When Victorians remember Tim Pallas, they will recall the extraordinary mismanagement of the Treasury under Labor Party rule and the $155.2 billion dollars of debt which expands continuously thanks to insane amounts of interest.

He is the longest serving Victorian Treasurer and author of 10 Budgets. Ten terrible, embarrassing, and negligent Budgets.

Victoria’s debt was hovering around a recoverable $22.3 billion upon his appointment. Debt began to rise before Covid, but the Covid era sent it into a full Shakespearean tragedy underpinned by panic, waste, and the idiotic policy of his fellow MPs.

Who would have thought that shutting down a living, breathing economy might inflict a fatal wound?

The Labor Party’s ingrained socialist thinking during Covid – the fantasy that an all-powerful government could simply spend its way out by printing money – resulted in a complete inability to accurately predict the damage we are seeing.

According to the Institute of Public Affairs, the net debt for each Victorian will reach around $25,000 by 2028. That has to be recovered from each person, via taxes. Victorians paid for something, the question is, what? Where did all this money go? The streets should be paved with gold instead of the rubble from failed CFMEU projects.

All of this makes me think of a Victorian man I used to know. He’s in his mid-80s and dedicated his entire life to a third-generation family business.

This man spent his days in service of building a future for his children in the form of a productive business. These are not union working hours. Small business owners work from 7am to midnight. Seven days a week. Very few holidays, if any at all. This is what we mean by a life’s work. The business was to be his legacy and a testament of his labour.

I say labour because the socialist-Left like to go on and on about capitalists stealing their labour. On this occasion, it is the Labor Party of Victoria, first under the (soon-to-be) bronze-enshrined Daniel Andrews and now under the non-entity of Jacinta Allan, who stole the labour of the entire business community.

This man, who was within a year or two of retirement, had to shut the doors of his business for Covid.

Shut its doors for months and months and months.

Just hang on, the government said, as business owners took out loans to pay the power, rent, and payroll. Just another week to flatten the curve, they promised, as those loans grew bigger. Another month and the vaccine will be done, they said, as these distressed business owners re-mortgaged their houses. Sack your staff and ban your customers if they don’t take the vaccine, they demanded, as daily press conferences put the fear of God into potential customers.

Margins are tight at the best of times. Competition from barely-regulated online Chinese competitors and outrageous shipping fees coupled with a near-endless sale season imported from America has made those margins almost unworkable. Toss in a doubling of power bills, the unions demanding higher wages, and the cost of transport and a perfect storm swept over Victorian businesses.

Had the government not panicked, Covid would have been a slightly worse flu season. Like all the other near-pandemics that this country has waded through, it was manageable. What our politicians did was take a machete to a papercut.

People were always going to die, that is the fault of China and its lab in Wuhan, but the vast majority of pain and damage in Victoria was self-inflicted by an irresponsible political class.

Of that damage, it is the economic turmoil that continues to cause unbearable heartache for countless families. Long-Covid? More like Long-Labor.

This man, a gentleman who never did anything wrong – paid his taxes, jumped through every hurdle of bureaucratic red tape – had to shut his third-generation business. He buried what had always been a profitable enterprise with debts incurred thanks to a just hang on mantra spouted by politicians and health officials.

Despite his age, it is not possible for him to retire. Saddled with the spirit of an entrepreneur and devoted worker, he drives an Uber all day to pay the bills.

What he has lost is not just a business, it is every day he sacrificed for a dream that no longer exists.

His life’s work has slipped away, sucked into the black hole beneath Canberra.

When you read the debt of $155.3 billion, I want you to remember every shuttered shop front, every new face on the Centrelink line, every For Sale sign on the street, and every person who knows that Labor murdered the Australian dream.

It’s not a cost of living crisis, it is a crisis of trust.

Who would open a business knowing that the government can destroy it at the first sound of a cough? Or that even if you succeed, the Treasury will take most of it in taxes as a sort of modern day tribute to the political gods…

This is how you destroy capitalism – with the existential terror of government. Australia is a country where those who work the hardest, suffer the most.

Mr Pallas describes this era as one of economic growth.

‘I think we can look back on the body of work and say, well, the economy is solid, the fiscal position is improving and sound.’

See if you believe that the next time you read a story about a business in Victoria closing its doors.

‘Regrets,’ he added, ‘I have a few but then again too few to mention. Can I make the point that we are all human and we all have to acknowledge that in public life we try our hardest to do the best that we can.’

The bloke driving an Uber is human too, the only difference is that he did not make a mistake, instead, he is paying for the mistakes of the Labor government out of his own pocket, then he pays again when the taxman comes around.