Call her Sarah. She cast her first ACT vote in October 2001, the election that put Jon Stanhope's Labor government in office, and has voted in every one since — without ever once electing anyone but ACT Labor. Twenty-five years on, several parts of that record are moving on her at once. Her general rates notice, the annual property charge that funds the territory in place of a separate local council, rose by an average of 8 per cent in the government's 2026-27 Budget, on top of a health levy that was introduced, halved and then abolished inside three budgets. She reads that light rail has finally been approved to cross Lake Burley Griffin toward Woden, on a route her side of town has been promised since before her first vote. She sat with her father in Canberra Hospital's emergency department last winter — a stretched bay, familiar to most Canberrans by now — and argued with a neighbour, weeks later, about whether police no longer charging small drug possession has made the street safer or simply different. Sarah is a composite, not one named voter. But her ledger — rates, rail, hospital, reform — is the government's ledger too, accumulated one term at a time since 2001, and it is the one this scorecard sets out to read whole, rather than one topic at a time.
Twenty-three years, one governing bloc
Andrew Barr has been Chief Minister since 11 December 2014, succeeding Katy Gallagher when she moved to the Senate, and was Treasurer for thirteen years before that, from 2011 to 2024 — a grip on the territory's two most consequential portfolios matched by no other living Australian political leader. By June 2024 he had overtaken Jon Stanhope's own record to become the longest-serving Chief Minister in ACT history, and since Victoria's Daniel Andrews resigned in September 2023, Barr has been Australia's longest continuously serving state or territory leader. ACT Labor itself has governed continuously since 20 October 2001, an unbroken run of seven elections by the time it was returned an eighth time on 19 October 2024. For most of that period it governed with the Greens as a formal partner — a Parliamentary and Governing Agreement from 2012 that deepened after 2020 into a coalition with three Greens ministers, led by Shane Rattenbury, inside Cabinet. The 2024 election broke that pattern: Labor held its ten seats and the Liberals their nine, but the Greens' primary vote fell to 12.2 per cent and the party lost two of its six seats — including two sitting ministers — to independents. The Greens moved to the crossbench under a Supply and Confidence Agreement, guaranteeing supply and confidence votes without a Cabinet seat. For the first time since 2012, the government elected in October 2024 is, technically, a Labor minority government relying on crossbench votes — even though "Labor-Greens" remains the shorthand most coverage, including this site's, still reaches for.
Onto that foundation of stability the government has built four signature reforms, each examined in full elsewhere on this site. Since 2012 it has run the only structural tax reform of its kind in Australia, phasing out stamp duty over twenty years and replacing the revenue with general rates. Since April 2019 it has built the country's most contested piece of light rail, opening a 12-kilometre Gungahlin-to-city line close to budget and now extending it, in stages, toward Woden. Since October 2023 it has run the nation's first broad decriminalisation of personal drug possession, treating small quantities of cannabis and other drugs as a health matter rather than an automatic criminal charge. And since 2023 it has expanded Canberra's hospital system, building a Critical Services Building at Canberra Hospital and compulsorily acquiring Calvary Public Hospital to run as North Canberra Hospital. Each reform was legislated, funded and defended by the same governing bloc over the same two and a half decades — which is precisely what makes one ledger, rather than four separate report cards, the right way to read them.
