“The government in the nation’s capital is spending uncontrollably, inventing dishonest taxes and overseeing a flawed education system that is failing children,” says the Australian Financial Review’s economics editor John Kehoe in a lacerating piece to a national audience on Wednesday. 

In a column headed “ACT Labor is bankrupting Canberra”, he characterises the ACT government as reckless, saying federal taxpayers are on notice because they could end up footing the bill for the ACT’s “incompetence and profligacy”.

He cites last week’s budget shock, the “health levy”, on top of annual land rate increases of between 3.75 per cent and 18 per cent for property owners.

“The ACT’s supposed health levy won’t directly fund healthcare,” Kehoe writes. “The new tax on landowners will go into consolidated revenue to fund runaway government spending. The budget’s fastest-growing expense is interest on ballooning debt,” he writes.

“The annual interest bill is projected to grow a hefty 94 per cent over the next four years to almost $1 billion by 2028-29. That’s $1 billion on debt interest every year that won’t be available to spend on health, education, social services and to take financial pressure off hard-working taxpayers.”

He says the “supposed health levy” should be called a “tram tax”.

“Debt is rising unsustainably partly because of a utopian light rail that Labor and the Greens are trying to extend by 11 kilometres from the city, over Lake Burley Griffin to the parliamentary triangle and to the inner-south at Woden,” he writes.

“Like a scene in Utopia, the project failed an independent cost-benefit analysis, but Labor recklessly pushed ahead at great risk.”

He says federal Finance Minister Katy Gallagher should be sounding the alarm on Labor’s financial mismanagement.

“Perhaps she feels conflicted. Gallagher is a senator for the ACT and draws her factional support from the local public sector union. She is also a former chief minister and treasurer of the territory and handed power to [Andrew] Barr when she left local politics for the federal Senate in 2014.”

He says that the Australian Early Development Census last week exposed that more than half of ACT students in kindergarten are falling behind on basic development measures.

“Only 43.8 per cent of kindergarten students in the ACT are on track across the five areas of physical health, social competence, emotional maturity, language and cognitive skills, and communication skills and general knowledge,” he reports.

The ACT scored second-worst out of the eight states and territories, only beating the NT, which has well-documented challenges due to remoteness and a higher indigenous population.

“This is a disgraceful result for the ACT, which should be top of the class due to parents having the highest education qualifications and the highest median incomes in the nation,” says Kehoe.

“ACT public schools have been thrashed academically by Catholic education, which has recorded outstanding results by embracing a back-to-basics, evidence-based, explicit learning approach and abandoning woke education fads that have failed children.

“Unfortunately, Labor has made Canberrans poorer, let down our children and put federal taxpayers on the hook for a potential bailout. After 24 years in power, it’s past time ACT Labor was held accountable.”

Busted: Steel went where he should not have gone