Steve Price: ‘Delusional’ Treasurer should have starred at Comedy Festival
Treasurer Tim Pallas is either crazy brave or delusional with the story he spun while delivering his tenth state budget as Victoria stares down the dark hole of state-destroying debt.
Opinion
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Victorian Treasurer Tim Pallas is either crazy brave or delusional.
Delivering his tenth state budget, he uttered eight words that should scare everyone in this state.
Without even a hint of irony, Pallas told media on Tuesday: “We are on track with our fiscal strategy.”
The Treasurer should have been starring at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival last month with a joke like that. I can’t believe the Spring Street media pack didn’t burst out laughing.
Victoria is staring down the dark hole of state-destroying debt with interest payments set to hit $26 million a day. And this bloke says he has a strategy!
How Pallas can even show his face in public defies belief. I’m reminded of that scene in Life of Brian when the Black Knight calls his severed arm “but a scratch”.
Let’s be very frank: Victoria has become a laughing stock nationally and abroad with its so called “fiscal strategy”.
Pallas even had the hide to appear on 3AW’s Tom Elliott program and defend the construction of an underground train line from Cheltenham to Box Hill. A trip from somewhere no one wants to be to somewhere no one wants to go to.
He compared its importance to an underground project in Paris – failing of course to admit the French Metro first opened in 1900 and was modernised in 1998 and services central Paris. Comparing Box Hill-to-Cheltenham with the Grand Paris Express — which when completed will be four new underground lines with over 200km of track carrying an estimated 2 million passengers a day — is laughable.
The Treasurer really is playing with us.
Worse, this bloke has been in charge for ten budgets and each one has plunged our state into ever more debt. You can combine the debt of NSW, Queensland and Tasmania and not reach Victoria’s debt level.
How Pallas survives is as much a mystery as how Daniel Andrews kept getting re-elected becoming a statue-earning Premier.
Treasurer Pallas was first elected to the Legislative Assembly in 2006 and now is the local Member for the seat of Werribee. He formerly had the suburb of Tarneit in his electorate, an area not without its localised crime issues but that shouldn’t worry Tim — he lives 20km away in Williamstown.
His working life started in the union movement with the National Union of Workers before ending up as Assistant Secretary of the ACTU.
Moving into politics he ended up working as Chief of Staff to former Labor Premier Steve Bracks.
Pallas was originally from the right faction of the Labor Party but in 2022 with six others defected to the left, joining his then-boss Andrews. A bit of a pattern emerging here of do whatever it takes, not what is necessarily right.
Victorians are now the most-taxed Australians in the nation but not one word on Tuesday about the obvious need to take an axe to the non-essential seat warmers in the public service, many still working from home dressed in leisure wear. A hangover from Covid, thousands of these time servers still refuse to return to CBD offices and the government not only refuses to demand that they do so, but announced in the budget they would be selling off government office space as it was not required.
That’s how desperate for money they are. Not so desperate though to reign in the public sector wages bill. Wages for public servants have doubled in the decade-long term of this government, on track to now reach a staggering annual $40 billion over the next five years.
Pallas revealed Tuesday – wait for it – a $600 million blowout to the estimated wages bill just this financial year. Taxpayers forked out $36.5 billion is salaries just this financial year. When Labor came to office in 2014 the wages bill was $18.8 billion.
Not a word on Tuesday about trimming the public service numbers, and in fact just last month they were awarded a three per cent annual pay rise plus a 0.5 per cent bonus that will average out as $1400 for each year of the new agreement for every public servant.
There’s your answer about how these economic vandals keep getting elected. Of course you vote for the mob that keep paying you more, let you work from home and hire more and more of you. To be fair, Pallas in March 2023 ordered departments to cut staff numbers by 10 per cent but still the wages bill blew out.
And his budget revealed departmental cuts to education by $89 million, health $542 million and justice $555 million. His explanation was typical political spin, saying: “We are recalibrating with a clear path forward, backed by disciplined decisions.”
Another Tim Pallas comedy special.
While Tim recalibrates, Victorians are being forced to keep paying more in state taxes and charges. Next financial year alone the tax take is forecast to hit $39 billion. Employers will be hit with $10.4 billion in payroll tax (up from $9 billion); the hated Dan Andrews land tax will soar from $7.8 billion to $9.3 billion; and stamp duty hits $10.2 billion.
Pallas has hiked the Fire Services levy from July 1 and they have even found a way to tax your rubbish with the land fill levy increased. Expect also to see more mobile phone and seat belt cameras snapping away as a revenue-raising road safety measure.
Victorians will pay more to employ people, invest in real estate, drive cars, empty bins and heat and cool homes.
No wonder then that the median house price in Victoria last year rose by just 0.7 per cent compared with Sydney at 11.1 per cent, Adelaide at 15.8 per cent and Perth 16.6 per cent. So even if you want to flee Victoria, you’ll get less for selling your house here and pay more to buy interstate.
Back in 2010, launching a road safety initiative, Pallas called F1 world champion Lewis Hamilton “a dickhead” for doing a burnout on a suburban street.
Fourteen years later Tim need look no further than his bathroom mirror.
LOVE
– Neale Daniher’s ten-year battle with MND raising almost $100 million from the big freeze event – what a brave hero he is.
– Billionaire Anthony Pratt’s hot pink suit coat at the Met Gala.
– Reserve Bank leaving interest rates on hold – for now.
– Free influenza jab at the local medical centre.
LOATHE
– Idea that AFL players – all of them – on a premiership winning list be showered with an expensive Grand Final ring copying US sports.
– Ten dropping reality show Masked Singer hosted by the very funny Dave Hughes.
– Useless copies of the local yellow pages being dumped at the front gate – no-one uses them so straight in the bin.
– Mental health funding cuts in the Victorian state budget after suffering through the longest Covid shutdowns in the world.
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