Ben Carroll says he respects taxpayer money. His party needs a spell in opposition to rediscover what this means

OpinionAugust 27, 2026 — 5:00amA remarkable thing happened outside the Victorian Parliament this week.In the middle of the morning rush hour, with trams clattering down Spring Street and commuters dodging the rain as they emerged ear-budded and harried from the nearby train station, Premier Ben Carroll stood atop the steps of parliament and declared his respect for public money.It was remarkable, not so much for Carroll’s prosaic words, but that a Victorian premier would ever feel the need to say such a thing out loud. In that moment, he reminded us both of a time when financial rectitude was a given in good government and how deep the rot has set in over the life of this one.Victorian Premier Ben CarrollEamon Gallagher“I respect every single dollar of taxpayer money,” said Carroll, his tone laced with solemnity.Carroll made the comment in preface to a decision he had made to alter the proposed design of some of the stations along the first stage Suburban Rail Loop which, according to the government’s estimates, will shave $1 billion off the cost of the project. He has also commissioned a deeper technical review aimed at finding a further $1 billion in savings.It came two days before the Auditor General tabled in parliament a report challenging the funding and cost assumptions underpinning the project and revealing a secret tax on public transport users cooked up five years ago to prop up the SRL business case.In effect, Carroll was announcing a landing point on his greatest policy conundrum inherited from the Andrews and Allan administrations – what to do with a gargantuan infrastructure project that has never withstood independent cost-benefit scrutiny but now appears too far progressed not to build.His answer, delivered above the din of morning traffic, was to build it, but to do so at the lowest possible cost to Victoria’s finances. A $1 billion-$2 billion difference on a project the Auditor General conservatively estimates will top $36 billion may not sound like a massive saving but it is still a tonne of public money that can be spent only once.Carroll is the first Victorian Labor leader since John Brumby who seems to understand this.Let’s think back, for a moment, about how Labor used to govern in the early years of this century. In Joel Deane’s Catch and Kill, an insider’s account of the Bracks and Brumby governments, there is a scene in which Brumby as treasurer is wrestling with what to do about a cost blow-out on Labor’s 2002 election promise to extend the Eastern Freeway to Scoresby.A decision to tunnel under Mullum Mullum Creek rather than cut through it had more than doubled the projected cost of the road from $800 million to $2 billion which, for Brumby, represented an unacceptable drain on finite public finances. “If we proceeded with that on budget, it would be close to $2 billion that would not be available for a Geelong Hospital upgrade, or a Warrnambool Hospital upgrade, or a new Children’s Hospital,” he reflected in the book.Brumby’s advice, which Bracks accepted, was to refinance the project as a public-private partnership and toll the new road, which was reimagined as EastLink. It broke an election promise but meant a much-needed freeway got built without the government having to forgo expenditure on other important things.Compare this to the attitude adopted by former premier Daniel Andrews, at the peak of his powers and hubris, in the post-pandemic, post-fiscal world of 2022, when the Matthew Guy-led opposition was campaigning to scrap the SRL and redirect the money into public hospitals.“Not rail or hospitals,” Andrews tweeted. “Both.”For Andrews, public finances were never finite. What couldn’t be paid for could always be borrowed.On the day of Andrews’ tweet, Victoria’s net debt was nudging $100 billion. It is now heading towards $200 billion and beyond.A big reason for this is we keep building stuff we don’t have money to pay for. According to the current state budget, the government between July 1 this year and June 30, 2030 will spend $87.5 billion on infrastructure projects. Of that, $15.1 billion will be sunk into the SRL.Guy, having tried to inject some measure of financial reality into the 2022 election campaign, failed to put a dent in the Andrews government, which went on to secure a third term with a whopping majority. For Andrews and his acolytes, this reaffirmed the essential worth of the SRL, as measured in hard, cold votes in eastern suburbs seats.To understand how Andrews thought about such matters, you need only click on to the Socially Democratic podcast featuring his former chief of staff Lissie Ratcliff.“Did we win the 2018 election?” her co-host Stephen Donnelly asks rhetorically.“Actually, Stephen, we did comprehensively win the 2018 election,” Ratcliff replies. “We also comprehensively won the 2022 election.“We put it on the ballot and said people need to say whether they actually want this and whether they endorse it. As it turned out, they did comprehensively endorse it, and it’s been popular ever since.”The SRL wasn’t merely popular in Labor’s eyes. It was an election winner. This was the only benefit-cost analysis it needed. And how are all those new hospitals coming along? The works promised for Drouin, Ringwood East, and the Arden precinct never broke ground.Carroll will not change Labor’s decade-long attitude towards public finances in the space of a doorstop interview.If Victorian Labor is to ever find its way back to the ethos that kept the budget in balance and debt in check throughout the Bracks and Brumby era, it will take Carroll and his like-minded colleagues all the time remaining before the state election and most likely, a long spell in opposition.Election results are the only currency modern Labor understands. Seats won and lost is the calculus that mattered to Andrews, to Ratcliff and to a dwindling group of government MPs who believe that staying in power covers all manner of sins.Losing in November may be the first step towards remembering what good government looks like.Chip Le Grand is state political editor.The Opinion newsletter is a weekly wrap of views that will challenge, champion and inform your own. Sign up here.From our partners