Victoria’s Labor government has handed down its budget for 2025-26, with debt predicted to rise to record levels.
Balancing billions of dollars can get confusing. Here are some charts to try to make sense of the announcements.
Debt continues to rise
Years of spending has seen Victoria’s net debt balloon to more than $167 billion in this coming budget.
This is expected to rise even further, to about $194 billion in three years’ time.
The government has linked the rise to increased spending on infrastructure projects and COVID relief programs in the past few years.
But another way to look at debt is to compare it to the overall size of the state’s economy.
This figure is called Gross State Product (GSP), which is calculated by adding up all the…
