I’m not sure why we do it – but we spend a large slab of each year living in Victoria. That’s right, living under Dan, the Teflon man.

Of course, there have been times when we had no choice. We were caught in Danistan in 2021 and couldn’t leave. Let’s not forget that Dan enforced over 260 days of lockdowns – lockdowns when you couldn’t travel more than 5 kilometres from your house; when there was a curfew from 9pm to 6am; when many shops, cafes and restaurants were forcibly closed; and when playgrounds were out of bounds for a time.

The worst part about it was that quite a few of my fellow Victorians seemed to lap it up, at least initially. Dibber-dobbers flourished. Karens were everywhere. Forget the Stasi in East Germany, we had our own informal enforcement army in Victoria.

Certainly, towards the end of the lockdown period, many more people were exhibiting signs of being fed up. Violation of the rules was noticeable. But it’s not clear that the frustration, the exasperation, the incomprehension have lasted. Nearly everyone has moved on, with some people still believing that the lockdowns saved lives even though Victoria had by far the worst Covid death record. Think disastrous hotel quarantine here.

Living in the burbs, it’s been hard even to realise that an election campaign is afoot. A few posters here and there, the occasional pamphlet shoved through the letterbox. The legislated limit on election spending does have an upside. I did see a group of older women (my guess, all over 60) congregating around a local intersection trying to make some point about the need for climate action. Perhaps tennis or bridge had been cancelled that day.

I’m not sure there is a Teal candidate in our seat, but there is one in Hawthorn. Her face is everywhere in that electorate, which doesn’t bode well for the Liberal’s John Pesutto who is aiming to retake the seat from the Labor member whose main claim to fame seems to be the car allowance he receives even though he doesn’t have a car or a driver’s licence. (You know it makes sense.)

But let me put on my economist hat and make some observations about the Victorian economy and the competency of the state government – ok, ‘competency’. The first point to make about the Victorian economy is that it has been driven overwhelmingly by population growth which in turn has been driven by immigration. Melbourne has grown in leaps and bounds as new migrants flock to very uninteresting outer suburbs with poor infrastructure and transport links.

Part of this arrangement has been large flows of international students, both to universities and various dodgy vocational colleges. (Are some of the universities dodgy too? Probably.) At one stage, our number plates carried the motto: Victoria, the education state.

International students have provided a steady supply of cheap workers, often paid under the table, to prop up the state economy. Covid put a temporary spanner in the works, but the plan is to return to those heady pre-pandemic days as soon as possible.

When it comes to the economic and fiscal expertise of recent Victorian governments, it’s necessary to distinguish between pre-Dan and Dan when it comes to Labor and to note that the Coalition’s brief period in government between 2010 and 2014 probably doesn’t even deserve a footnote – with the exception of the one very negative feature of banning gas fracking.

Both Steve Bracks and John Brumby were effective Labor premiers, determined to demonstrate that the complete ineptitude of Labor under John Cain and Joan Kirner was dead and buried. Both men rang tight fiscal ships and were interested in some reform, some of which went well, others not so much, but government debt was extremely manageable.

When Dan Andrews was elected premier in late 2014, the management of the budget began to deteriorate. The handling of the big projects in particular has gone seriously awry. (Let’s not forget it was Andrews who decided to pay over a billion dollars not to construct a project.)

The cost of the Metro Rail project, which aims to duplicate the current (and overstretched) underground rail loop, has blown out massively and who knows when it will be finished. The Westgate tunnel project has also been a disaster after the Andrews government signed a highly unusual deal with the road toll operator, Transurban. Part of the deal was to grant Transurban an extension to its monopoly with guaranteed increases to the tolls it can charge.

This project was initially costed at around $3 billion and has now blown out to $10 billion and rising. The date for completion is constantly being moved into the future, with a dispute about where the contaminated waste would be dumped causing serious delays.

Bizarrely, Andrews also entered into some Belt-and-Road deal with the Chinese government, now cancelled by the federal government.

On the face of it, these sorts of disasters should bring a government down. But the Liberals have barely laid a glove on this bumbling government; it’s not even clear most people understand what has happened.

Mind you, there’s no hiding the figures in the Budget. Government debt has gone from around $20 billion when Dan assumed office to over $160 billion now. The state lost its AAA credit rating at the end of 2020 and the state has been marked down again since. Victoria now has the lowest credit rating of all the states with the credit agencies watching carefully.

The government’s wage bill has nearly tripled in seven years, notwithstanding the constant assurances of hapless Treasurer, Tim Pallas, that the government’s employee expenses would be contained. Pallas has also tried to make the ludicrous point that the project blowouts are small in the scheme of things.

Dan the Man now thinks the answer to Victoria’s economic dilemma is to build a suburban rail loop that will cost at least $150 billion even though it’s not clear who will use it. The state auditor-general doesn’t think it’s a good idea and the project hasn’t made the shortlist of Infrastructure Australia. In the meantime, regional roads are in a disastrous state and the health system is close to collapse.

Nonetheless, it looks as though Dan will still be premier come 27 November, the day after the election. He is unlikely to hang around for the full four years, but he will have done enough damage whenever he goes. The key question now is: will his replacement be any better?