Commonwealth Games shame a symptom of a looming crisis in Victoria

Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews was reportedly boasting of his government’s ability to do what Ms Allan’s portfolio says on the tin during a media free tour of China in March.

I have one question: If Jacinta Allan is Victoria’s Minister for Commonwealth Games Delivery as her business card clearly states, why does she still have a job?

According to one wag within the Labor Party in Victoria, Ms Allan was described as the “Minister for the Fyre Festival”, an obscure but amusing reference to a disastrous music festival in the Bahamas in 2017 that left attendees stranded, without adequate food or water and promoters facing a $140 million lawsuit.

Ms Allan is the deputy premier, vice-captain of the team that stands behind Premier Dan Andrews at pressers, nodding approvingly at his inscrutability.

She is also the one considered most likely to take over the reins of government in Victoria, should Dan fall under the proverbial mass transit chariot, or indeed, in the event that he announces his retirement at some stage before the next election, which ironically is due to take place several months after the Commonwealth Games would have been held had Dan not pulled the pin earlier this week.

Victorians will now foot the bill for the cancellation. Millions of dollars will be spent on not having the circus come to regional Victoria. How many millions? Well, that’s not immediately clear and Jacinta Allan is not saying. Perhaps she doesn’t yet know. But it is a lot.

Some of the world’s greatest athletes, including the Jamaican men’s and women’s 4x100 relay teams, will now never know the simple pleasure of staying at a motor inn at Moe or grabbing some light refreshment at the pie shop in Nyah.

Andrews put the kybosh on the Commonwealth Games. Costs had blown out, he claimed, almost as if the looming financial burden of hosting the games had become news to the premier within hours of his presser.

“What’s become clear is that the cost of hosting these Games in 2026 is not the A$2.6 billion which was budgeted and allocated. I will not take money out of hospitals and schools to host an event that is three times the cost estimated and budgeted for last year,” Andrews said.

The question must be asked, when did the Minister for Commonwealth Games Delivery become aware that delivery was going to cost three times what had been allocated and budgeted? When did what has become a reputational train wreck for the state and more broadly the nation, first jump the rails?

According to reports, Dan was boasting of his government’s ability to do what Ms Allan’s portfolio says on the tin during a media free tour of China in March. The Andrews Government was spruiking its financial acumen in hosting the Commonwealth Games throughout regional Victoria in the election campaign in November last year.

Last night, Labor advertising guru Dee Madigan appeared with The Australian’s Caroline Overington on a panel show on Channel 7 late night news. Madigan proclaimed that while the rest of Australia may have been in uproar, she believed Victorians were oddly becalmed by all the fuss.

Nothing to see here, folks.

The decision made by Mr Andrews and Ms Allen will cost Victoria millions.

Overington made the point that an event such as the Commonwealth Games had become a financial burden no state or city around the world could bear.

It’s true that for every Olympic game success story there are multiple financial failures with host jurisdictions beset with enduring fiscal haemorrhaging if not outright bankruptcy. For every Sydney, there is an Athens or, more pointedly, a Montreal. It is a lesson the people of Brisbane may yet learn the hard way.

While the athletes express their disappointment that a second-string event like the cancellation of the Commonwealth Games is a shambles and an embarrassment, it is merely a symptom of a government drunk on its own publicity while having lost its talent, its energy and its way, less than a year into its third fixed term.

Those longer in the tooth than most will have a pressing sense of deja vu.

The Cain Labor government was re-elected in 1988 for its third term with a slim but workable majority. It, too, was running out of steam by early 1990. After the failed implementation of a new public transport ticketing system, tram drivers parked 250 trams along Bourke and Spring Streets and went on strike. Labor MPs would casually pull the heavy curtains in the windows of their parliamentary offices to view the CBD traffic carnage and knew deep in their hearts that the mother of all election drubbings was headed their way.

The floggings continued but morale did not improve when Tricontinental Bank, the merchant bank division of the State Bank of Victoria collapsed with huge debts, forcing the sale of the bank to the Commonwealth Bank which duly was privatised by the Keating government. The bank that thousands of Victorians held their savings in for their lifetimes was a mere memory.

Cain ran a ‘Back me or sack me’ push in the party room and lost the caucus.

Joan Kirner became premier and went into the state election in 1992 with polling showing Labor with support in the low 20s. Victorian voters grabbed for their cricket bats and Labor lost 19 seats in the 88 seat lower house chamber.

History may not repeat but it is furiously resonating now.

The Andrews government was re-elected with an increased majority last year. In electoral terms, Dan Andrews has done what no one in recent political history has been able to do – increase his majority at each subsequent election since he first came to power in 2014.

In doing so, he has reduced the Victorian opposition to political rubble. While the Cain-Kirner government had an opposition led by Jeff Kennett ready to pounce, the people of Victoria now look at the Opposition benches with understandable disdain.

The wheels are falling off now. The pickings are slim and Jacinta Allan, the Minister for Commonwealth Games Delivery Who Couldn’t, may yet find herself premier of the state when Andrews sees the writing on the wall.

One wonders what real horrors lie in wait for the people of Victoria, knowing that a government has spun out of control, forsaken the fundamentals of cabinet government with the only available alternative unelectable.

The only safe conclusion we can draw is that this is not going to end well for Victorians.