The pond does miss the Sundays when fun could be had courtesy of the Pellists and the angry Anglicans.
Either those standing there managed to last a few thousand years, and are still living in hope, or Jesus didn't return in time to reward them before they tasted death,.
So he's either a bald-faced liar, or a deceiver and deliverer of broken promises, not a good look for an all knowing being.
If only the rest of Sunday could proceed in that vein, but imagine the pond's surprise when it went looking for the usual weekend dollop of Polonial prattle as a way to kick start proceedings, and could only find his last entry from a week ago brooding about Vlad the sociopath...
Had Polonius succumbed early to the Xmas spirit? (He must have, because it seems like he delivered his copy late and it only turned up late morning yesterday, and so the pond decided to punish him by burying him in a late afternoon slot, 4 pm to be precise).
Whatever the reason for his dilettante tardiness, his dilatory sluggishness, it left the pond scrambling to find alternatives.
Nah, the likes of "Ned", Dame Slap, snappy Tom and garrulous Gemma had been sent from the classroom for good reasons, and besides, they were still available on the intermittent archive.
And so on, and at least the gave the pond an excuse to segue to a 'toon or two...
Or the pond could have gone over to the Nine rags for a sighting of a simpering onion muncher, in a nauseating snap with the former Chairman ...
Sure it was fun observing the post-ironic way he was, in his tone deaf day, completely oblivious to irony:
The pond had to stay on the reptile tracks.
The pond had absolutely no taste for parish pump politics in distant croweater land, served up Penbo style ...
Just look at the gormless one at the top of that tale of woe ...
And the lizard Oz editorialist was a compleat bust ...
The pond routinely bans TG bashing by the reptiles, and there was no reason to exclude the lizard Oz editorialist from the ban:
The pond is so over bigly TG conspiracy theories. Such a tiny minority, and yet so relentlessly persecuted by reptile bigots.
And the lizard Oz editorialist could only manage this on the need to stop watching musical garbage ...
Ah, so not watching music that's been indigestible crap since ABBA left the scene puts the pond in company with Hamas and Iran?
The Australian Daily Zionist News strikes again.
Sorry, SBS, the pond is over and out, and so should you have been.
And that's how the pond ended up with Nicholas Jensen, celebrating two epic losers and dropkicks who managed in suicidal fashion to kill themselves going bush.
Young Nick is these days high up the reptile pecking order...
That puts him in a plum position to meditate on those two epic dingbats ...
Some might get a sense that they're sitting in on a social studies class circa 1950s, celebrating Oz explorers, and that seems to be about the right period for Nick.
The header: Monumental self-loathing drives Burke and Wills from the public square; Australia seems to suffer from a deep aversion to the epic, a cringing hostility towards the monumental in our history. We are anxious, often nakedly hostile, to public expressions of our past.
The caption for a snap which didn't manage to show either the statue or the town hall in style: Burke and Wills monument at the corner of Collins and Swanston streets, Melbourne.
Of course the real reason that the bloody monument was moved was that it was on the corner that has had the Metro Tunnel Project going on for what seems like an eternity, perhaps since the days when the pond first visited Melbourne as a child ...
But Nick was determined to do a bit of jingoistic sabre rattling, sticking it up the fuzzy-wuzzies in good Rudyard Kipling style ...
Public monuments can make powerful statements on the rare occasions we get round to noticing them. As sites of memory, they bear the imprint of a collective culture and carry the remnants of a past that resists sliding into forgetfulness. Yet in Australia we suffer from a deep aversion to the epic, a cringing hostility towards the monumental in our history. We are anxious, often nakedly hostile, to public expressions of our past, especially our settler past.
Every day in our cities we pass soaring, mostly triumphant figures that stare down at us from a distant, unfamiliar time. They are the conspicuous yet unseen adornments of our cityscapes; it’s often only when they’re threatened they are noticed.
