After a quarter of a century with Labor at the helm, the Australian Capital Territory stands at a crossroad. A generation has passed under the laws, budgets, and philosophies of a single political party. In theory, such continuity of government should have offered Canberra and its surrounds an era of stability, strategic investment, and compounding prosperity. In practice, however, the rising tide of government debt, ballooning interest expenses, persistent service failings, and a distinct lack of transparency paint a picture that belies the Labor Party’s glowing self-assessments.
When Labor first claimed control in the mid-1990s, the ACT was at a decisive moment. Young, prosperous, and relatively unencumbered by the legacy of the past, Canberra could have moved in many directions. Today, instead, residents are confronted by creeping debt and declining value for their significant tax spend, all while the lingering effects of public service inefficiency and political complacency set heavy limits on the Territory’s future.
Canberrans might fairly ask: Is this the best that a quarter century of unbroken government can deliver? With interest expenses now eating a swelling portion of every government dollar, and with signs of broader fiscal strain visible at every turn, it is an essential question for any engaged citizen to consider. To answer it, let us chart exactly where and how the ACT’s finances stand, assess the government’s choices, and examine the consequences for both present and future generations.
A Rising Price: The True Cost of Interest in the ACT Budget
To understand the gravity of Labor’s financial stewardship, one must begin with the projected interest expenses. In the 2025–26 fiscal year, official estimates reveal that interest expenses for the ACT Government’s General Government Sector will reach approximately $629 million. With total government sector expenses in the same year totalling about $9.6 billion, this means that interest will consume around 6.55 percent of all government spending.
The implications are stark. Rather than investing in tangible improvements to health care, education, transport, or housing, the government is now compelled to dedicate a sizeable share of its entire budget to servicing debt. This does not build a single new school, resolve any overcrowded wards, lay any new metro lines, or provide steady jobs to public servants or private citizens. Instead, it is money spent in tribute to past borrowing, a cost that delivers no cumulative benefit to current or future Canberrans.
To provide further context, these interest costs account for something even more alarming: about 20.6 percent of the ACT Government’s total taxation revenue for the year. That is, for every five dollars the government raises in taxes from citizens and businesses, more than one dollar is immediately consumed by interest payments even before a single actual service is delivered. With pressing demands on health, education, and infrastructure, this allocation is emblematic of deeper problems. It forces difficult choices, necessitating either cutbacks in key services, higher rates and charges on already pressed taxpayers, or further borrowing – a vicious economic cycle.
Unfortunately, the outlook is not improving; the trajectory is worse still. Projections for 2028–29 indicate that interest will climb to roughly 9 percent of all government expenses for the year. This is not a one-off spike or a temporary consequence of external conditions. It is the culmination of years of borrowing, compounded by a persistent failure to rein in spending or set realistic financial priorities. For every ten dollars the ACT spends, nearly one dollar will vanish into the black hole of interest payments. This inexorable rise is a direct result of systemic choices over decades.
The fact that such a large portion of the entire ACT budget will be claimed by interest payments is not just a dry point on a spreadsheet. It is the lived reality for citizens who notice stagnant investment in local services and amenities. An efficient, forward-thinking government would have at least ensured that debt was taken on for productive, lasting investments that would drive future growth and quality of life. However, in the ACT’s case, the evidence is clear: debt has too often funded consumption, pet projects, and recurrent expenditure, rather than strategic capital investment with a credible path to repayment and lasting value.
Service Deficit: The Chasm Between Spending and Outcomes
All governments are custodians of the public’s resources, and the measure by which custodianship should be judged is, ultimately, how well those resources are converted into real-world outcomes. In Canberra, a well-educated city full of public sector professionals, there is a legitimate expectation that their government, especially after 25 years in the driver’s seat, would be champions of efficient, forward-thinking, and transparent administration.
Regrettably, this expectation has not been met. Instead, the ACT is saddled with an overstretched, underperforming health system that consistently appears at or near the bottom of national rankings for wait times and patient outcomes. Canberra’s hospitals are renowned for overcrowding, continual ramping at emergency departments, and reports of deteriorating infrastructure. These failings cannot be attributed to a lack of appetite for reform from staff or to an absence of community spirit; rather, they are the direct result of systemic mismanagement and misplaced fiscal priorities at the very top.
