Federal Labor’s $100bn tax windfall to shore up Victorian votes

Federal Labor will be spending it up big in Victoria with an eye to the next election.

Victorian premier Jacinta Allan seems to be the apple of Anthony Albanese’s eye.

Now, while our prime minister Anthony Albanese might well be Chinese president Xi’s “handsome boy”, the 20m Australians who don’t live in Victoria might well ponder just exactly why Victorian premier Jacinta Allan seems to be the apple of his – Albanese’s – eye.

First, Victoria got a special $4bn extra out of the GST carve-up, courtesy of that ‘handsome boy’s’ government in Canberra.

But for that, Victorian treasurer Tim Pallas’s merely just horrendous budget would have had to have been a full-on horror one.

Now, the PM has tipped a special extra $3.25bn into Melbourne’s ‘North-East Link’ – at least, it’s actually a tunnel from somewhere TO somewhere – taking the total federal contribution to a healthy $5bn.

Why is the PM being so generous to the new premier?

He said it was because the road was a “vital nation-building project”.

His generosity to the profligate Andrews, now Allan, state Labor Government, is certainly vital to the ‘project’ really most dear to his heart – his ‘national re-election project’.

The path to a second term, and all that international smooching and glad-handling with global so-called leaders, starts and arguably ends in Victoria, with Labor holding 25 of Victoria’s 39 federal seats.

Yes of course Labor also has to hold its seats in NSW and try to win some in Queensland.

For the latter, the PM’s best hope is if the giggling Queensland premier Stephen Miles loses in November. Then maybe, Queenslanders will be less disinclined to vote Labor out federally.

But Victoria could lose it for him all on its own. And a Victoria in ‘hot’ financial crisis and Victorians really hurting would certainly not help.

Good thing then – for want of a better term – that his treasurer Jim Chalmers has plenty of money to splash around.

But apart from being entitled to be a tad cheesed off at so much of – after all, their – money being directed at the profligate state, those other 20 million Australians, and indeed many of the 7 million Victorians, might ponder the question I posed yesterday.

Is it exactly a good idea for Chalmers to be taking the whole nation back to a ‘Victorian future’?

For the last decade Victoria has been spending money – and committing to spend tens of billions into the future – as if it was endless and ‘free’.

Next Tuesday Chalmers will be doing something very similar, but on a much grander scale.

He’ll be spending most of the near-$100b-a-year tax windfall (the difference between revenue now and what pre-Covid it had been projected to be), that he’s getting from Australia selling all that iron ore, coal and gas to, especially, China.

And indeed, to anyone else who wants it. Except of course, 27 million Australians, to whom it’s verboten.

Indeed, it’s supposed to be verboten to everyone. But, to them, only sometime manana.

To misquote Saint Augustine: Lord, make them - my successors - climate-pure, but just not yet, me and my cabinet colleagues.

We enjoy too much, spending the fossil fuel-emitted fiscal loot, and jetting off to talkfests.

Just throw another billion or ten on Jacinta’s barbecue, Jim.

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Originally published as Federal Labor’s $100bn tax windfall to shore up Victorian votes