In Melbourne, across from the Old Treasury Building, stands a bronze statue of General Charles Gordon, cast as the embattled military hero brooding his fate. Few passers-by would probably bother to look up at him today. But when news broke across Australia in early February 1885 that the British garrison at Khartoum had fallen to the attacking Mahdi rebels and that Gordon had likely died in the siege it was hailed as one the great epics of the colonial era.
It doesn't seem to have occurred to Nick that Gordon had absolutely no business being in Khartoum, unless you happen to be a late Victorian with a colonial empire mindset... Gordon's last stand in Khartoum, 1885.
Nick was in raptures at the way that the empire turned the planet red (not that sort of red, more the red you found in 1950s maps of the world):
Reports of his downfall were relayed throughout the far reaches of the empire with a blast of imperial fervour and sentiment. In Australia, devoted audiences, eager to learn of Gordon’s fate, consumed newspapers and cabled updates from London with an almost fanatical avidity. It was the late 19th-century equivalent of a social media trend or meme gone viral.
The statue, erected through public subscription and unveiled before a crowd of thousands, portrays the general as the tragic Christian hero. Piety, adventure and military prowess – those romantic traits derived from late 19th century representations of imperial heroism – found their spectacular apotheosis in Gordon.
Until relatively recently, a little farther down the road at the intersection of Collins and Swanston streets stood two other mighty figures of Victorian tragedy and triumph. Robert O’Hara Burke and William John Wills were both men of destiny. Their monument, said to be the oldest public work of art in Melbourne, has been relocated across the city five times since it was first presented by sculptor Charles Summers in 1865. Now it’s expected to be moved again, to the Royal Historical Society of Victoria at the edge of the CBD, clearing the way for the design of a new city square, where the two explorers were situated until 2017 when they were taken down for the construction of Melbourne’s underground rail project.
As this newspaper reported last weekend, the relocation has provoked discussion of de-colonising the urban space and drawing greater emphasis on Indigenous history. It seems drearily fitting, in this era of statue-toppling iconoclasm, that Burke and Wills should be cast down and relegated to the second league, condemned to gather dust in relative obscurity.
The reptiles kept digging up snaps to reinforce the mind set ... The Burke and Wills monument at a previous location, on the corner of Collins St and Russell St, Melbourne.
Sh*t happens and things get moved around, with the
yellow peril exiled to near ACCA in Southbank...
Sic transit gloria, but Nick is still mourning the lost empire, and the inept meanderings of a couple of singularly incompetent colonials, as if determined to emulate the feats of Irish bushranger Ned, whose main skill was to get himself hanged ...
The story of their expedition across the arid heart of the continent to the Gulf of Carpentaria – beginning with their triumphant farewell in Royal Park and ending in the dramatic funeral procession through Melbourne – is one of those celebrated events in Australian folklore that captures our imagination precisely because it ended in disaster.
Like Gordon’s defence at Khartoum, it is an epic punctuated with terrible coincidences, small oversights and spectacular miscalculations that turned what could’ve been one of the great triumphs of exploration into a poignant failure.
When the Victorian government announced in 1860 its ambitions to dispatch an expedition northwards, the colony’s elite were determined that its explorers should cross the continent’s interior before a competing mission was launched from South Australia. No expense was spared. The company of 19 was lavishly supplied, famously with camels imported from India.
In August, they departed Melbourne for Menindee on the Darling River, where Burke left part of his company under command of William Wright, and then forged on to Cooper’s Creek, near the dead heart of the country.
Despite warnings about travelling through high summer, Burke and Wills made for the Gulf of Carpentaria with two others, Charles Gray and John King. Just south of the Gulf the river water tasted brackish. It was their moment of triumph, as they realised they’d achieved what no other explorers had since the possibility was first discussed by the Dutch as early as the 1640s – they had traversed the continent from south to the north.
The attempted return journey, as is now legend, ended in disaster. Abandoned and emaciated at Cooper’s Creek, suffering scurvy and malnutrition, Burke and Wills died within days of each other. They recorded their demise with simple understatement.
