James Campbell: Farewell Treasurer Tim Pallas, Victoria will be forever in your debt

Unlike most of the sycophants and toadies Daniel Andrews liked to keep about, the outgoing Treasurer knew how a disciplined government operated - how did it go so wrong?

So farewell Tim Pallas, we will be forever in your debt.

Make no mistake, the departing Treasurer knows full well history is going to be brutal to him.

Perhaps this is why he has lately been telling people things would have been even worse if he hadn’t been there to stop them.

This has always been the puzzle of Pallas – how could he have been so bad?

This is the man who spent years at the side of Steve Bracks as his chief of staff where he had seen how a Labor government should operate: frugal with public money, disciplined in its dealings with public sector unions.

To understand that is to understand why his failure as a treasurer is so comprehensive – unlike most of the sycophants and toadies Daniel Andrews liked to keep about, Pallas knew better.

The state’s longest standing Treasurer Tim Pallas leaves behind a mountain of debt for Victorians. Picture: David Crosling

In retrospect it is clear as mud that despite his ability and all the years he spent as a senior minister before achieving the treasurer’s job in 2014, a chief of staff is all he remained – the weak-willed enabler of the strong man Andrews.

In 2016, the Emergency Services Minister Jane Garrett begged him to use the authority of his office to stop Andrews letting the United Firefighters Union take over the CFA through an enterprise agreement that she warned would end up costing billions of dollars.

Garrett later said Pallas told her what she was saying was true and that he knew it was a terrible deal.

But he told her he had to support the Premier.

In recent months reports have emerged that Pallas has begun standing up for himself in his dealings with Jacinta Allan.

If they’re true, Allan must have rolled her eyes at the sudden emergence of a spine which had been completely unsighted during the nine years when the premier was a man.

Outgoing Treasurer Tim Pallas and Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan inside Parliament. Picture: Getty Images

As the economist Saul Eslake points out today, in Pallas’s decade at the helm, the state’s debt ballooned from $36bn to $155bn and will soon hit $224bn.

During that time Pallas has run a cash deficit of $109bn, with another further $60bn in prospect for the next four years.

If you want to understand why it is almost certainly worse than this you should look at the projected health spend in the May budget and the updated version handed down last week.

Back in May, Pallas was estimating the government’s biggest outlay would be $27.8bn this year.

He also predicted that somehow despite inflation and a rapidly ageing and rapidly growing population, by 2027-28, he would, by some miracle, be spending $500m less.

It was fantasy stuff.

Victorian Treasurer Tim Pallas announces his resignation from politics alongside Premier Jacinta Allan. Picture: Mark Stewart

Even Jeff Kennett couldn’t have achieved those sorts of cuts – they just can’t be done without turning Victoria’s hospital system into some sort of grim antipodean version of the Scottish NHS.

You might have thought however the estimates would at least have made it until the mid-year economic update.

Instead it only took 12 weeks for Allan to be back announcing an extra $1.5bn in health spending.

But as we can now see from last week’s budget update, this was an underestimate: health spending won’t be $1.5bn higher than predicted in May, it will be $3.5bn higher.

Yet despite this obvious lack of political will, last week Pallas was still pretending health spending will be lower in 2027-28 than it is today and total departmental spending across the whole-of-government will only be $10bn higher than this year.

It’s his final insult to the intelligence of Victorians.

Originally published as James Campbell: Farewell Treasurer Tim Pallas, Victoria will be forever in your debt