question, did they ever think them through?

Hospitals canned. Promised kinders delayed. Mental health help halted.

Three big policies — shouted from the rooftops by former premier Daniel Andrews and his ministers Jacinta Allan and Tim Pallas — were shelved in the treasurer’s 10th budget.

It begs the question: were these policies properly considered in the first place, or were they just politically expedient ideas?

The fact the state’s debt needs reining in — it’s still going to hit $187 billion in three years — made these three decisions easier to make.

Government insiders concede that over the past decade Labor has made grand announcements before the heavy policy work had been completed, resulting in cost blowouts and unachievable policies.

“The chickens are coming home to roost in this budget,” one Labor figure quipped this week, reflecting concerns that Andrews and his close allies in cabinet had borrowed too much money to pay for pet projects in the past.

“It was always unsustainable.”

Pallas and Allan have tried to preach fiscal responsibility this week, but burrowing down into the budget reveals spending and debt continue to increase.

Labor dismisses concerns that it is saddling future generations with debt to pay off — ignoring concerns from some economists that the ballooning debt limits its ability to provide new projects and services, or indeed borrow further in the future.

This is a budget that makes a virtue of slowing down projects and programs, without actually killing them off.

But what it has chosen to delay raises questions about what Victorian voters were promised.

It’s a pattern that is familiar if you consider the Commonwealth Games debacle, where the state cancelled the games because the cost had blown out well beyond the estimates.

The state’s financial watchdog later slammed the Andrews government for — wait for it — failing to do its due diligence.

But in 2022, before the true cost of the Games were known, the Andrews government were able to campaign about bringing the 2026 Games to regional Victoria.

On the eve of the last election, then-premier Daniel Andrews heralded the construction of Australia’s biggest ever hospital, to be built right next to his signature train project the Metro tunnel.

It was a vision for Victorian voters of a new campus for the Royal Melbourne and Women’s Hospitals at Arden, a once industrial precinct re-imagined thanks to the new train station a drop punt from North Melbourne footy club’s spiritual home.

But less than two years later, the $5-6 billion plan was dumped in Tuesday’s Victorian budget because electromagnetic fields from trains underneath will interfere with the specialist medical equipment.

This type of interference shouldn’t have been a surprise.

The problem of interference was already well known — it was frequently raised by the major hospitals when the Metro Tunnel was being planned, and then built, under them at Parkville.

So, where was the due diligence by the government before making the Arden announcement in the heat of the 2022 state election?

The government is adamant it was aware of the issue, but says the interference once the trains began testing along the new route was higher than anticipated.

The government will still build a new hospital, but it will now be at the existing Parkville site and will cost $2.2 billion.

A spokesman said it would deliver the same standard of care, be delivered sooner and with less disruption to patients.

And there’s already questions about how this year’s budget sweetener, the $400 payment to parents of government school kids, will be administered.

The premier and treasurer have also swatted away questions about why the $287 million School Saving Bonus wasn’t means tested.

Why do parents earning hundreds of thousands of dollars in one part of the city get the same as parents struggling to make ends meet in another?

The government’s response to means testing queries is that the means test is if you send your kids to a government school.

Schools have already raised concerns about the extra work they’ll have to do to administer the scheme.

There’s concern among some policy hard heads that this is politics trumping good policy.

Broken promises and a growing debt

One of the big achievements of the Andrews government was the “Australian-first” Royal Commission into Mental Health.

Among its dozens of recommendations was a plan for the state to make access to clinics easier for people in their own community.

Premier Andrews embraced this idea with gusto, promising that “only Labor” would deliver 50 mental health locals — special walk-in clinics in communities — by 2026.

“This investment is critical. Its time has come. This momentum is undeniable,” Mr Andrews said in 2021.

But that momentum has been stopped in its tracks.

On Tuesday, we learnt the government couldn’t find the required workers, so it’s delayed the rollout of the remaining 35 planned walk-in mental health clinics.

Was the policy properly tested in government before announced?

It’s the same with the major — and popular — $9 billion reforms to kinder, announced in 2022.

The policy requires thousands of extra staff. And there were warnings at the time that it would be a real challenge to find, and retain the workforce, due to staff burnout and low pay.

“This is a comprehensive, well thought-through plan,” Mr Andrews said, highlighting a suite of scholarships to attract and train new workers.

But Tuesday’s budget delays that promise by years because it cannot find the workforce.

“It’s time the Allan Labor government understands that you can’t just make promises casually without the proper due diligence when there’s a risk, as we’ve seen, that the truth catches up with you and you waste tens of millions of dollars,” Opposition Leader John Pesutto said.

The coalition is pegging its hopes of a political comeback on Victoria’s growing debt, which for all Mr Pallas’ commentary about economic responsibility, continues to grow.

The opposition attacks are from its greatest hits: “Labor can’t manage money”.

This budget shows Victoria is going to be deeper in the red than initially forecast — to the tune of $1.1 billion.

It’s also worth remembering that this year the state is $3.7 billion better off because of an increased slice of the GST pie from Canberra.

Yet, the deficit still got worse.

As for debt, it continues to grow, and is forecast to hit $187 billion in 2027-28.

The interest expense on that debt will cost $9.3 billion alone in that year, that’s more than $25 million a day in interest payments.

But Labor seems unperturbed by concerns about its debt.

It sees debt as productive, as part of its plans to not only build infrastructure but to grow the economy.

Redbridge pollster and former Labor strategist Kosmos Samaras said debt didn’t carry the same political baggage with voters as it did in the 1990s.

“For the majority of voters, government debt is no different from the daily fluctuations of the stock markets or the annual profit and loss reports of large companies,” Mr Samaras said.

“It’s abstract and has little relevance to their personal life. Government debt only has salience if it results in cuts to critical services, something the current government has avoided so far.”

And that’s something that this government is acutely aware of.

It will do everything to maintain that balance, even if it means avoiding the really tough decisions of government.

SOURCE: ABCNEWS