For years, Victorians have heard essentially the same political argument.
**The projects blew out. Where did the money go?**
It is a perfectly reasonable question.
But perhaps, after years of asking it and receiving answers that many people still consider inadequate, it is worth approaching the subject differently.
Not with an accusation.
Not with a declaration that somebody stole the money.
And certainly not by presenting speculation as fact.
Instead, let's conduct a thought experiment.
## What if there is more to the story?
Victoria has undertaken one of the largest infrastructure programs in its history through the Big Build.
Projects have become more expensive. Timelines have shifted. Governments have defended their decisions. Oppositions have demanded explanations. Journalists, auditors and parliamentary committees have attempted to untangle what happened.
Then there was the extraordinary story of the 2026 Commonwealth Games.
Victoria agreed to host them.
Then Victoria walked away.
Hundreds of millions of dollars were ultimately spent on an event that Victoria never hosted.
There are documented explanations for this: inadequate initial planning, unrealistic estimates, construction costs, compressed delivery schedules, infrastructure requirements and increasing operational expenses.
Those explanations deserve to be taken seriously.
But so does the public's continuing demand for transparency.
And that raises a more interesting question.
**What if the assumption that every unexplained government expense must equal corruption is itself preventing us from asking better questions?**
Imagine, purely hypothetically, that a government faced a serious security situation.
Imagine intelligence indicated that a major international event, transport system or infrastructure project faced a credible threat.
What would we expect responsible government to do?
Presumably its first responsibility would be protecting human life.
And if revealing everything it knew would compromise an investigation, intelligence source or security operation, perhaps the government couldn't immediately explain every decision publicly.
That does **not** mean this happened in Victoria.
There is presently no publicly established evidence that Victoria's infrastructure overruns or Commonwealth Games cancellation resulted from ransom payments, terrorist threats or some secret security arrangement.
That distinction matters enormously.
But asking hypothetical questions is different from making accusations.
Suppose, for argument's sake, that government expenditure occasionally contains decisions that cannot immediately be explained publicly because of security considerations.
How should democratic accountability operate?
Should expenditure eventually become available after the security risk passes?
Should an independent body secretly audit it at the time?
Should Parliament have a security-cleared committee capable of examining expenditure that cannot safely be disclosed publicly?
And perhaps most importantly:
**How long should "we can't discuss that" remain an acceptable answer in a democracy?**
## Daniel Andrews, Jacinta Allan and the duty of government
This discussion should also avoid reducing complicated government decisions to personalities.
Daniel Andrews led Victoria through an extraordinary period encompassing enormous infrastructure investment, COVID-19, economic disruption and the original decision to host — and later cancel — the 2026 Commonwealth Games.
Jacinta Allan held major infrastructure and Commonwealth Games responsibilities before becoming Premier.
Those positions carried enormous responsibility.
With responsibility comes scrutiny.
But scrutiny is not the same thing as automatically assuming corruption.
Public officials have a duty to act in Victoria's interests, and citizens have every right to ask whether that duty was fulfilled.
Perhaps that is where the discussion needs to mature.
Instead of:
**"Where did they steal the money?"**
ask:
**"Where did every dollar go, who authorised it, what purpose did it serve, and what information can now safely be released?"**
If everything has an ordinary explanation, publishing the evidence strengthens confidence in government.
If mistakes were made, acknowledge them.
If contracts were poorly negotiated, identify them.
If forecasting failed, explain why.
If industrial relations increased costs, quantify it.
If governments changed project scope, document it.
If confidentiality legitimately prevents disclosure, establish an independent mechanism capable of verifying that explanation.
And if security considerations ever influenced expenditure, disclose whatever can eventually be disclosed without compromising public safety.
That is accountability without automatically assuming conspiracy.
## Something I have struggled to explain
There is another reason I find this question interesting, although I recognise that my personal experiences are not evidence of what happened inside government.
Before the Tokyo Olympics and before COVID-19 transformed the world, I went through experiences that I interpreted at the time as something resembling a trial-and-error training exercise.
While staying at backpacker accommodation in 2019, I remember being alone in a bathroom and saying aloud:
**"Who's ready for the Olympics?"**
I also remember thinking that I would hate to be "patient zero."
Months later, the world entered the COVID-19 pandemic and the Tokyo Olympics were ultimately postponed.
I understand perfectly well why someone hearing that story might see coincidence where I have wondered whether there was something more to it.
My experiences have also previously been interpreted through a mental-health framework.
But neither interpretation establishes what happened.
Memory, coincidence, personal interpretation and documented government activity are different categories of evidence, and they shouldn't be collapsed into one another.
I can say **this happened to me and this is how I experienced it** without claiming that therefore I possess evidence of a secret government operation.
That boundary matters.
Because the bigger question survives without requiring anybody to believe my personal interpretation.
## "Blow out" or "blow up"?
Here is the darker hypothetical.
Governments constantly talk about **budget blowouts**.
But imagine that somewhere behind closed doors the choice confronting authorities wasn't simply:
**stay within budget or exceed it.**
Imagine it was:
**pay more or risk something being blown up.**
Again, I am **not alleging that occurred**.
There is no public evidence I can point to establishing that Victoria's Big Build spending or Commonwealth Games cancellation represented ransom payments.
It is a thought experiment.
But it produces a fascinating ethical dilemma.
If spending an enormous amount of money secretly prevented an attack and saved hundreds or thousands of lives, would we still call that expenditure a "waste"?
Probably not.
Yet citizens couldn't possibly make that judgement if they weren't permitted to know the reason.
And therein lies the democratic paradox:
**sometimes public safety requires secrecy, while democracy requires transparency.**
Both principles can be legitimate.
The difficult question is who watches the people operating behind the curtain.
## The Commonwealth Games deserve another look
The Victorian Auditor-General's investigation already gives us reason to continue asking questions.
The original Games budget was too optimistic.
The later estimate used to explain cancellation was also problematic.
Victoria ultimately spent hundreds of millions withdrawing from an event that never occurred.
None of that proves corruption.
None of it proves a security conspiracy either.
It proves something much simpler:
**government decisions involving enormous amounts of public money deserve enormous amounts of accountability.**
Maybe the question in 2026 shouldn't simply be:
**"Where did the money go?"**
Perhaps it should be:
**"Do we now know enough to understand why it went there?"**
Those are subtly different questions.
One assumes wrongdoing.
The other demands evidence.
And if the answer to the second question remains "no", then Victorians are entitled to keep asking.
Not because Daniel Andrews must have been corrupt.
Not because Jacinta Allan must have known some enormous secret.
Not because every construction overrun hides a conspiracy.
But because democratic governments spend money belonging to the public.
Sometimes governments may genuinely have information they cannot reveal immediately.
Sometimes the boring explanation really is the explanation: inflation, labour, contracts, forecasting mistakes, changed scope and poor administration.
And sometimes history reveals information years later that completely changes how an earlier decision is understood.
Our job shouldn't be to decide which story is true before seeing the evidence.
Our job should be to insist that eventually **the evidence is good enough for us to know.**
Maybe there is nothing hiding underneath Victoria's Big Build story beyond extraordinarily expensive infrastructure and some very questionable forecasting.
Maybe mistakes explain it.
Maybe politics explains some of it.
Maybe future audits will tell us more.
But there is one possibility democracy should never accept:
**that after enough time passes, people simply stop asking.**
Because public money deserves a receipt.
Public power deserves scrutiny.
And genuine public safety deserves something equally important:
the truth, whenever it can safely be told.
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