If it wasn’t so serious it might work as a form of dark comedy or a pantomime for brainwashed adults.

In just a few weeks we shall hear from two of Australia’s seven treasurers as to how they will ‘manage’ their respective but interdependent economies. Voters are breathless in anticipation.

Recent days have seen those knockabout guys, Jim (Chalmers) and Dan (Andrews), start to share with us why their respective debt positions are not their fault.

Wallowing in debt far exceeding $100 billion – Victoria is blaming the federal government for not handing over more federal cash to bail out the state – while the Commonwealth is blaming global forces along with ScoMo’s legacy for the nation’s staggering debt. Labor’s narrative, in case you missed it, is that Albo inherited a trillion dollars of debt and it’s this mess that Labor must now tackle. There is no mention of Covid expenditure, which was supported by the then Labor Opposition and the National Cabinet.

This ‘blame shifting’, but mutually convenient narrative, will have been nutted out by back-room operatives in both Canberra and Melbourne over recent months. Wall-to-wall Labor on the Australian mainland makes it so much easier for a coordinated and powerful deception exercise to be mounted.

Budget time is a busy period for the hundreds of hacks and ‘advisers’ who hover around Ministers like blowflies. They attend to framing ‘voter perceptions’ of the fiscal abilities of governments – but much more importantly they focus on how social and so-called ‘legacy’ media will frame the economic outlook with an emphasis on managing the ‘cost of living.’

The early ‘blame game’ salvos have been as predictable as they are puerile.

At Budget time, Treasurers think nothing of treating voters as morons as they attempt to make debt and deficit sound great and that our future well-being is assured despite all the evidence being to the contrary.

What a charmed life these treasurers have.

Knowing the dire consequences of their actions, they commit (year after year) to massive unfunded spending using not their money – but ours. When they run out of that they turn to global markets to ensure projects keep going and public servants get paid. All Victorian major projects have blown out massively and yet we can expect further spending from Spring St.

Victorian Treasurer, Tim Pallas, has mainlined on this trick for nine years and still wants us to believe the financial chaos of Victoria is someone else’s doing. Of course, Pallas and Andrews will be long gone from politics when budget repair becomes critical.

Just weeks from delivering his Budget – it turns out Victoria’s chronic debt and deficit are not his fault. They’re Canberra’s.

Let’s examine the numbers. Victoria’s rapidly deteriorating debt position is projected to be more than $116 billion by June this year. By the middle of 2026, without radical cuts in spending and restructuring, this figure is widely expected to be north of $166 billion.

The projected deficit for 2022-23 alone has blown out from $7.8 billion to more than $10 billion – a 30 per cent blowout in six months.

The tens of billions of obscene unfunded spending by the Andrews-Pallas government eclipses the combined debt of three other Australian states. This is well in advance of Victoria hosting the 2026 Commonwealth Games at an expected cost of $2.6 billion.

Of all the heinous addictions human are susceptible to – debt is surely the worst. Many young Victorians are getting a cruel lesson in the consequences of unmanaged debt as cost of living and rents head north. The bad news for them is there’s worse to come – even if Labor were to be booted from office tomorrow.

Amid the uncertainties – where we all live within a world still grappling with Covid – some things are certain. The cost of energy, food, rent, mortgages, property ownership, car ownership, education, and a host of state taxes will all go up and keep going up. Rents are already crippling many, but the politically ruthless Andrews isn’t concerned. He doesn’t face the voters again until the November 28, 2026. He hopes glow of the Games will see Labor re-elected.

In what is certainly one of Victoria’s most fiscally reckless administrations on record, Andrews and Pallas have, with predictable vigour, made plain their addiction to spending our money. They believe that the promise of grand infrastructure projects will be sufficient to blur the stark realities and long-term consequences for voters of the state’s ballooning debt.

Andrews will continue to make a virtue of debt believing punters are not focused on it. Labor’s market research (which we pay for) will be telling them which lines resonate and which don’t. As the Budget approaches, Andrews will simply regurgitate the lines given to him by political spin doctors and strategists.

One such promise to condition voters to believe that Andrews is actually doing something to rein in spending is to reduce the size of the state’s gargantuan public service. It’s likely he will cut around 5,000 jobs – but this will not scratch the surface in a government workforce of an obscene 400,000 plus.

The similarities in style of both Andrews and federal treasurer Jim Chalmers are noteworthy – especially as they ‘gravely acknowledge’ debt on the one hand and then claim it’s really no problem on the other while casting blame away from themselves.

Jim and Dan want voters to regard them as pillars of financial rectitude. This is against an economic background for the nation which is dire, an aspiration by Chalmers to be seen to be responsible (and seal his destination as the next Labor leader) and to be seen as easing the cost of living.

Voters would welcome (at least) the following in the lead-up to the Federal Budget (Tuesday, May 9) and Victoria (Tuesday, May 23): some honesty about how bad things might become economically, tangible efforts to reduce government expenditure as a percentage of GDP and a cessation of government promises and commitments that will never occur.

As May approaches, try keeping your exposure to both Jim and Dan to an absolute minimum.

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