Danny boy, you’ve just dropped the relay baton

Jeroen Weimar, Jacinta Allan, Daniel Andrews and Harriet Shing during a press conference at Parliament House in Melbourne.

Why doesn’t it surprise us that the Andrews government signed up, last year, for hosting the Commonwealth Games and now, suddenly realising there would be enormous cost blowouts, has abruptly pulled out of the commitment?

It shouldn’t. The Andrews government – like the Kirner and Cain governments of yore – throws money around as if there was no tomorrow. Besides, Daniel Andrews seems likely to step down soon and drive off into the gloaming, with his name on public projects, the debt left for others to deal with and handy little earners to retire on.

The Victorian government was already up to its eyeballs in debt from extravagant infrastructure spending and enormous Covid lockdown spending.

There’s also the estimated $33bn annual expenditure on salaries for a bloated state public service. It beggars belief, therefore, that Andrews would have entered into the Commonwealth Games commitment on a wing and a prayer.

As the Premier himself states, the deal was struck on the basis that the Victorian government would budget $2.6bn to host the Games. Nice for all those with a cut of the money, but a questionable use of state finances in all the circumstances. Then, with very little yet in place, the cost, so he now informs us, has blown out to between $6bn and $7bn, perhaps more.

That’s a financial debacle fully worthy of the federal Department of Defence. But its blowouts tend to take many years, sometimes decades to unfold. This all happened as quickly as Covid and the Premier now declares the budget must be put into lockdown.

Given the soaring net debt, it’s a wonder members of the state opposition haven’t been yammering like geese for an audit of the state’s budgetary processes. Heaven knows they could afford to hammer this theme, if only because they are unlikely to be in government any time soon and can afford to let fly. Alas, they are a dwindling electoral prospect, despite the failings of the incumbents. Yet surely lack of budgetary discipline is something even they could call out.

Brisbane Olympics chief executive John Coates

Meanwhile, what of the Games themselves? Premier Roger Cook, in Perth, put it bluntly when he dismissed the idea of Western Australia picking up the tab by hosting them. They’d be a “ruinously expensive once-off sugar hit”, he declared. Why couldn’t Dan Andrews have taken that stance last year? What was he thinking?

That Melbourne is a sports-mad metropolis must be part of the reason. It has world-class sporting facilities and huge crowds with a passion for all manner of athletic contests to attend them. How come the Commonwealth Games couldn’t be made to pay their way? Well, even the initial estimate of $2.6bn meant roughly $500 for each and every inhabitant of Melbourne. Don’t ask them to spend that money. Just borrow it. Yes?

But how could the estimates have been out by something like 250 per cent? How can Andrews stand before the cameras announcing this while withholding even the most perfunctory data about the matter from both Craig Phillips and the Commonwealth Games secretariat, to say nothing of the voting and taxpaying public?

He has form in this regard, of course, does Andrews. He runs an exorbitant media and spin pool, but only for propaganda purposes. When the spotlight would be inconvenient, as in his recent visit to China, no journalists were invited, though one suspects his inner circle of spinmeisters were in the picture.

Perhaps if he had put the same resources into rigorous cost accounting and budgetary discipline, the state would not have run up the staggering debts it is now saddled with? Perhaps if he had put those resources into high-fidelity opportunity cost analysis, the blowouts and social tensions of the Covid lockdowns might have been mitigated?

All might-have-beens now. But he has a nice little nest egg tucked away, over $2bn that will not be spent on the Games.

Perhaps, as a few wry commentators have observed, the Commonwealth Games are an anachronism, a leftover from the era when they were called the British Empire Games.

Daniel Andrews

Perhaps – with apologies to all the aspiring athletes and coaches who work so hard to participate in them – it’s time they were gently and diplomatically put down like an old horse?

Just think! Chairman Dan could have won some serious brownie points in the capital of his most favoured empire had he taken that line to Beijing last year and publicly announced that the British empire is done and dusted, the New World Order of Master Xi is coming? What a stir that would have created. But he had other, less public things to talk about in Beijing. Oh well.

To be fair, democracies run fiscal games and debts are the coin of such games. Just look at US debt ceiling politics. This latest mess is of a piece with so much else that even the most enlightened political leaders have been struggling to bring under control in recent decades.

But one would have liked to think – sitting in Melbourne, anyway – this state could lead by example and manage its spending, its decision-making and its accountability impeccably. Isn’t that the point of federation: to allow smaller units to experiment competitively? Danny boy, you just dropped the relay baton.

Paul Monk is a Melbourne-based writer and poet. His latest books are Thunder From the Silent Zone: Rethinking China (2023) and The Three Graces: Companionship, Discretion, Passion (2022).