Around the corner from where we live in suburban Melbourne, there is a sign that reads ‘Fault Identified’. It is close to a continuous stream of water that has been making its way down the road for weeks.

In fact, teams of workers have made two attempts to fix the problem, but to no avail. Both tries involved closing the entire road for several hours. My guess is that the sign will be there for some time. Its real purpose is to stop us from calling.

Further up the road, the edges of the potholes have been conveniently painted to alert drivers to their existence. That’s right – they haven’t been repaired, but fearful drivers have been made more aware of these damaging fissures.

The house of our neighbour over the road was recently invaded by a group of young people who jumped over the side fence. They made a terrible mess and took a few valuables. Luckily, she was out. She has now invested heavily in additional home security, including some powerful external lighting.

Car thefts are commonplace in our area.  It’s best to leave the car fobs in a convenient place in the house for the intending burglars – indeed, this is the advice of the police.  Prising open garage doors is a common trick for the young’uns, who then often take the car for a spin until the fuel runs out.

Mind you, the stolen car is never the same again, that’s if it hasn’t been torched. The owner of the stolen car is always out of pocket.

I guess we are lucky that we live on the other side of town from where those five young teenagers thought that a bit of shoplifting would fill in the afternoon. When confronted by another shopkeeper, the group set upon him, striking his head on multiple occasions. He died several days later in hospital. All but one of the villains were released on bail within the week.

Welcome to living in Victoria.

With the dramatic overthrow of premier Jacinta Allan and her replacement with the more moderate Ben Carroll, the question everyone is now asking is: can the state recover? There is no doubt that had things continued as they were, financial catastrophe was just around the corner.

Mind you, Carroll got off to an awkward start by declaring that ‘in my government, integrity will not be optional’. Was he telling us that integrity had been optional under the previous Labor government of which he had been a senior member? (Actually, integrity wasn’t optional; it was totally absent.)

But let’s give him the benefit of the doubt because the state of Victoria is at a crossroads. To facilitate the state’s recovery, it’s necessary to identify the fundamental problems and then to sort out the solutions.

At heart, the principles underpinning the way Labor has governed since Dan Andrews took the helm in 2014 is big government spending, particularly on human services and infrastructure, and taxing and regulating business.

Throw in some woke obsessions, including a state indigenous Voice, and an inflexible commitment to decarbonising the energy system and the end-result has been a state with out-of-control debt and very poor economic outcomes. The average per capita income of Victorians is now below that of Tasmanians and that’s saying something.

The most palpable emblem of the state’s mismanagement under Labor is the bizarre commitment to build the Suburban Rail Loop. Dreamt up by Dan the Man in cahoots with a self-interested consultant from one of the Big 4, it’s unclear what possible purpose a 90-kilometre orbital rail loop, mainly underground, could serve.

It is reminiscent of the planning for the National Broadband Network undertaken on a plane by prime minister, Kevin Rudd, and his loyal lieutenant, Stephen Conroy. I should mention here the necessary ingredient of the drink coaster.

Dan’s plan, which was essentially a means of continuing to provide oodles of high-paid jobs to members of his affiliated union, the CFMEU, involved four stages. The first stage, SRL East between Cheltenham and Box Hill, was expected to cost a cool $34.5 billion, with the federal government contributing a third.

Another third was to be financed by so-called ‘value capture’, which is just a means of fleecing property developers. It turns out there won’t be any value to capture, so that’s $11.5 billion which now needs to be scratched out.

Did I mention that the costing – complete guesses really – for SRL East was predicated on another stage being completed at the same time? It’s odds-on to a dollar that the cost of SRL East is much closer to $50 billion, with the cost of the whole project now more than $200 billion. It might make Snowy 2.0 look almost modest – OK, not really.

The only possible conclusion is that the SRL must be scrapped as soon as possible.   This is where the Member of the Victorian Legislative Council, David Limrick of the Libertarian party, comes in. He commissioned the Victorian Parliamentary Budget Office to estimate the net budgetary impact of cancelling the SRL project.

Here’s the answer: over the next decade, the state’s net debt position would improve by over $21 billion. To be sure, there would be a short-term financial hit because of contract termination costs – around $1.9 billion this financial year.

Victoria also can’t be sure of what would happen to the federal government’s earmarked commitment to the SRL of close to $5 billion. My guess is that Albo would happily redirect that large sum of money to another more politically palatable project such as completing the rail link to the airport.

For those who understand sunk costs, it’s a no-brainer to cancel the project. Accept that an almighty mistake has been made, write off the costs and get on with it. Any short-term hit to the state’s net operating budget line will be worth it.

There is a further irony to the SRL project and that is the Labor government’s proposal to legislate the right to work from home, dubiously using anti-discrimination legislation for this purpose.

Employers will be required to prove why workers can’t work from home for at least two days each week and any costs for workers doing so would have to met by the employer. Talk about making it even more difficult for business to operate in Victoria! But, hey, if we are all at home working, or pretending to work, why spend all that money on new public transport links?

It seems unlikely that Ben ‘from Kmart’ Carroll will be able to do much to right the ship in the few months before the election. He is still beholden to the strong factional plays that dominate Labor in Victoria.

The environment is conducive to a change of government, all going well. We should dare to dream.