The strongest case
A government that chose hard, unglamorous reform over easy politics — and kept being re-elected for it
Put the record at its best, and it is a genuinely stronger case than most twenty-three-year incumbencies can make. The stamp-duty-to-rates transition is the reform tax economists have recommended to every Australian government for over a decade, because a tax on moving house distorts more decisions than a broad land tax, as the Henry Tax Review and the Productivity Commission have both found — and the ACT is the only jurisdiction that has stuck with it through three changes of Treasurer, rather than announcing it and abandoning it, as New South Wales and Queensland have each done since. Light rail's first stage opened on time and slightly under its contracted budget, a genuinely rare outcome for an Australian rail project. Drug decriminalisation applies the same health-first logic every Australian government has nominally endorsed since the National Drug Strategy of 1985, and two years in, the territory's rate of recent illicit drug use remains below the national average even after cannabis was legalised. The hospital expansion delivered real capacity to a system serving not just the ACT's own roughly 447,000 residents but a much larger regional catchment — New South Wales residents accounted for around 17 per cent of ACT public hospital admissions in 2023-24, treated in a system the territory alone funds and staffs. And Canberra's voters, offered a change of government seven times since 2001 under one of the country's more proportional electoral systems, have not taken it once, including in October 2024, when they trimmed the Greens' influence sharply but still returned Labor to office. A government this durable, attempting reforms this ambitious, has earned the right to have its case heard before the numbers below are weighed against it.
The evidence
Set against that defence, the primary record each reform has generated tells a more mixed story — and the same pattern recurs across all four: an ambitious, defensible reform, priced or projected at the outset, that has cost more, delivered less or taken longer than the government first said, confirmed not by opposition claims but by the ACT's own statutory watchdogs.
The clearest single number sits underneath all the others. ACT net debt is forecast to reach $12.5 billion in 2026-27 — 18.4 per cent of gross state product, on a trajectory to $14.1 billion by 2029-30 — against a figure of just $312 million (approx.) when Barr became Treasurer in 2011 (ACT Treasury, 2026-27 Budget Outlook, 10 June 2026; Legislative Assembly Budget Adviser review, approx.). Standard & Poor's has downgraded the territory's credit rating twice in two years, from AAA to AA+ in September 2023 and from AA+ to AA in September 2025, the second citing five consecutive annual operating deficits since 2022 and a debt burden, relative to revenue, higher than every rated Australian state or territory except Victoria. An independent review commissioned by the Legislative Assembly itself — economist Saul Eslake's interim report of 27 February 2026 — found Canberrans "overtaxed and underserviced by a big-spending ACT government" and concluded the deterioration was "entirely due to policy decisions," not bad luck; his own numbers, conservative when published, were overtaken within four months by the government's own June Budget figures.
The other three reforms show the same shape in miniature. Light rail Stage 2A — a 1.7-kilometre extension whose 2019 business case put the cost at $268 million — was contracted in December 2023 for $577 million, and the ACT's own Auditor-General found the project's benefit-cost ratio sat at 0.38 to 0.56, well under a dollar of benefit for every dollar spent; the one figure that clears break-even, a "blended" 1.18–1.20 ratio, could not be independently verified by the audit that examined it (ACT Auditor-General, Report No. 8 of 2021). Stage 2B, the harder Woden crossing, still has no published cost at all. Canberra Hospital's Critical Services Building, budgeted at $500 million, was delivered for close to $660 million (approx.), and even with that extra capacity ACT emergency departments still run behind the national benchmark: an average wait of 25 minutes against 18 minutes nationally, with 62 per cent of patients seen within the clinically recommended time against 67 per cent nationally, in 2024-25 (AIHW MyHospitals, 2024-25). And the Suburban Land Agency, the government's own land-release arm, has missed its dwelling-release targets in every year checked — 451 delivered against a target of 608 in 2024-25 — while Canberra's median house value passed $1 million in 2026 and rents hit a record $700 a week (Cotality Home Value Index; Domain Rental Report, Mar-2026 quarter).
The critique
Three patterns repeat across all four reforms, and none can be waved away as the ordinary cost of governing a fast-growing capital. The first is that opening estimates have proven wrong at the moment of commitment, not merely blown out later by external shocks. Light rail Stage 2A's contracted cost more than doubled between its 2019 business case and its signed 2023 contract, before a single tram had run on the line. The Critical Services Building's final cost ran roughly a third above its original budget. The Suburban Land Agency's own affordable-housing quotas have been undershot in every year a comparison is possible since 2022-23. And Eslake's review found the ACT's own spending decisions, not external shocks, cut the operating balance by more than $6 billion over the decade to 2023-24 — expense growth alone adding $7.2 billion to cumulative deficits, against barely $900 million recovered through new revenue measures. A government that gets its opening number wrong this often, on commitments this large, is not managing bad luck; it is running a costing process its own Auditor-General and its own commissioned economist have each, independently, found wanting.