Inevitably there's an artist to blame for the mythologising of this pair of loons, and Ned as well, Burke and Wills by Sidney Nolan, 1948.
Nick kept on regurgitating that 1950s school text ...
When the relief expedition led by Alfred Howitt arrived in September 1861 and found King – kept alive by the Yandruwandha people – they came upon the bodies of the two explorers. Now in full possession of the tragic story, Howitt remarked: “It is impossible to describe the feelings of sadness and awe that filled our minds as we gazed on the spectacle – the remains of brave Burke.”
Not long after their reburial in Melbourne, Summers produced a work of colossal proportions, now at the centre of controversy. The figure of Burke stands at least 3.6m tall, a slender, hatless, bearded giant in shirt-sleeves, gazing out towards the horizon, his right hand gently resting on the shoulder of Wills, sitting next to him with his diary. It is a stirring yet desolate depiction, a monument shot through with melancholy, exhaustion and dashed hopes; the two noble explorers holding forth in grim eminence, against all the odds, against all the wild and capricious forces this unforgiving land could throw at them, joined together, at the end, like medieval knights, somehow intuiting their fate before the fall.
“This seems to have been a story of predestined anticlimax,” Alan Moorehead wrote in his brilliant 1963 account of the expedition. “Without the tragedy on the Cooper, Burke and Wills would have remained rather minor figures, but with it they were lifted to another and a higher plane, one might even say a state of grace. And that perhaps is more important for them than the conquest.”
More than 160 years later, the two men remain a curious study in contrasts: Wills, 27, as the young and disciplined Englishman, devoted to science and deduction; and Burke, 40, as the mercurial, charming, irascible Irishman, who, despite his lack of experience in bushcraft, nourished hubristic visions of glory from the beginning.
It's impossible not to gaze on this spectacle and not note that fact that perfectly competent people of the Aboriginal kind wouldn't have been so bloody stupid and inept.
Dying from incompetence and stupidity is the way that you can get elevated into tragedy?
Or is it because not much of note happened in Australian history in the early days, so a couple of plonkers would have to do?
How desperate did Nick get?
Why he had to introduce that notorious commie Order of Lenin medal wearer (or so Major Mitchell says, and who could doubt an explorer like the Major?)
Alan Moorehead, Manning Clark
Inevitably Nick had to put in a disclaimer for referencing the notorious Commie swine ...
Manning Clark, that seminal but flawed prophet of Australian history, was especially enamoured of the two hero explorers, and the tragic motif that has haunted their legacy ever since. “In the story of Burke and Wills,” Mark McKenna writes in his 2011 biography of Clark, “he (Clark) came to see the embodiment of everything he had tried to convey in his writing of the country’s history.
“It had all the necessary ingredients – grand visions, majestic ambitions and fatal mistakes – European explorers who were lured by fame into the heart of the continent and slowly undone. All that he (Clark) wanted to say about man and his environment in Australia could be said in the telling of their tragic story.”
But what of the tragic now? What appetite is there today for history at scale? A combination of fear and self loathing has led to a degrading of the monumental in the public square.
While our culture places enormous emphasis on Anzac as an affirmation of ritual and remembrance, it is nonetheless ridiculed by some as a tradition of perverse extravagance and base jingoism, among other sins. This does not mean admonishing public memorials and ceremonies is wrong; certainly no colonial-era statue I know of enjoys universal acclamation. Nor should it. (After all, it was the Victorians who excelled in the mass manufacture of kitsch chauvinism and stony lifelessness.)
Speaking of kitsch and lifelessness - the reptiles obliged again ... Arrival of Burke, Wills and King at the deserted camp at Cooper’s Creek, April 1861, by John Longstaff, 1907.
What a trudge, but at least the pond could break the journey by heading to the fridge for a snack ...
Still, it suggests that, after years of animus and attack, our culture no longer recognises the difference between what is triumphalist trash and what is telling us something genuinely interesting and worthwhile about our shared inheritance and who we are. The antidote to this is more history, not less; it means commemorating people such as the Yandruwandha, who also played a decisive role in the Burke and Wills epic.
