Tuesday, 12 May 2026

 Georgie CROZIER (Southern Metropolitan) (14:14): Last week confirmed what millions of Victorians already know: that the Allan Labor government has lost control of the budget and has no plan to repay the debt that they have racked up, a debt that future generations are going to be saddled with and will have to pay back. We are paying a whopping $1 million per hour on the interest repayments on the current debt. In a few years time that figure will climb to over $1.3 million an hour, or over $30 million every single day. This is billions of dollars of interest repayments each year that have to be paid by the state before any new nurse, midwife, doctor, paramedic, dentist, physio, OT or theatre technician is hired. To put Jacinta Allan’s $200 billion debt into some context, what could that have paid for? Well, it could have paid for 2.1 million nurses, 2 million police, 178 hospitals or 1.7 million teachers. These are extraordinary figures, and this is the reality facing Victoria. But the indifference this incompetent Premier and Treasurer have to these numbers and the burdens they are loading future generations with is, quite frankly, frightening. As former Treasurer Peter Costello commented last week:

Debt creeps up on a government. It starts with small increases and then comes on with a rush.

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This is where Victoria finds itself. It started with benign neglect from the current government, and now it is a fully blown disease which threatens the financial prospects of the state.

Victorians can see through the spin, the excuses, the deception and the outright lies being peddled by a desperate Premier – a Premier that has no plan. Only the Liberals and Nationals have a plan to fix the budget, and that is exactly what we will do.