In Ballarat Base Hospital's ambulance bay on a winter night in 2026, a paramedic crew has been ramped outside the emergency department for the better part of two hours, radioing dispatch that they still cannot clear. Three years earlier, this city was one of four regional hubs signed up to host events at a home Commonwealth Games; today it is one of five regional health services the state's own Auditor-General singled out for the worst rates of patients left waiting in emergency care for more than a day (Victorian Auditor-General's Office, Access to Emergency Healthcare, 25 June 2024). A few hundred kilometres away in Melbourne, a landlord opens a land tax notice that did not exist before the pandemic, a commuter under Box Hill checks a countdown to a rail tunnel that will not open until 2035, and a Treasury official finalises a budget update against a net debt now approaching $176 billion. That is the ledger Jacinta Allan's government left Victorians — not as one decision, but as three years of choices layered on top of a decade of Labor government she inherited more than she built.
What the government did
Jacinta Allan was sworn in as Premier on 27 September 2023, three days after Daniel Andrews announced his resignation, becoming the first woman to hold the office outright. She inherited, rather than authored, most of the largest items on Victoria's ledger: a decade-old Big Build transport pipeline now running to roughly $140 billion (approx.) in projects under way or planned; a pandemic-era debt the 2023-24 Budget had only months earlier locked into a Repayment Plan running to 30 June 2033 (State Revenue Office Victoria, COVID Debt Repayment Plan); and a Suburban Rail Loop business case Andrews had announced by social-media video in 2018. Two decisions, however, are hers to own directly. As Minister for Commonwealth Games Delivery from June 2022, she held that portfolio through the entire life of the 2026 Games bid, including its withdrawal on 18 July 2023 — a call made two months before she became Premier but one she co-announced and has defended since. And as Premier she has owned delivery of the Housing Statement, launched under Andrews on 20 September 2023 but hers for the whole of its ten-year life, promising 800,000 new homes by 2034 (Victoria's Housing Statement — The Decade Ahead 2024-2034, 20 September 2023).
On her watch since September 2023, the Metro Tunnel and West Gate Tunnel have both opened to the public, the Big Housing Build reached roughly three-quarters completion (approx.), the COVID Debt levy has continued raising revenue from business and investment-property owners, WorkCover was overhauled to tighten mental-injury claim eligibility and lift premiums after a sustained rise in claims, and Ambulance Victoria declared a statewide "red escalation" — signalling exhausted surge capacity — from 9 January 2026.
The strongest case
A government that kept building, made one hard call, and finally named the housing gap
Put the record at its best, and three things separate it from simple mismanagement. First, it has finished what it started: the Metro Tunnel opened to passengers on 30 November 2025 and the West Gate Tunnel on 14 December 2025 — two projects that ran years late and billions over their original estimates, but now exist and are moving Victorians, at a point where a more cautious government might have paused rather than finish. Second, the Commonwealth Games withdrawal, however costly and however overstated the government's own $6.9 billion justification later proved to be, was still a decision to cut losses before a single permanent venue was built, on a project whose cost had roughly doubled in sixteen months — a harder and more accountable choice than quietly letting the bill keep climbing, which is what happened instead on North East Link and the Suburban Rail Loop. Third, the Housing Statement put a specific, falsifiable number — 800,000 homes by 2034 — on a shortfall that governments of both colours had managed quietly for two decades by simply letting waiting lists and rents grow, and backed it with an Affordability Partnership signed by the state's major property and construction bodies. On planned surgery, Victoria was the only state or territory to treat 100 per cent of its most urgent Category 1 patients within the clinically recommended time in the Productivity Commission's 2025 Report on Government Services, and the Big Housing Build has delivered close to three-quarters of its 12,949 homes broadly within its original $5.3 billion budget (Victorian Auditor-General's Office, Planning Social Housing, 19 June 2024). None of that erases the numbers below. But a government managing a fast-growing population and an inherited pandemic debt, while still finishing tunnels and naming the housing gap out loud rather than managing it silently, has a case worth stating before it is weighed against what follows.