For almost a decade now it has been voguish among certain groups to paper over these distinctions by simply getting rid of things they don’t like or find too irksome. Or, worse still, deploying the past as a kind of weapon to redress historical grievance and fix contemporary inequalities. None of this is new; in fact, it has become predictable and boring.
In the case of the Burke and Wills memorial, its expulsion from the centre of civic life (whatever the lame excuses) is not merely a symptom of a state that is badly governed, or of a national self-confidence in desperate need of renewal, but of a far deeper sense of cultural nihilism that is, perhaps now, ineradicable.
To be fair, Nick managed to be both predictable and boring, and as well as inducing a far deeper sense of cultural nihilism, he also managed to induce an ineradicable sense of ennui and existential tedium.
Worse, he gave absolutely no excuse for the pond to catch up on a few 'toons, so the pond decided to run them anyway ...
And that's the last bit of pleasure allowed on the pond, because Killer of the IPA was also on the loose ...
The header: Daniel Andrews’ big build leaves a big bill, and there’s no relief in sight, Daniel Andrews transformed Victoria from one of Australia's most fiscally prudent states into its most indebted, leaving behind a $235bn debt legacy that threatens the nation’s finances.
The caption for that cornball collage featuring comrade Dan and a cartoon bomb worthy of Wile E. Coyote: For his last budget before leaving office in late 2023, Daniel Andrews, left, projected net debt to surge to a forecast $171bn across the next four years – almost eight times the 2019 level. Now Jacinta Allan, right, has pencilled in net debt of $235bn by mid-2029 using a broader estimate. Pictures: News Corp/iStock
The pond offers this outing as a community service.
Anyone who reads it and switches off will likely have saved themselves the pain of dropping thirty bucks on a Killer item from Connor Court.
The constant obsessive compulsive talk of comrade Dan - who has been long lost to the real world for an immeasurable time - is deeply weird, but it becomes more understandable as a trailer for flogging that Killer book ...
Daniel Andrews evidently governed with political skill, winning three elections. But his fiscal legacy is one of recklessness, overreach and denial – which more Victorians apparently are beginning to realise amid reports the former premier often faces abuse when he ventures out of his home. He leaves behind a state in financial peril, with few levers left to pull.
In his eulogy for former Labor premier John Cain, who died in 2019, Andrews recalled being told by his political mentor and hero “never to waste a day”.
He certainly didn’t in transforming Victoria from one of the most fiscally prudent jurisdictions in the country to one of the most indebted, with painful years of adjustment ahead for Victorians and potentially the rest of Australia, too.
Even if unclear to the average voter who naturally associates him with destructive pandemic restrictions, Andrews’ most harmful and enduring legacy is in public finance.
The reptiles thought so little of the outing that they kept interrupting with sundry snaps, as if hive mind readers might wander off, never to return: Then opposition leader Daniel Andrews celebrates in his electorate of Mulgrave after Labor won the November 2014 state election. AAP Image/Joe Castro
2014? That's an eternity ago ...
summer grass
all that remains
of a Samurai’s dream (Basho)
And yet they must keep on battling that phantom, that ghost, in pursuit of unlikely book sales...
The figures are startling. In June 2023, a few months before Andrews retired from politics, Victoria’s net debt stood at almost $117bn, a $96bn absolute increase, or more than five times greater than what he had inherited from the Napthine government in November 2014.
In his last budget before leaving office in late 2023, Andrews projected net debt to surge to a forecast $171bn across the next four years – almost eight times the 2019 level. As it turned out, that was optimistic. Jacinta Allan, Andrews’ successor and former cabinet colleague, has pencilled in net debt of $235bn by mid-2029 using a broader estimate that includes government non-financial corporations.
The visual interruptions started to come thick and fast ... The Victorian Legislative Assembly soon after Jacinta Allan, lower right, took over as Labor Premier of Victoria in 2023. Picture: Asanka Ratnayake/Getty Images
Boring ... and after a short gobbet ...
