Steve Price: Jacinta Allan and Jaclyn Symes are running our state into the ground
A photo of Jacinta Allan and Jaclyn Symes sharing a belly laugh before releasing a state budget containing a bin fire of debt should haunt the pair. How the hell did the Victorian public let this happen?
Opinion
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Take a close look at the photograph published online a day before Victoria’s state budget this week.
Two of the most powerful women in state politics – Jacinta Allan and Jaclyn Symes – sharing a belly laugh. It should make you all very angry and frightened that this pair are driving your great state into the ground.
That photograph should haunt the Premier and her treasurer sidekick, who couldn’t run a takeaway food shop, let alone the second biggest economy in the nation. Symes and Allan are career Labor staffers and as the Herald Sun reported back in February, Symes reportedly asked her staff to stop using economic terms and phrases in communications because she didn’t have a clue what they were talking about.
Premier Allan’s only real job was working the checkout at Coles while getting an Arts degree at Latrobe University, while Symes got herself a law degree at Deakin before joining – you guessed it – a union, the Australian Services Union.
This pair run Victoria, Allan from the hard socialist left and Symes from the union right. The next Victorian election will be held in November 2026. So for another 18 months these two are in charge and who knows what will be left of Victoria by the time we get to vote for a state government again.
The Daniel Andrews fan club, made up of construction unionists blessed with inflated salaries on over-budget and overtime infrastructure projects, and public servants guaranteed jobs for life, will react to this description of life under Labor as the rantings of someone desperate to give the hapless Liberals a leg up. Far from it.
I am genuinely frightened and believe we are living in a state where the only solution to any problem is a new tax dressed up as a levy. What will be left at the end of next year will be a bin fire of debt and unfinished transport projects.
When I outline the numbers, most people won’t be shocked, and most will ask the question: How the hell did the Victorian public let this happen?
Victoria is being run like a socialist state where aspiration is sneered at and wealth redistribution is a priority. Allan and Symes don’t care about debt and the Premier had the hide to turn up to Raf Epstein’s ABC studio first and then Tom Elliott on 3AW.
To listen to her you’d think she’d won the lottery, not just delivered another chapter in a record of failure.
At least Andrews just ignored the media while Allan takes the direct approach which is deflect and dodge any questions about her fiscal failures. She had the hide, when asked about the ever-increasing taxes being levied on Victorians – set to hit an annual $50bn by 2030 – that “every single dollar” was being invested back into services and initiatives across Victoria.
Asked about paying down the debt, she argued the money was being well spent on projects like the Metro Tunnel, West Gate Tunnel, North-East-Link and her pet project the Suburban Rail Loop. Pity someone didn’t point out that given the tax burden she keeps adding to every Victorian they won’t be able to afford to drive or ride along any of these money pit projects by the time they are finished.
By 2029 – so in just four years’ time – the debt will hit $194bn, up from $22.3bn 10 years ago. On current debt levels the Victorian taxpayer is forking out $20.7m a day – or close enough to a million dollars an hour – to just pay off the interest on the state’s borrowings.
If someone doesn’t deserve the sack for creating that financial disaster, I don’t know what you’d have to do, but then the architect of this financial fiasco has walked away from any responsibility with a multimillion-dollar pension for life. It’s enough to make even Dan Andrews fan club members throw up.
The current mob in charge believe inventing taxes that they call levies will dig them out of a hole, while at the same time hiking existing fines and charges way beyond inflation. Let’s look at just three of these Andrews/Allan so called levies: the parking tax called a congestion levy; the CFA tax called the emergency services and volunteer levy; and the Covid debt levy.
Take this so-called congestion tax that we are told is aimed at getting people off the roads and onto public transport. Quietly at the end of last year – let’s call it for what it is a parking tax – the government announced its intention to widen the areas that cop the levy, and from January 1 next year increase the tax by 73 per cent. There are two categories to this revenue grab, Category 1 which is the CBD and close surrounds and Category 2, that takes in places like South Yarra, Richmond and Burnley.
From next year Category 1 goes from a $1750 annual fee to $3030 and Category 2 from $1240 to $2150. That’s a fee on every private and public parking space in those areas every year. The leftie government that so cares for renters will see those charges passed on to tenants in full, even if the car spot attached to that property isn’t even used.
What about the dishonestly-named Emergency Services and Volunteers fund that filled city streets this week with thousands of CFA volunteers and farmers who were white hot angry.
Fancy gouging those same volunteers with a levy named after them, and gouge them it will, with the Premier trying to argue they will all get exemptions which if that’s the case why were they protesting?
They were protesting because they don’t trust anything these people tell them. We already all pay a fire services levy on our rates notice – mine was $298.15 this year – and law firms that have looked at the renamed tax predict that for a property classified as a farm, it will increase by 150 per cent in July this year and a commercial property worth $1 million will jump by around 72 per cent.
Worst of all is the Covid tax that I hate to remind you of. In the 2023 budget these financial wizards decided that for the next 10 years business owners and people with more than one property would be hit with a new tax.
The Covid tax sees Victorian businesses with a payroll of over $10m pay a half a per cent more payroll tax – that’s a tax for employing people by the way – and a full one per cent for payrolls over $100 million. Why the hell would you set up a business here?
On property we have the devil of all these invented levies – a Covid Land Tax. These desperate financial no-hopers decided anyone who had an investment property like an apartment or an old fibro beach shack worth more than $50,000 would pay an additional land tax on top of council rates. That property value threshold was ripped down from the previous value of $300,000. Disgraceful daylight robbery.
Justifying this, another Labor gypsy who has jumped ship, former Treasurer Tim Pallas said when conceding the Covid tax would hit 860,000 Victorians that it targeted “businesses and property owners who had seen healthy recent profits.” The Robin Hood theory of attacking people perceived to be rich.
There you have it in a nutshell, classic socialism determined to redistribute wealth through blunt government intervention.
Andrews and Pallas are gone, and it seems Allan and Symes are determined to continue trashing the once great state of Victoria and Victorians seem stupid enough to keep voting these people back into government.
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