The evidence
Set against that defence, the state's own record-keepers — the Auditor-General, the Parliamentary Budget Office and the credit-rating agencies — describe a government whose headline numbers have moved in one direction on almost every major commitment made or continued since September 2023. Victoria's net debt is forecast at $175.6 billion for 2026-27, on a trajectory the government's own forward estimates put at close to $199 billion (approx.) by 2029-30 (Victorian Budget Papers, 2026-27 Budget, Strategy and Outlook, May 2026) — a load two ratings agencies say the state can service less comfortably than it could five years ago, having stripped Victoria of its AAA rating in 2020-21 and not restored it since (S&P Global Ratings, December 2020; Moody's Investors Service, 2021-2022). The Commonwealth Games cost the state roughly $589 million (approx.) in wasted spending and settlement once the Auditor-General tallied the full bill, on top of a reputational cost still being paid in Glasgow, which staged a scaled-down substitute Games substantially on Victorian money (Victorian Auditor-General's Office, Withdrawal from 2026 Commonwealth Games, 20 March 2024). And on the Housing Statement, the government's own trajectory and independent industry monitoring point the same way: a target quietly cut from 80,000 homes a year to around 60,000 within two years, with delivery still running roughly 20,000 homes short of even that lower figure — putting genuine annual delivery at somewhere near 40,000 homes (approx.), against the original promise of 80,000 (Property Council of Australia, media release, September 2025).
Placed side by side, three unrelated measures of the government's own choosing land in roughly the same band.
The critique: numbers that don't survive contact with delivery
Three patterns recur across almost every item in this ledger, and none can be explained away as inherited from the Andrews years alone. The first is that headline commitments have proven wrong at the moment of approval, not just derailed later by external shocks. North East Link's business case was already showing signs of a $6.9 billion (approx.) hole before its main construction packages were finalised, according to the Auditor-General's own 2023 tracking, and a subsequent case study put the total increase at more than $10 billion (approx.) over the 2018-19 figure (Victorian Auditor-General's Office, Major Projects Performance Reporting 2023 and 2024). The Suburban Rail Loop's own business case put its benefit-cost ratio at up to 1.7; the Auditor-General's recalculation, using Treasury's own standard 7 per cent discount rate, found 0.51 — barely half a dollar of benefit for every dollar spent (Victorian Auditor-General's Office, 21 September 2022). And the $6.9 billion figure the government used publicly to justify walking away from the Commonwealth Games was itself found to double-count risk provisioning, overstating the case for withdrawal by roughly $1 billion (approx.) (Victorian Auditor-General's Office, 20 March 2024). A government that gets the opening number wrong this often, on projects this large, is not managing bad luck — it is running a costing process its own auditor has repeatedly found wanting.
The second pattern is the gap between what is announced and what is later reported. The Housing Statement's headline figure, 80,000 homes a year, has never been formally restated on the government's own website even as it was privately revised down by a quarter within two years, according to industry monitoring — leaving the public with no single, current number to hold the government to (Property Council of Australia, September 2025). The Auditor-General's decade-long review of emergency care found Victoria's hospitals met only one of five key targets across ten years, missing the other four every single year, even as government communications have continued to highlight the metrics that are improving (Victorian Auditor-General's Office, Access to Emergency Healthcare, 25 June 2024).
The critique: a credibility gap layered on a real achievement
None of this means the underlying projects were wrong to attempt. A finished Metro Tunnel, a finished West Gate Tunnel, a housing target that at least names the scale of the shortfall, and a Games withdrawal that stopped a runaway budget before construction began are genuine achievements that do not require inflated original estimates, or quietly abandoned targets, to justify them. That is precisely what makes the pattern a governance problem rather than a delivery one: the state's Ombudsman separately found the Suburban Rail Loop's early development was "shrouded in excessive secrecy," kept from the transport department's own secretary and blindsided the statutory body created specifically to keep major infrastructure decisions out of short-term political timing (Victorian Ombudsman, Alleged politicisation of the public sector, Part 2, 30 November 2023). A parliamentary committee reached a near-identical conclusion about the Games bid, finding the business case "deeply flawed" and officials constrained from getting the information a decision of that size required (Parliament of Victoria, Select Committee on the 2026 Commonwealth Games Bid, Final Report, 1 April 2025).
Across debt, transport, housing and health, the same pattern repeats: the number Victorians were first given was not the number they were eventually asked to pay.
The third and most consequential pattern is timing. Every program in this ledger is funded from a Budget already carrying the largest net debt of any Australian state, with an interest bill now running at roughly $29 million a day (approx.) — money that buys no hospital bed, no home and no train service, and that grows automatically whether or not the next project comes in on budget (Victorian Budget Papers, 2025-26). A government that inherited most of this trajectory has had almost three years, and one full Budget cycle after another, to change its direction. On the primary record, it has instead kept adding to it.
