It’s a party that has had an active disdain for anyone in business and a lot of relationships have been burnt,”
That's precisely what I told The Australian Financial Review after the new Victorian Premier's pitch to business.
It's a fresh face at the top, but it's also the same caucus and set of ministers that, for the last 12 years, deliberately chose to scapegoat business, oversaw the spending and policies which made the Victorian economy a basketcase and made it, by far, the worst place in Australia to invest.
Carroll is trying to distinguish himself from his predecessors, but unless he takes meaningful, concrete actions – fixing spending, tax settings, red tape, bureaucratic and authority performance, and, frankly, actually listening to business concerns instead of alienating and using us as political fodder – the result will be just more empty words.
Victoria's development and property sectors will be watching closely. Confidence won't return because of a press conference; it returns when we see actual change.
Until then, capital and confidence will continue to flow elsewhere as the state rots.