As any arborist with a swimming pool will tell you, money really does grow on trees. And if I had a dollar for every time someone told me how they’re spending my dollars, I’d be as rich as a Stop-Go sign holder holidaying in the Maldives.

Like a white-suited American prosperity evangelist or union official scouting a Spearmint Rhino gentlemen’s club for lap dancers who are good with a squeeze mop, I live by a prosperity gospel and know if I pray enough the money will come. Most likely from above – or any direction, really. I’m ecumenical when it comes to other people’s money and not fussy as long as it’s in an untraceable offshore account.

The Melbourne Council’s four-kilometre Greenline Project was supposed to cost $300 million but has blown out to $473 million. It was our former Lord Mayor’s pet project, so that’s all right then. Possession is nine tenths of the law, just ask the CFMEU. And what’s an extra 173 mill’ between rate payers when we’re about to start charging to visit the Great Ocean Roads’ Twelve Apostles.

My free advice if you want to view them for free, is wind down your car window, hang your tongue out, and channel your inner labrador as you hurtle past to your reupholstered Lorne love shack.

‘Money’s not a big deal’, Tim, my wealthy arborist friend tells me in a posh Scotch College accent he learnt while clipping a St George’s Road hedge into the shape of a large, dimpled golf ball. ‘It’s exciting really. It’s nice to open the newspaper and see an ever-escalating set of figures – 125 million to settle the Hotel Quarantine court case, 500 million to pay Glasgow to hold the Commonwealth Games in July. One million for a glossy Games ad with a pretty athlete running into the empty wilderness, which I guess is truth in advertising. I see Time Out magazine have just declared Melbourne the best city in the world in a review that proves they’ve never been to New York City or Dandenong, so we must be doing something right.’

Tim has a point, but these figures are nothing compared to Victoria’s Big Build and claims of a dodgy 15 billion. That’s not just a lot of alleged money trees, it’s an Amazon rainforest, and we all know that’s the lungs of the world, making 15 billion the state government’s kidney or maybe a gangrenous left toe that needs amputation in a Westfield shopping mall round 3 p.m. on a sleepy Sunday afternoon when police are between shifts.

Talking Points say this figure is untested and I tend to believe everything Talking Points says especially via TikTok. But what is the right figure? 5 billion? 30 billion? It really is a mystery.

All this Potemkin village cash is great. I hear the federal government is ponying up an extra $230 million for the Sydney-Newcastle high-speed rail line. This will make this project ‘shovel-ready’ which is fine by me. My Dad said, when you have a money pit the important thing is to just keep digging in case there’s another money pit underneath it. But he died in a suspicious harbour-side boating accident after complaining about Snowy 2.0.

I blame Covid ScoMo for this mess, because as the Covid Karen-ing set in, the government largesse kept growing until everyone had new air fryers – even poor people sleeping on cardboard in Elizabeth Street who aren’t featured in the latest edition of Time Out. I think it was Amy Remeikis who said on Insiders at the time, ‘We are all socialists now.’ Not quite defiant, lantern-jawed Kirk Douglas, ‘I am Spartacus’ but Amy’s recently moved from the Guardian to the Australia Institute which I think is the progressive version of failing upwards.

What’s it’s like living in Victoria right now: Exhausting? Exhilarating? Cashed up? I used to say electrocuted to curious Sydney friends, because it’s sudden, may cause death and can give you an involuntary erection.

They thought I was joking and it was a pretty cute answer that left them rolling in the aisles (Sydney-siders can be a tacky bunch and like their Rodney Rude served cold) but with the ever spiralling, 24/7 election-year spruiking of this government, the word I now use most often is ‘molested’ as political panderers, who won’t take no for an answer, keep trying to work out what turns me on.

A visiting Queenslander asked me why this government is so successful at getting re-elected. I refer him to my trousers jibe and electrocution joke, then whisper, ‘Well, you remember Sir Joh.’ He screws up his tanned perplexed forehead with no idea what I mean. Checking his wife isn’t around he asks, ‘Is this one of those famous King Street strip clubs I read about in Time Out where you can hire hot-looking cleaners for 20,000 dollars to vacuum the office shag pile?’

Speaking of money, I do wonder how those hard-working State Library pro-Palestine protesters who never leave get paid. Is it by the hour or a work from home arrangement where they have the constitutional right to protest from the couch while watching Karl monster Wayne Swan about petrol shortages on Today?

Exhausted after a day of bullhorn-bellowing, anti-Netanyahu interpretive dancing and blocking families visiting the National Gallery for Nanna’s 90th, because Weeping Woman is a Jewish conspiracy, do they all head off to the nearby Imperial for drinks and if so, how do these Che Guevara office drinks work? Is there a code of conduct? Do the HR scolds send a stern email about not photocopying your backside and emailing it to Josh Lees? Are jokes about non-binary man buns allowed? Do Islamist hotheads put down their placards for a quite frothy with the Queers for Palestine typing pool? Is Grace Tame the only one who can pronounce intifada properly? I mean how do they all get on so well? Does the lion really lie down with the lamb?

This protest diversity is testimony to the brilliant harmony of our neurotic basket case state approaching election day. What’s Victoria like? It’s like the Star Wars bar scene with Jabba the Hutt shooting up Ozempic. But if Darth Vader, Obi-Wan Kenobi, and the Tin Man from Wizard of Oz are shouting drinks, who really cares?