The Daniel Andrews government has paid $1.5 billion not to do things.
The Victorian Premier announced at the weekend that taxpayers would be slugged $380 million for cancelling the 2026 Commonwealth Games.
He cancelled the games last month after successfully bidding to run them as a regional event that would ignore existing sporting infrastructure in Melbourne and instead require multiple new venues to be built from scratch in far-flung Victorian towns.Andrews won the election, but in a result that no-one, apart from everyone outside the Premier’s office, could possibly have predicted, the cost of hosting the promised Games blew out.
The Victorian Premier said the alternatives were to push on with the sporting event, but at a cost of up to $7 billion on a $2.6 billion budget.Instead, Daniel Andrews said he would do the only responsible thing, which was to pay $380 million for the right not to run the Games he had bid to run.He was spending millions to save billions.Indeed.He told reporters straight-faced: “who knows what the ultimate number would have been.
Andrews even insisted that agreeing to pay $380m to not stage the Games was “not a very difficult decision to make”, so great was the saving.NSW once had a Premier who resigned over a $3,000 bottle of wine.
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