You needed to have a heart of stone to not have laughed at the paean of a resignation speech Jacinta Allan, Victorian’s ex-Premier, crooned to herself.

I think it was Tommy Douglas, a Canadian politician, who expressed his wish to attend his own funeral, much like Tom Sawyer, so he could hear the nice things people would say about him. It seems to me Allan took a page out of his book and wrote her own political eulogy.

Joking aside, you must admire the gall of the woman who stood there, facing down the barrels of multiple cameras, and re-drafted the political record without so much as a blush.

She claimed that the budget is now in surplus. This is typical politician spin – despite an operational surplus, which does not include infrastructure and other capital spending, the state is looking at a more than $200 billion dollar debt. This is the highest among the states. When I previously wrote on the state of Victoria, at the end of 2025, the debt was only $167.6 billion. The cash deficit for 2026-27 is $400 million worse than the December forecast. Tellingly, while Victoria’s economy is roughly 25 per cent smaller than that of NSW, its debt is larger.

The massive blowouts of Victoria’s major projects account for much of the spiking debt – tens of billions of dollars over budget, not to mention eye-watering cost of the Big Build, which is a fetid boil yet to be lanced.

Allan went on to claim credit for crime that has fallen for the first time since Covid. The latest crime statistics leading up to March 2026 does show a small decrease of under 2 per cent in overall crime rate, after years of increases. But the Q2 snapshot, covering March to June 2026, show a 4.2 per cent increase in overall recorded offences across Victoria compared to the same quarter in 2025. So much for that medal Allan tried to pin on her own lapel.

Allan’s machete surrender bins, along with the entire knife ban project, cost taxpayers $13 million. The bins collected 9,000 weapons, while more than 5,000 were handed in to police by retailers. That works out to be $520 per weapon collected.

Yet a report in June tallied over 40 public knife attacks that occurred in Victoria since the weapons ban, with four deaths. Just a few days ago, there were two machete attacks in one night in Melbourne CBD. Four people were charged, who were already on bail for other offences.

The story of offenders continuously been let out on bail underlines the fundamental incompetence of Labor’s policy. Compared to all other states, Victoria’s imprisonment rate is the lowest, according to 2024 statistics, at 107.6 per 100,000 adults, whereas NSW is at 194.0 per 100,000, almost double that of Victoria. NSW also has much lower crime rates than Victoria.

One reason might be that the Allan government, while having hundreds of millions for machete bins and a 3.5 per cent pay rise for politicians, decided to cut funding to the police and courts in the crime-riddled state, to the tune of more than $200 million. Incidentally, Allan was the highest paid Premier in Australia, with a salary of more than $530,000, which is more than $100,000 higher than the salary of the NSW Premier Chris Minns.

Towards the end of her speech, she very gave her ‘encouragement’ to young women entering politics, telling them ‘don’t look at what I’ve experienced this week and think “stuff that, I don’t want to be involved”.’ It’s as if being female was her only blemish, as if she was a Caesar, having built a glowing empire, only to be surprised at the hand of her nearest and dearest attached to the hilt of the dagger in her kidney. A tragic hero, not an incompetent career politician.

Remember this is a woman who became Premier without having faced public voting, and whose rise to Deputy Premiership, propelled by Daniel Andrews, was already eyebrow-raising, contravening Labor’s own convention, and elevating left-wing dominance within the Labor Party.

Now another politician has become Premier without the public’s consent. Don’t let’s forget that Ben Carroll, the new Premier and Allan’s deputy through her Premiership, declared his loyalty to Allan in front of cameras and to her face just weeks before supplanting Allan to the top job.

It is clear that we deserve a better class of politicians.

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