Shockingly reckless increases in spending were to blame: for the 2026 financial year $107bn, up from less than $70bn before 2020 – a 55 per cent increase, vastly more than the state’s population growth of about 8 per cent across the same period and similarly ahead of inflation. Victoria no longer holds a AAA credit rating from any major agency, a significant symbolic and financial blow that underscores the state’s deteriorating credibility. At AA, Victoria is now the lowest-rated mainland state in Australia.
...more bore ... Daniel Andrews at a 2022 press conference to talk about the Covid situation in Victoria. Picture: NCA NewsWire / David Crosling
Inevitably mask- and vax-fearing Killer dragged Covid into it ... on the basis that IPA elephants never forget or forgive ...
The deterioration didn’t begin with Covid, which the government’s apologists often cite as an excuse, but it didn’t begin on day one of the Andrews premiership either. Indeed, Andrews began his lengthy term observing the prudent examples of the earlier Bracks and Brumby Labor governments. When his veteran treasurer Tim Pallas handed down his first budget in May 2015, the state’s net debt stood at $21.5bn.
Three years later, in June 2018, Victoria’s net debt had actually declined to under $20bn.
By the time of the delayed 2020 pandemic budget – released in November that year – the government had pencilled in a tripling of net debt from $44bn to $154bn across the next four years.
That surge was not solely driven by the costs of so-called public health measures. Indeed, total state government spending on Covid-related measures, across the three financial years to June 2022, was $35.8bn, according to a fiscal retrospective published by the Treasury in 2024.
After just four pars, the reptiles felt the urgent need to intervene with the liar from The Shire ...
Prime Minister Scott Morrison has raised concerns about the Andrews Labor government’s plans to increase taxes in next week’s budget. Victoria is set to unveil a swath of tax measures targeting high income earners as the state struggles with a mounting debt and much-needed revenue for coronavirus recovery schemes. Anticipated tax hikes include a $2.4 billion property tax increase and a 50 per cent tax rate for developers who reap windfall gains above $500,000 when their property is rezoned. A new premium stamp duty rate for property transactions valued above $2 million is also expected in the fast approaching budget. Mr Morrison said the Coalition’s plans for Australia’s recovery from the coronavirus pandemic was to be fuelled by lower taxes. “Lower taxes are underpinning Australia’s economic recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic,” he said. “That’s why it concerns me that taxes are rising here in Victoria under the Labor government and equally the federal Labor Party is looking to increase taxes as well. “That’s not how you grow your economy. That’s not how you get people in work. That’s not how you help them buy their first home.”
Then came another two short pars...
Notorious lockdowns – which lasted longer in Melbourne than in any other major city in the world – hurt revenue as they shut businesses for months on end. But it was government choices, not public health necessity, that underpinned the extraordinary budget blowout.
The politicisation of infrastructure, not Covid, explains the bulk of the cost blowout. Australia’s population was growing rapidly everywhere but only in Victoria did annual infrastructure investment explode from a steady $5bn a year across the decade to 2016 to nearly $25bn in the 2024 financial year.
The reptiles stayed fixated on comrade Dan, while keen to drag in Jacinta too ... Then premier Daniel Andrews and at left, Jacinta Allan, then minister for transport, at a Suburban Rail Loop site at Clayton in 2022. Picture: Andrew Henshaw/ pool via NCA NewsWire
Killer of the IPA barely had the chance to get out just four more pars of moan ...
Andrews launched infrastructure megaprojects on a scale never before seen in Victoria, often with little to no cost-benefit analysis. Projects routinely were announced with no federal funding secured and scant regard for how they would be paid for.
The Suburban Rail Loop, which would link outer suburbs of Melbourne in a radial fashion, was emblematic. Touted as a transformational piece of infrastructure, the SRL was announced before a business case was released and even now remains only partially funded.