The economic ledger, in numbers
Set aside delivery and politics for a moment, and Victoria's economic scorecard against the seven other states and territories is unambiguous on the measures state governments do not fully control the timing of, but do control the settings for. Net debt of $175.6 billion in 2026-27 is already the largest of any Australian state in outright dollar terms — bigger than New South Wales's $129.3 billion despite an economy roughly a quarter smaller — and the government's own forward estimates put it at $199.3 billion (approx.) by 2029-30, with interest costs rising from $8.9 billion this year toward $11.8 billion, or more than $32 million a day (approx.), by then (Victorian Department of Treasury and Finance, Budget Paper No. 2, 2026-27 Budget, May 2026). On ABS government finance data for 2024-25, Victoria also carries the highest net debt per person of any state, more than a quarter higher than second-placed South Australia (Australian Bureau of Statistics, Government Finance Statistics, 2024-25, cited by Crikey, 27 April 2026). Two ratings agencies have priced that risk in: S&P Global Ratings and Moody's Investors Service both stripped Victoria of its AAA rating in 2020-21 and have held it at AA/Aa2 since, unrestored on either agency's scale (S&P Global Ratings, December 2020; Moody's Investors Service, 2021-2022).
The debt has not bought Victoria out-performance. The state's gross state product per capita fell 0.8 per cent in 2024-25 — the nation grew 1.1 per cent GSP overall but population growth outpaced it — leaving Victoria's per-capita economic output the third-lowest of any state, ahead of only South Australia and Tasmania, on a productivity growth rate since 2005 of just 0.7 per cent a year against 3.0 per cent in Western Australia and 1.5 per cent in Queensland (Australian Bureau of Statistics, Australian National Accounts: State Accounts, 2024-25, released 20 November 2025). Net interstate migration has moved the same way: Victoria lost residents to other states on net in every year since the pandemic reopening, including a net internal-migration outflow of roughly 4,200 people in 2023-24 alone, with only Queensland and Western Australia recording net inflows nationally over the same period — a trend the Australian Government's Centre for Population forecasts will not turn even mildly positive for Victoria until 2026-27 (Australian Bureau of Statistics, National, state and territory population, June 2025; Centre for Population, 2025 Population Statement — Victoria, September 2025). On the business side the picture is more mixed than a simple exodus story: Victoria's actively trading business count still grew by a net 16,486 in 2024-25, slower than New South Wales's 20,040 and Western Australia's percentage growth, even as individual firms — among them the Melbourne-founded defence technology company Arkeus — have relocated their head offices to Queensland citing costs and tax settings (Australian Bureau of Statistics, Counts of Australian Businesses, including Entries and Exits, 2024-25, released 16 December 2025).
Tax settings explain some of that competitive gap. Victoria is forecast to collect the highest combined property tax revenue per person of any state, rising from roughly $2,450 this financial year to $2,710 (approx.) by 2028-29 and from 16.3 per cent to 17.4 per cent of total state revenue over the same period — a legacy in large part of the COVID Debt levy imposed on business and investment-property owners in the 2023-24 Budget and still running under the state's Repayment Plan to 30 June 2033 (Victorian Parliamentary Budget Office, State comparison of land transfer duty and land tax, January 2026; State Revenue Office Victoria, COVID Debt Repayment Plan). None of this erases the genuine achievements documented above — finished tunnels, a housing target no predecessor named, planned-surgery waiting times the best in the country. But it separates what is inherited from what is structural: the pandemic-era debt base and the population growth pressure were not Jacinta Allan's to choose, while the tax mix used to service that debt, and the productivity and migration trends that have moved against Victoria on her watch, are the terms on which this government now asks to be re-elected.
The risk to the future
A ledger the government did not fully write, but now fully owns
Update, 10 October 2026: Jacinta Allan resigned on 28 July 2026 and Ben Carroll became Premier. This scorecard covers the Allan years; the Carroll government inherits the same ledger. See Victoria's crime in numbers and the nation's largest state debt for the latest figures.
Labor carries a genuinely mixed inheritance: real, finished infrastructure and a housing target unmatched by any predecessor, alongside a debt load and a credit downgrade that predate her but that she has had nearly three years to arrest and has instead continued. The immediate risk is fiscal: if net debt keeps compounding at the rate the Parliamentary Budget Office has modelled, reaching roughly $234 billion (approx.) by 2032-33, the state will have materially less room than any other Australian jurisdiction to respond to the next genuine emergency — a recession, a severe bushfire season, another pandemic — without a further downgrade raising the price of every dollar it borrows (Parliamentary Budget Office Victoria, Net debt in the medium term).
The deeper risk is credibility. A government asking Victorians to trust an 800,000-home target it has already quietly revised, a Suburban Rail Loop whose remaining two-thirds is still unfunded and uncosted, and a health system its own auditor says has met one of five targets in a decade, is asking for that trust on a record of announced numbers that have not held up once independently checked. Every one of those commitments — the housing target, the SRL's remaining stages, the next wave of Big Build projects — will be tested against the same institutions, the Auditor-General, the Parliamentary Budget Office and the ratings agencies, that have already found the government's numbers wanting once. Whoever governs Victoria next, the ledger those institutions keep will still be there, and so will the debt.