Every Victorian will pay a long-term price because CEOs aren’t telling us the truth of their silent plot against Victoria.

CEOs of large companies have a dirty little secret. They won’t fess up to it. And they certainly won’t walk into the Premier’s office at 1 Treasury Place and tell her what they’ve been up to.

Yet they’ll say it behind Victorian’s backs in other States, and they’ll whisper it to each other behind closed doors in Collins Street boardrooms. 

What they’re hiding from all of us is their silent program to replace positions within their companies with jobs interstate when Victorians leave their roles. 

The data is clear.

Victoria has the highest unemployment in the country.

Analysis by the Australian Industry Group shows private sector jobs growth nationwide is double the rate in Victoria.

Almost every job in Victoria is dependent on the government borrowing from the future to keep employment up today.

The Employment report from job ad company, Seek, from November last year reported “ad volumes in Victoria continue to trend downward”.

The most optimistic thing they could highlight was that “the rate of annual decline, which has persisted for almost three years, is slowing”.

Large companies with offices in other capital cities are actively trying to reduce their employment headcount here, and with it are going well paid jobs, opportunities and career pathways for us all, and the next generation.

Their justification is simple: under the Allan government Victoria has become too hard to do business today, and they think it will only get harder. 

They think with public debt levels continuing to climb. And they know that today’s debt is tomorrow’s taxes. So there’s only one trajectory for taxes under Labor.

And Allan is going straight after those that hit business: land tax, payroll tax and work cover premiums.

They know crime has become a problem, and shoplifting targeting retailers continues to add to rising costs, and insurance premiums. 

And with the CFMEU let loose they have watched corruption become normalised with a cartel kickback extortion price tag.

When $10,000 cartel kickbacks have become the price of entry for Victorian government projects it also sets a precedent for demands on private sector jobs.

But what has really broken their confidence has been the press release-depth policy of two days a week of work from home. 

For mostly Sydney-based CEOs it took a bad economic environment, and made it harder to employ and manage workers.

No other State is following the Allan government on work from home because they know it means big business will speed up their silent program of moving jobs from Victoria to their State.

We all like the flexibility of working from home. But as any teacher, tradie or retail worker will tell you it isn’t a universal right. And it is only sustainable when it works for employees and employers.

And despite the Victorian government boasting they’ll deliver it, late last year in Senate Estimates the Federal government admitted they hadn’t sought legal advice on how to deliver the Victorian government proposal.

They then confessed they hadn’t sought legal advice because the Allan government hadn’t spoken to them about it, which is a problem since most of the legal authority is in Canberra and not Spring Street.

But that hasn’t stopped Jacinta Allan gaslighting Victorians on false hope she can deliver it if it will help her get through an election. 

Increasingly it seems Premier Allan will deliver the “from home” bit, it just might cost Victorians the “work” bit. 

Meanwhile Sydney CEOs of big businesses replace jobs in other States, and Victorians suffer through economic death by a thousand resignations. 

When CEOs are asked why they won’t tell the State government they say privately they won’t listen, and they’ve given up thinking they’ll care anyway. 

But the real crime of these CEOs is they won’t say so publicly, because in the meantime Victorians aren’t being told the long-term cost to their career for a short-term gain. 

The tragedy is it doesn’t have to be this way. It wasn’t long ago that Victoria was the destination for investment and jobs creation because we had growth-orientated policies that helped meet human need, and supported families. 

We had low debt so we didn’t have rising taxes, and those we had were spent on health and education, not redirected to keep debt wolves at bay. 

We had an economic environment where employees and employers could work together on flexibility because cooperation and harmony was the norm. 

Now, recent ABS data shows Victoria’s days lost to industrial disputes doubled in the most recent quarter as conflict enters workplaces. 

CEOs might have lost their voice, but Victorians can find theirs at the ballot box in less than a year. Our future is on the line.

Published in the Herald Sun, 8 January 2025