Our Policies
Rebuild the Budget
On the Chopping Block
The Suburban Rail Loop
The Parliamentary Budget Office shows the Suburban Rail Loop returns only 60 to 70 cents for every dollar spent. They knew the numbers and kept digging anyway. Nothing opens until 2035. The main tunnels still are not built. This is the last chance to stop a project that will drain tens of billions from a state already drowning in debt, money that could have gone towards cost-of-living relief, hospitals or police.
What we will do:
Finish the projects that matter. Stop the ones that do not.
Cutting the Bureaucracy
Labor’s Jobs for the Boys, Not the Front Line
Since 2019, the number of public service executives in Victoria has exploded by 52 per cent. That is Labor’s own figure, from their own review. In the same period, police numbers have barely moved, and in recent years have gone backwards. Teachers have slightly increased, but nowhere near the rate of the executive class.
This is what Labor’s “jobs for the boys” looks like in practice: a ballooning layer of highly paid executives and politically favoured roles, while the people who actually keep the state safe and running get left behind. There is a job advertised right now for a Multicultural Coordinator General paying up to $400,741.
Labor’s own review in December 2025 told them to cut 2,000 jobs and close 78 bodies because the public service had become top-heavy and inefficient. They announced roughly half of it, then went quiet. No clear public accounting has ever been published showing whether even that limited clean-up was finished. They identified the problem. They admitted the growth at the top was unjustified. Then they protected their own.
What we will do:
The people who keep the state running should grow. The executive class above them should not.
Agency Sunset Reviews
Victoria is carrying hundreds of public entities and more than 3,400 boards and committees. Together, these public entities account for around $35 billion in annual operating expenditure. Many duplicate work, add extra layers of executives, and keep consuming money long after their original purpose has faded. There is currently no systematic process that forces these bodies to justify why taxpayers should keep funding them. They survive by default.
Texas has operated a different system since 1977. Every agency is given an expiry date. It shuts automatically unless the legislature votes to keep it. On a rolling cycle they have closed or consolidated 95 unneeded agencies.
What we will do:
When you are spending $35 billion a year across this dense web of entities and boards, the default must be accountability and transparency.
Red Tape: Two Out, One In
Victoria’s government decision-making is too slow, too complex and too expensive. Whether it is a planning permit, a business licence, an infrastructure approval, a grant or any other government decision, people and businesses are left waiting while applications bounce between agencies, accumulate conditions and disappear into process. Every unnecessary delay costs money, kills investment and frustrates ordinary Victorians.
British Columbia has shown a better way. For more than twenty years it has run a disciplined red-tape reduction program and cut its regulatory burden by close to half.
What we will do:
We will reverse the default. Government will be required to clear unnecessary rules and make decisions on time, or get out of the way.
Arts
Victoria is the home of the arts in this country, and we did not get there by accident.
There’s live music in half the pubs in Melbourne. We still have more live music venues per head than any city in the world, one for every 8,785 people, ahead of Austin, ahead of Sydney, ahead of New York. Theatre, ballet, and opera on Southbank. The comedy festival, the film festival, the writers festival. A state where you could go out on a Tuesday night and find something worth seeing.
That standing took decades to build, and people built it by backing their own judgement with their own money.
Look at us now. We are not making the work and we are not filling the seats.
On screen, Australian films took 11.5% of our own box office in the 1980s. Last year they took 2.6%.
On stage, the musicals Back to the Future, Waitress, and Beetlejuice all closed early or cancelled Australian seasons in 2025. Not one producer blamed the work. They blamed costs. Creative Victoria defunded eight arts organisations, and Writers Victoria is reported to be closing.
There are two reasons for this, and they feed each other.
Public money is handed out by agencies that have decided their job is something other than making work people want to watch. VicScreen’s own diversity statement commits it to funding projects for the “diversity of their storylines and characters”, and to using “the appropriate levers at our disposal to promote and drive change”. That is a screen agency describing itself as an instrument of social change. Nowhere does it ask whether Victorians will turn up.
And there is no longer any reason for a private investor to back an Australian production. When the tax incentive that built this industry was stripped away in the late 1980s, private money walked and never came back. Everything runs through the agencies now, which is why the agencies decide what gets made.
So the money sits where it does no good. In the same 12 months those productions were closing, VicScreen banked an $11.6 million surplus and finished the year holding $87.6 million in cash it had not spent.
What we will do:
Australia is not short of stories. We are short of people allowed to back them, because we built a system that put a committee between the storyteller and the audience.
We can’t let bureaucrats commission our culture any more. We need to take them out of the picture and let Australia make things again. Investors will back it. People will pay to see it. It’ll be loud, funny, dangerous, and unmistakably ours.
