State government's building obsession could rob Peta to pay Paul

The Age

18-05-2025

Last August, towards the end of her first year as premier, Jacinta Allan reached a fork in the road. A review of health services commissioned under her predecessor Daniel Andrews recommended the amalgamation of Victoria's 76 providers into just 12 health services – six for Melbourne and six for the regions.
With the state confronting soaring government debt, forecast to reach $187.8 billion by June 2028, considering efficiencies must have seemed an obvious choice. After all, why does Victoria have 76 providers when NSW has 17 and Queensland 16?
Yet when The Age revealed the proposal, Allan was spooked and it became the review's only recommendation to be knocked back. Instead, as we reported later, she promised hospitals $1.5 billion in additional funding that the government didn't have in its coffers. That marked a parting of ways for Allan and then-treasurer Tim Pallas.
This year's state budget, to be delivered on Tuesday, will be the first for new Treasurer Jaclyn Symes, and for the first time Allan's priorities in government are laid bare. Symes has promised to address runaway growth in the size of the public service. But the review commissioned into the sector, headed by former top bureaucrat Helen Silver, will not report back until June 30, too late to be incorporated into Tuesday's announcements.
What is also clear is that both education and health will be squeezed as the budget focuses on big-ticket infrastructure projects and crime. In the end, healthcare providers have been rearranged into 12 'networks', with individual services' boards left in place. But that means a reckoning over funding – and cuts – must come.
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The Age is concerned that the state budget will bring cuts made with the chief aim of robbing Peta the teacher or nurse to pay Paul the construction worker.
Nowhere is this problem clearer than in the treatment of our state schools. Our revelation that last year's budget quietly delayed $2.4 billion in funding needed to meet the School Resource Standard set out in the Gonski reforms to state education, putting us years behind Queensland and NSW, strongly suggests that important contributions to our children's futures are being diverted to keep the government's Big Build above water.
The weekend's announcement of free public transport for children over the weekend will no doubt be welcomed by school families but does not fill the hole being left in their education.