Internal government documents and senior Labor figures have since admitted the hope was always to pressure Canberra into paying for a third and for land value capture to pay for another third – a strategy that appears increasingly fanciful. On her trip to China in September this year, Premier Allan had even resorted to asking Chinese investors to help make up the shortfall.
The SRL was first announced in 2018 with a mooted price tag of $50bn; some observers now expect the total cost across the three stages to surpass $200bn.
... and then then the reptiles decided to double down on the visual distractions with two large snaps of what looked like propaganda for a Victorian government on the move ... An impression of what the Box Hill SRL station in Melbourne’s outer east would look like; Work at the SRL site at Box Hill. Picture: Mark Stewart
On and on Killer rambled ...
One senior Labor figure confided that they didn’t believe the government was ever serious about building the SRL when it was announced, seeing it instead as a clever political strategy to win votes in marginal seats that would ultimately be walked back.
Other projects, such as electrifying the rail lines to Melton and Werribee, bringing them into the suburban network and taking pressure off regional services, would have cost far less and brought greater benefits.
Almost incredibly in hindsight, Andrews quashed a proposal from a consortium of investors including even Labor-aligned IFM Investors to build a high-speed rail link from the airport to the city, which would have cost Victorian taxpayers $5bn and could at least be justified on the basis that Melbourne was one of the few major cities in the world without a train connecting its airport to its CBD.
Quick, another AV distraction as the ogre goes about destroying Melbourne, which somehow still managed to score fourth place in the 2025 Global Liveability Index ... behind Copenhagen, Vienna and Zurich, but ahead of Geneva, Sydney, Osaka, Auckland, Adelaide and Vancouver ...
Daniel Andrews has defended Labor’s decision to increase the state’s debt, telling Sky News it is ‘perfectly prudent to borrow to build’. Labor campaigned on the promise it would deliver more road and rail projects but later revealed it would have to borrow $25 billion to do so, doubling net debt to 12 per cent of gross state product. The re-elected Premier told Sky News the infrastructure program will be a ‘gift’ to Victorians that will last generations.
Killer raged on ...
The North East Link was another example. Initially budgeted at $10bn, it is now expected to cost $26bn. The West Gate Tunnel has nearly doubled in cost because of mismanagement and environmental remediation issues. Other examples include the level-crossing-removal program, originally forecast to cost $5bn, which now has exceeded $10bn, and the decision to expand the size of the National Gallery of Victoria. Even the Frankston Hospital upgrade is on track to cost over $1.1bn, more than double the forecast in 2019.
The excessive and growing influence of the CFMEU, the most powerful construction union in the state, has been a major factor in rising construction costs across Australia, up about 30 per cent in recent years.
The militant union, long accused of criminal activities, has used aggressive industrial tactics and restrictive work practices to increase its influence over the more politically moderate Australian Workers’ Union, which once competed to oversee the workforces of state government projects, helping keep a cap on costs.
Even unionised traffic controllers on major sites have reportedly been paid more than $200,000 a year – more than double what police or nurses might earn. Far from confront it, Andrews appeared to ensure the CFMEU would oversee every single major construction project in the state.
But just as he kept building up a head of steam, the reptiles kept interrupting with absolutely meaningless stills that contributed nothing to the ravaging of comrade Dan... Construction work under way on the Suburban Rail Loop in Melbourne’s suburbs. Picture: Mark Stewart
So they do concrete in Victoria? Big deal. We in NSW specialise in shutting down motorways and trapping motorists for hours ...
Undeterred, Killer of the IPA slogged on ...
Then there was the 2026 Commonwealth Games. Marketed as a decentralised triumph for regional development, the Games became a textbook example of fiscal incompetence when it was cancelled barely more than a year after it was announced. The cancellation cost $589m, including $380m in compensation payments, without a single race run.
Cynics noted the Games, which would have helped the government win votes in marginal regional seats where many of the events were to be staged, were announced in early 2022 before the state election. Their cancellation barely more than a year later created an impression that a government floundering in debt might not have intended to host them at all.
