Matthew Abraham: The year is 2030. Rob Lucas is retired. State debt has topped $60b

The year is 2030. Rob Lucas wears crocs and trackies and there’s no light at the end of the South Rd tunnels, because we couldn’t afford them, writes Matthew Abraham.

Rob Lucas dropped anchor and surveyed the horizon with his trademark world-weary gaze.

“Whitecaps,” he muttered, looking at the breaking waves. “Bloody BOM. They said it’d be under 5 knots and flat.”

He was talking to himself, as you tend to do when you’re solo in a tinny. Alone at sea, no one can hear you scream and no one cares if you wee overboard. It’s just like outer space.

After 40 hugely enjoyable years in politics, most of them spent losing elections, he walked away from the game at the 2022 March election.

That was six years ago, and for much of that time he’d found himself at a bit of a loose end.

After a lifetime never having worked at a real job, he didn’t know how to retire.

His entire political career had been spent on the red leather benches of South Australia’s Legislative Council, a retirement village for policy wonks, backroom powerbrokers, Greens, Christians and anyone lucky enough to hitch a ride on Nick Xenophon’s bandwagon before the wheels fell off.

Treasurer Rob Lucas with a squid jag presented to him on budget day by your humble columnist. Photo: Matthew Abraham.

It’s the cushiest job in politics outside the House of Lords. So how do you know when you’ve retired? For Lucas, a man of numbers who rescued SA from the $3b State Bank debt in his first go as Treasurer then left it with a projected $33b debt in his last, it was a question with no satisfactory answer.

Then one day he was rifling through the pockets of a suit destined for Vinnies. He hadn’t worn it since Tuesday June 22, 2021, that momentous day that had marked the unveiling of his last ever Budget as Treasurer. He was a tracky dacks and Crocs man now.

Ouch! Something pricked his finger, drawing blood. Gingerly he retrieved the object. It was the yellow squid jag he’d been given as a “retirement gift” by a journo, Matt Abraham, whom he’d described as a fishing-obsessed “old codger” in the lock-up.

At the time, he didn’t have a clue what a squid jag was or how you used it.

But staring at the banana-yellow Yozuri squid jag, he had a lightbulb moment. It was a sign from the Big Fella, as the Pentecostals, now running the Liberal Party, liked to say.

Rob Lucas now knew what he’d do for the rest of his retirement. He’d buy a boat.

He tells friends it’s just a ”tinny” but he’d taken the advice from the guy in Jaws who said “You’re gonna need a bigger boat” and bought what is known in fisho circles as a BBB, a Bloody Big Boat, with all the bells and whistles.

They needed a bigger boat. A still from the 1975 movie, Jaws. Actors Richard Dreyfuss, Robert Shaw. Photo by Bud Gray - © MPTV

Despite being fully loaded up in the world’s most generous parliamentary super scheme, he didn’t pay cash. Nope, he’d borrowed the lot, plonking it on his credit card. One painful lesson he’d learned as Treasurer was this: Never play with your own money.

So, in that final Lucas Budget in 2021, he walked away leaving SA with a debt expected to hit $33.623b by 2024-25.

It was just a stab in the dark of course, because by the time 2024-25 came around, the actual figure was almost double. Who knew interest rates would go nuts? But he was long gone by then.

At the time, the ratings agencies agreed with the government’s spin that the debt was “manageable”, whatever that meant.

S&P Global even said his last Budget showed an “improving economic outlook that supports a gradual return to operating surpluses” and record infrastructure investment “to support jobs and longer-term economic prospects”.

Sitting in his boat, he chuckled.

They never did get around to building the South Road tunnels but had almost finished the final, final “business case” for them.

Ambulances were still ramping at the RAH and now at the new Children’s Hospital. They’d at least finished the new $662m Riverbank “basketball stadium”, at a cost of $1.2b, and it was now going gang-busters as a Hillsong revivalist church.

The “gradual return to operating surpluses” was a lot more “gradual” than he or the ratings agencies promised. So gradual it hadn’t happened.

He really should have paid more attention to Chapter 6 in Budget Paper 3 in his final Budget, the one headed “Risk Statement” and the three sentences about interest rates. But no one seemed to mind.

The ex-Treasurer poured a coffee from the Thermos, cracked a fresh pack of Tim Tams, and settled back to wait for action on his squid float. With politics and fishing, someone, or something, always takes the bait.