Fiscal Management

Victorian families cannot get lower taxes from a government that keeps spending as if the money is free. Frontline services stay. Police, nurses, teachers, paramedics and firefighters will be protected and properly funded. What goes is the rest: the incompetence that blows the budget, the waste that never reaches a hospital ward or a highway, and the corruption that cannot survive daylight. Victorians should not pay more so that a failing system can keep paying itself.

Our Policies

Rebuild the Budget

Cutting Bureaucracy

Arts

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:

Cancel the Suburban Rail Loop and redirect funding to infrastructure that actually delivers.
Publish both figures side by side: the real cost of continuing the Suburban Rail Loop, and the cost of stopping. Victorians have never been shown either number honestly. In a cost-of-living crisis, that secrecy ends.

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:

Finish the job Labor’s own review started: cut the bureaucratic layer at the top.
Do not touch frontline workers - police, teachers, nurses, paramedics or firefighters. Increase them.
Take the savings, and the accountability, from the growth at the top.

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:

Introduce a proper sunset review system for Victorian public entities and agencies.
Give every relevant body an expiry date so it automatically ends unless Parliament votes to continue it after a public review.
Reverse the burden of proof: an agency will only continue if it can demonstrate it still deserves to exist and deliver value for money.
Conduct the reviews in public so Victorians can see the case for keeping or closing each body.

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:

Introduce a strict two-out, one-in rule across government. Every new compliance requirement, condition or regulatory obligation must be matched by the removal of two existing ones.
Put a legal clock on government decisions. If the responsible agency does not decide within the set time, the application or approval is automatically granted. Silence will no longer mean “no.”
Require agencies to justify delays in public. Multiple referral bodies will no longer be able to sit on decisions indefinitely without consequence.

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:

Abolish VicScreen and wind up the agency. Victoria does not need a government body deciding which Victorian stories deserve to be made.
Exempt screen and live production wages from payroll tax. Producers currently pay up to 5.85% on their Victorian wage bill, and that money will stay in the production instead. There is no application form and no panel. Employ Victorians to make something and the tax does not apply.
Make the Victorian screen rebate a legal entitlement administered by the State Revenue Office, rather than a grant an agency decides.
Remove every identity test from Victorian arts and screen funding. No program will make a person’s race or sex a condition of applying.
Return VicScreen’s $87.6 million cash reserve to the industry to fund the transition.
Audit and repeal the costs that are closing live venues: liquor licensing, council-by-council event permits, road closures, public liability, and noise rules.

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.