The second pattern is how long it has taken Canberra's own institutions to catch each problem. The Legislative Assembly is unicameral — twenty-five members, elected by Hare-Clark, with no upper house to compel a minister to appear or hold up a budget a governing bloc controls outright — and the territory had no standing anti-corruption body until the Integrity Commission Act 2018 took effect in December 2019, eighteen years into Labor's current run. When that Commission did start examining government contracting, its first major case, Operation Luna, found CIT had paid more than $8.5 million to a single outside consultant over five years despite its own Procurement Board raising the same concerns three times — and CIT's chief executive was ultimately found to have engaged in serious corrupt conduct in how she handled that advice. None of that proves twenty-three years in office caused any single failure. It does show that the scrutiny an upper house, or an earlier watchdog, would ordinarily apply arrived, in the ACT's case, years after the decisions it was reviewing were already locked in.
Across tax, transport, health and housing, the same governing bloc keeps making the same kind of promise, and the same institutions keep finding the same kind of gap between the promise and the bill.
That gap lands, ultimately, on households like the one in this article's opening. General rates rose an average 8 per cent in the 2026-27 Budget alone, after 3.75 per cent rises in each of the two years before it, on a tax reform sold in 2012 as revenue-neutral but, fourteen years in, has delivered its unpopular half — the rates rises — in full, while residential conveyance duty is still projected to supply roughly a tenth of ACT revenue in 2029-30, two years before the reform's original 2032 deadline (Pegasus Economics analysis for the Legislative Assembly, reported 3 July 2026). Renters carry a version of the same pressure at one remove, through landlords passing on those rate rises in a market where vacancy has tightened to 0.8 per cent and median rent has hit a record $700 a week. None of the four reforms is wrong in principle; the record shows a government whose ambition has consistently outrun its own costing, in a system with fewer institutional brakes than any mainland state, for long enough that the bill is now compounding faster than its small revenue base can comfortably absorb.
The risk to the future
A third decade in office, on a budget with less room than at any point in the other two
Andrew Barr enters his twelfth year as Chief Minister, and ACT Labor its twenty-fifth in office, carrying a genuinely mixed inheritance of its own making: a nationally unmatched tax reform still unfinished, a light-rail network Canberrans now ride, and a health and drug-reform record other jurisdictions are watching — alongside a net debt forecast to reach $14.1 billion by 2029-30, a credit rating downgraded twice in two years, and a Suburban Land Agency that has not hit its own housing targets since before the pandemic eased. The immediate risk is fiscal: the government's own new debt ceiling, adopted only in the 2026-27 Budget after years of having no numerical target at all, caps net debt at 19 per cent of gross state product "over time" — a rule the territory is already forecasting to sit within a single percentage point of, before Stage 2B of light rail, whose cost has never been disclosed, has even been factored into the numbers.
The deeper risk is the one Eslake's review named directly: a government asking Canberrans to trust a tax reform it has not finished, a rail line whose costliest stage has no public price, and a health and housing system its own record-keepers say is falling short, is asking for that trust on a record of opening estimates that have not survived independent checking, four times running. The 2024 election showed voters will still punish a governing partner whose performance slips — the Greens lost two of six seats and their place in Cabinet — but it did not remove Labor, and no configuration of that result put anyone but Andrew Barr in the Chief Minister's chair. Twenty-three years in, the ledger assembled here is the one the same institutions — the Auditor-General, the ratings agencies, the Assembly's own commissioned reviewers — will keep testing every new promise against, whichever way Canberrans vote at the next scheduled election in October 2028.