Beyond infrastructure, Andrews presided over a bloated political machine. The premier’s private office had 86 staff in 2022, dwarfing the 51 employed by prime minister Scott Morrison at the time. Such overreach was emblematic of a broader approach to government that increasingly blurred the line between public administration and political campaigning.
Across the eight years to 2022 about 20 per cent of new jobs in Victoria were in the public sector, a share that has exploded to 70 per cent of new jobs since then, according to Institute of Public Affairs research from late 2024.
Good old IPA, doing their best for the barking mad ratbag fundamentalist Xians and assorted loons who have infested the Liberal party down south ...Victorian Liberal Leader Jess Wilson has declared a “debt crisis” in Victoria. The state's Opposition Leader claims debt is causing longer wait times for ambulances, fewer police, increased crime and financial pressure on schools and hospitals. Victoria's plunge into the red is projected to total $194 billion by 2028. Ms Wilson has pledged no cuts to frontline workers under a Liberal government.
The pond began to wonder if Killer would ever end, before the point of his rage was finally revealed...
The Victorian public sector workforce grew from 277,670 in June 2015, including 37,942 in the core public service, to 382,823, including 57,345 in the public service, in June 2024. That’s growth of 38 per cent overall and a remarkable 51 per cent for the bureaucracy. Almost one in 10 workers in Victoria now works directly for the state. Combined with the private sector construction workforce dependent on government projects, a significant portion of economic activity and employment is dependent on the largesse of government.
The contrast with the relatively frugal Bracks and Brumby governments, in power from 1999 to 2010, is instructive. They were fiscal moderates who had inherited the political scars of the Cain-Kirner economic collapse in the early 1990s. John Brumby, as treasurer and later premier, delivered infrastructure such as EastLink on time and under budget, often claiming publicly it remains the cheapest toll road built in Australia.
One of the more common lines of defence used by the Andrews government and its supporters is that debt-servicing costs remain lower than under Joan Kirner’s Labor government in the early ’90s. Back then, interest payments absorbed about 15 per cent of budget outlays because the level of interest rates was so much higher. Today the equivalent figure is about 7 per cent.
But this is false assurance, given greater levels of global uncertainty that could lead to a sharp surge in interest rates, which would apply to a much larger sum of outstanding debt in nominal terms.
Back to the future?
Back to 2008 ... In 2008, then roads minister, later treasurer, Tim Pallas, then premier John Brumby and then ConnectEast tollway managing director John Gardiner at the EastLink opening announcement. Picture: Nicki Connolly
Again Killer of the IPA managed only a few pars...
Another favoured deflection comes from comparisons to the ’60s, when net debt reportedly reached 57 per cent of gross state product under Liberal premier Henry Bolte. But Bolte’s debt was held mostly by revenue-generating state-owned enterprises such as the Gas and Fuel Corporation that have long since been privatised. Andrews’ debt, by contrast, is predominantly held by the general-government sector, with far fewer revenue-producing assets to service it.
And whereas Bolte’s liabilities were associated with infrastructure that generated long-term productivity gains, much of Andrews’ spending was directed towards vanity projects and the ongoing expansion of the public service, about which even veteran Labor figures have privately expressed concern.
... before yet another still interrupted his train of thought, and even more boring than the boring ones that had gone before ... Prime Minister Anthony Albanese at the Victorian Trades Hall Council Building in Melbourne for Daniel Andrews’ farewell event in 2023. Picture: Tony Gough
Killer began to wind down as his hysteria still kept on building ...
Soaring debt was hardly a function of restraint in taxation, which soared during the Andrews administration. According to one analysis, the Andrews government introduced 63 new and increased taxes, fees and charges. Among these were the Covid debt levy, first pitched as temporary but which has become permanent, raising more than $1.1bn a year from overtaxed businesses in 2025.
Land-tax thresholds were lowered to as low as $50,000 (from a previous threshold of $300,000) and rates increased dramatically, hitting small investors and retirees.
