The Cancer of Victorianisation Spreads Across Australia
Kevin You's warning (link below) is that Victoria is no longer a local embarrassment but a template. Per-person GDP has gone backwards for ten of the fifteen quarters to March 2026. Real wages in the private sector have been eaten by inflation while public-sector pay has kept pace. Average private pay sits around $78,000; public pay above $100,000, a 29 percent premium that is not explained by teachers and nurses so much as by a swelling class of executives and coordinators. Victoria leads the nation in the real rise of public-sector pay and is the only state in which private wages fell even in nominal terms. A Multicultural Co-ordinator General advertised by the Department of Premier and Cabinet at $345,000 to $401,000, super on top, is the emblem. Victorian public-sector executives on $250,000 to $800,000 have almost tripled in a decade under Andrews and Allan. That is the state model: the private worker funds a bureaucracy that inflates faster than the economy that pays for it.
The national numbers show the same tilt written larger. In 2000 private investment and net exports were 28 percent of GDP and government spending 21 percent. By 2025 the shares had flipped: investment and net exports 20 percent, government 29 percent. IPA research puts missed private investment over a decade at $688 billion in 2025 dollars, lower wages, fewer export earnings, fewer jobs. Eighty-two percent of employees still work in the private sector; they are the ones whose real pay is falling while they fund the 18 percent whose pay is not. High migration is then sold by business lobbies as the next adjustment, another way to hold private wages down. Net Zero, red tape and a thicker layer of regulators complete the squeeze on mining, manufacturing and agriculture, the industries that actually generate the surplus the coordinator-generals spend.
Labor in Canberra did not invent every line of that graph. Coalition governments helped socialise the spending share. What Labor has done is treat the Victorian style: indifference to the budget, expansion of the administrative class, moralised regulation, and the assumption that private investment will somehow survive being crowded out, as the default setting of a national project. Degenerate, in this sense, is not a slur about manners. It is a description of an economy that rewards the people who allocate other people's output more reliably than the people who produce it, and of a politics that calls the result fairness. Victoria got there first because its Labor governments ran the experiment longest and with the least embarrassment. The rest of the country is now running the same experiment at federation scale: falling living standards per head, a public payroll that floats above inflation, and a private sector asked to remain the engine while the state takes a larger share of the fuel. The cure You names is the unfashionable one. The state steps back, cuts the tape, shrinks the executive layer, and lets firms invest instead of lobbying for more migrants to cheapen the remaining private wage. Until that happens, Australia is not Victoria's opposite. It is Victoria with a central bank and a flag. And, we all go down the proverbial gurgler, unless we all organise and fight back now!
https://www.spectator.com.au/2026/09/the-victorianisation-of-australia/
