Shannon Deery: Why dumping Comm Games will be a political game-changer for Andrews government
The sloppy handling of the Commonwealth Games has touched a nerve with the electorate — and the true fallout may not be realised until Victorians cast their votes in the 2026 election.
Opinion
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When it comes to the Commonwealth Games, Daniel Andrews is adamant that “the whole matter is now closed out”.
Done and dusted.
Contractually, that may be the case.
Politically, the fallout of the Commonwealth Games cancellation will haunt the government for months, if not years.
The true fallout of the sloppy handling of the event may not be realised until Victorians cast their votes in the 2026 election.
Because more than most issues that could have politically scarred the Andrews government, the Commonwealth Games has touched a nerve with the electorate.
Integrity issues have had little impact, nor have budget blowouts on major infrastructure projects, the health system, or rising debt.
Before the cancellation of the games in mid-July, the Liberal Party’s primary vote was in freefall.
Andrews was personally doubly as popular as Opposition Leader John Pesutto, who was even being booed by his own Liberal Party members.
Polling a month out from the cancellation of the games showed the Coalition hit a record low, and prompted very serious talks of a leadership challenge. The Liberals at the time steadfastly denied Pesutto’s leadership was in danger.
But it was, as some are only too happy to admit now, and the danger was very real. Two months on, and the tables are slowly starting to turn.
Polling out last week showed Pesutto had managed to improve both his personal popularity, and the primary vote of the Coalition.
Meanwhile, the Premier’s likeability took a massive hit, and Labor’s primary vote dropped, too.
The decision to cancel the Games appears to be a turning point, because it is calling into question the government’s wider judgment.
Buried deep within the government’s business case is the admission that it rushed its planning, and didn’t properly understand estimated costings.
“The estimated budget has been built on a ‘top down’ basis and baselined from the Gold Coast 2018 Commonwealth Games,” it said.
“Time has not permitted a more robust ‘bottom up’ approach as key elements of Games planning are not yet understood.”
What else is being done with such scant regard to proper process?
On the one hand our taxes are going up, on the other hundreds of millions of dollars are being squandered. Can we rely on the government’s estimations in other areas? Budget forecasts currently predict interest payments to service our staggering debt will hit $22m a day by 2026-27 while tax revenue will climb to $40bn. Will those figures in reality be higher?
Can we trust what the government is telling us? It’s this that voters must now start questioning on the back of the games debacle.
The Victorian Auditor-General and a new parliamentary committee will also examine the Games debacle.
It will examine the government’s bid for the Games and efforts to back out of it. And, nondisclosure clauses permitting, it should also give taxpayers an insight into how a $380m compensation deal was reached.
Certainly taxpayers deserve to know why such a clause limiting the sharing of information about how their money was spent was permitted in the first place.
Because the $380m compo payout is just the starting point for the total bill we will be left with for the non-event. It could have bought 1900 new ambulances, paid for more than 7000 police recruits or funded 38 breast cancer centres.
And true, the government may have saved us a couple of billion dollars by not proceeding with the event.
A couple of billion we can’t afford, the government insists. Except, perhaps, when one of our major projects next blows out by a couple of billion. Like the stalled Airport Rail Link which is set to soar up to $3bn above business case estimates.
Or the West Gate Tunnel which is facing a new budget blowout less than two years after taxpayers coughed up almost $2bn to keep the project moving.
The problem for the government is that it can no longer spend its way out of trouble. With no money to spend, there can be no shiny new announcements to distract people away from the issue at hand, try as they might.
On Sunday, the Premier boasted that cranes were coming down from the new Footscray Hospital. It’s not finished yet, but it’s tall. On Monday, Jacinta Allan spruiked work on the North East Link was ramping up. By that, she meant the ship carrying the first of two tunnel boring machines that will dig tunnels for the project was on its way to Melbourne. Talk about a go-slow.
The Commonwealth Games might have been an unmitigated disaster for Victoria’s reputation as the major events capital of Australia. And it might end up costing taxpayers well over $600m. But the catastrophic political misstep might just end up doing the most damage to those behind the mess, the Andrews government.
Shannon Deery is state politics editor