A new mental health levy extracts another $1.1bn a year from employers in added payroll tax. Registration fees, such as for births, deaths and marriages, were hiked.
Despite these revenue increases, Victoria continues to run large operating deficits. Victorian taxpayers are now the most burdened in the nation. Total tax revenue is projected to rise by more than 22 per cent by 2029, yet the budget remains structurally in deficit. Even huge revenue windfalls during the Covid recovery period – when property markets and payrolls surged – were spent rather than saved.
The question now is whether Victoria can unwind the debt trap it has built for itself. That will require a level of political courage not yet visible from the Allan government, which has shown little appetite for reform.
There came one last snap of the Sauron of the south, Daniel Andrews and Deputy Premier Jacinta Allan after the Labor government was sworn back in at Government House in 2022. Picture: NCA NewsWire / David Crosling
It was way past time to reveal the real point of this Killer outing...
Allan’s May 2025 budget was a continuation of Andrews’ legacy: optimistic assumptions, vague references to future savings and an almost religious commitment to infrastructure spending, not to mention a contempt for private business – epitomised by the Premier’s August 2025 call to mandate two days a week working from home.
Reform would require substantial cuts to a bloated public service, program cuts and significant reductions in taxation, especially on investors and small business.
The assumption has long been that economic growth will lift the state out of its fiscal hole. But there is little evidence to support that. Population growth has slowed relative to NSW and Queensland. And interest rates, while lower than in the ’90s, are no longer near zero. Debt-servicing costs are already approaching $12bn a year, on track to absorb a quarter of the state’s total annual own-source taxation revenue. That number could rise rapidly if borrowing costs increase even modestly.
The government already has sold the Land Titles Office, leased the Port of Melbourne, and privatised VicRoads licensing and registration. What remains is politically toxic or legally complex to divest.
Thar she blowed... The Dark Legacy of Daniel Andrews, edited by Morgan Begg, published this week (Connor Court).
Killer of the IPA delivered a few more pars ...
The government has appointed Helen Silver, former head of the Department of Premier and Cabinet, to identify $3.3bn in savings. But no serious cuts to the public service have been proposed. No major programs have been wound back. And the looming 2026 state election makes any politically costly move unlikely.
Some defenders of the government point to the similar behaviour of all Australian states; Queensland’s net debt is forecast to triple, for instance. But none has gone as far, as fast or as carelessly as Victoria.
Despite the lack of genuine fiscal independence, Andrews nonetheless made the decisions to embark on the most ambitious infrastructure agenda in the nation, inflate the size of the public sector and maintain pandemic-era public spending levels into 2025 and beyond – and there is now a very real prospect that ultimately the federal government will be required to step in and bail out the state.
Then came the revealing credit...
This is an edited extract from The Dark Legacy of Daniel Andrews, edited by Morgan Begg, published this week (Connor Court).
However, Killer is the only author credited in that excerpt.
Likely it was pretty much an extensive, 9 minute guide to his chapter in the work.
So why buy the book?
With Killer already covered by way of the pond's community service, not much was left to contemplate
The rest of the restless contributors rabbiting away looked like mere dross up against Killer's guarantee of iron pyrites ...
Mirko Bagaric | Morgan Begg | Gigi Foster | Scott Hargreaves | Peter Jennings | John Lloyd | Brianna McKee | Kevin You
Why get out of bed or fork over 30 bucks, knowing that Killer's krazed kavortings are probably a fair indication of the entire collection? And now he's been done and dusted.
That's a negative space vibe, the book promotion that ensured the pond likely wouldn't bother to pick it up even if it turned up for free in the local street library.
Killer of the IPA might want to brood about long one comrade Dan, but the pond still has a lettuce locked in mortal battle with Susssan ...
Just remember that first the reptiles came for TG folk, then for pesky furriners, then for Eurovision protestors, then they came to pick your pocket of a hard-won thirty bucks, in aid of Connor Court ...
Why are the reptiles so humourless, so lacking in a sense of fun?
