Andrew Bolt: Victoria now on the nose thanks to Labor government

This once-great state is now a rotting carcass that’s stinking up the whole joint, with the Allan government so on the nose it’s hurting Anthony Albanese too.

You can tell Victoria is now a national embarrassment – a rotting carcass that’s stinking up the whole joint.

Take a lungful, and learn that a Labor government that spends too much will one day hurt you.

Think of that as you vote at this federal election on May 3.

One way to tell this once-great state is on the nose is that the Prime Minister and Opposition Leader were both crawling all over Melbourne on Wednesday – Anthony Albanese trying to save the eight Victorian seats Labor fears it could lose; Peter Dutton to win them.

That Labor could drop so many seats there is not just because Victorians are fed up with Albanese’s government, although the crunch in living standards have hit hard.

Adding to that anger is that Victoria has the worst state government by the length of the Flemington straight, another Labor government.

It’s so appalling that pollster Jim Reed of Resolve Political Monitor said “there’s now a hatred of Labor in many parts of the electorate”.

Anthony Albanese is trying to save eight Victorian seats. Picture: Jason Edwards

That’s killing Albanese, too, dragging down his government’s primary vote in the latest Resolve poll to just 27 per cent, compared to 30 in NSW.

That’s why Albanese on Wednesday treated Premier Jacinta Allan like a leper, refusing to pose with her despite swanning around earlier this week with the popular premiers of South Australia and Western Australia.

How did it get that bad in the state that was for years a Labor fortress?

Blame Victoria living the Labor dream, good and hard.

I don’t just mean such weak enforcement of laws that the crime rate is now the worst recorded in the state.

Nor is it just that Victorian Labor went so crazy with the Left’s global warming faith that it even banned new gas developments for almost a decade and now, astonishingly, needs to import gas it could have just got from under its feet.

Be warned: Albanese’s Energy Minister Chris Bowen is equally obsessed with global warming.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan. Picture: David Geraghty

But let’s focus instead on Victorian Labor’s mad spending – which, again, is now aped by the Albanese government.

Victoria suffered worse than any other state during the pandemic from Labor’s new authoritarianism, with Melbourne setting a world record at the time for the city locked down the longest.

That devastated the economy and state debt soared.

But that debt was already growing out of control, much like Albanese’s, which next year will reach $1 trillion, with his budget last month admitting to a decade of deficits to come.

Victoria’s Labor government had gone on a titanic spending spree called the Big Build, including insane projects such as a proposed Suburban Rail Loop around Melbourne to link suburbs no one wants to visit, at a cost now guessed to be more than $200bn, if it ever gets built.

That’s the project Albanese just gave another $2bn of federal money, and the one Dutton this week rightly denounced as a “hoax”, promising to switch the funding to a rail link to the airport.

As for the state’s other Big Build projects – tunnels and roads – the blowouts have reached at least $40bn.

Peter Dutton labelled the SRL a “hoax”. Picture: Thomas Lisson

Then there are the other follies of a state Labor government that seems not to value a taxpayer dollar.

It hired so many more public servants and paid them so much more that the wages bill has rocketed by almost $17bn since Labor came to office in 2014. (Albanese’s government has itself hired an extra 41,000 public servants.)

Now it’s all gone splat. State debt has jumped to $188bn, with interest payments rising 28 per cent in just one year.

Even Premier Allan’s hapless government now realises the circus is over. It’s new Treasurer, Jaclyn Symes, knows so little about finance that she reportedly asked staff to “stop using economic terms and phrases” as she “doesn’t have a clue what they are all talking about”, but she does know red ink spells trouble.

Symes has ordered cuts to Victoria’s public service – up to 3000 jobs – at the very time that Albanese and his ministers attack Peter Dutton for promising cuts to the federal public service, too.

“If Peter Dutton cuts, you will pay,” cried Albanese’s finance minister, Katy Gallagher.

Actually, Katy, what we’re paying for are all your extra public servants, enough to populate two suburbs. It’s not cutting them that will cost us.

Just look at Victoria – grim, broke, crime-ridden. Shouldn’t we learn Labor’s lesson, that, in the end, someone must pay the bill?