Health care, of course, is just one critical domain. In education, the Territory faces a crisis of its own making. Despite lavish rhetoric about innovation and achievement, ACT schools regularly contend with teacher shortages, outdated facilities, and stagnating or even declining literacy and numeracy rates, especially in schools serving socially and economically disadvantaged communities. The situation is not the result of one difficult budget year, but a chronic underinvestment paired with poor allocation of whatever resources are provided. The failure is not just about numbers on a balance sheet; it is about the thousands of students and families who rely on responsible governance to deliver the foundational services that underpin meritocracy and opportunity.
If we turn to infrastructure, an area where prudent debt might be most defensible, the picture does not brighten as one would hope. Public transport projects, such as the light rail, have been delivered both late and considerably over budget. For all the expense, many residents still complain that traffic congestion gets worse, not better, and that outlying suburbs remain isolated and undersupplied. Similarly, housing is a perennial crisis in the ACT. Housing affordability has eroded consistently, public housing waiting lists grow ever longer, and homelessness has not been meaningfully reduced despite a decade of promises from policymakers.
The common thread linking these woes is not complexity, resource scarcity, or external factors beyond government control. It is, overwhelmingly, the result of poor decision-making, wasteful spending, and a culture in which inefficiency is tolerated, if not encouraged, because there is no threat to the incumbency of those responsible. The ACT’s Labor Government, shielded from real accountability by entrenched majorities and bureaucratic inertia, has presided over a decline in quality and quantity of public goods, all while charging residents, via rising taxes and charges, for a standard of service that simply does not materialise.
Public Service: A Growing Machine with Shrinking Outputs
One of the most striking features of the ACT’s finances is not just the swelling debt, but the growing scale and cost of its public service. The government frequently touts spending on public employees as a marker of progressive governance, but a hard-nosed look at outputs versus inputs tells another story. In the past decade alone, the ACT public service has ballooned by every measure, headcount, total remuneration, and share of total expenditure, yet, paradoxically, the quality, speed, and innovation of services delivered have not kept pace.
The reality is that each hiring spree, each new department, and each pay rise is funded by taxpayers. When these investments are justified by measurable improvements in service, they represent good governance. In the ACT, however, productivity gains are elusive. Many essential services, from childcare to waste management, planning and development to licensing and regulation, have become more bureaucratic, slower, and less responsive. The addition of middle-management layers, the multiplication of reporting lines, and a culture of risk aversion have created a governmental monolith that serves its own comfort more capably than it serves the public.
Making matters worse, this expanding bureaucracy has been insulated from performance scrutiny by a government that rarely changes hands or faces credible external review. Senior public servants are, unavoidably, shaped by the incentives set by those who appoint and retain them. Under unbroken Labor leadership, this means a cohort skilled at managing upwards, deflecting public frustration, and modelling the required political orthodoxy rather than one adept at efficiency, responsiveness, or reform.
With expensive, consultative processes layering atop each other, costs climb relentlessly. Yet public satisfaction declines, and outright waste becomes normalised. Whether it is ballooning project costs, endless reviews and reports that bear little fruit, or a lack of real innovation in core areas such as digital services and regulatory reform, the ACT’s government machine has adapted itself to preserve the status quo, not to meet the needs of a changing population.
Political Accountability: A System Built to Avoid Scrutiny
The corrosive spirit of unbroken government, more than any individual mistake or policy failure, explains the ACT’s current predicament. In a political system built around robust parties and regular changes of power, governments are compelled to prove their worth through effective service delivery and prudent resource management. They must, at the very least, respond to credible threats from opposition parties, the media, and civil society. The knowledge that one can be voted out at the next election edge acts as the most powerful motivator for good governance.
In Canberra, this dynamic is largely absent. For 25 years, Labor has governed the Territory with, at most, only minimal coalition arrangements or the occasional requirement for negotiation with minor parties. There is rarely, if ever, the sense of real jeopardy or the need for a comprehensive rethink of policy or personnel. Mistakes are papered over with slick communications; plans are revised rather than abandoned when they fail; and systemic incompetence, when exposed, is more often managed with another process or inquiry, not real accountability.
The mechanics of this political insulation are not arcane. The government is its own auditor. Official reporting is frequently opaque, with key fiscal documents drafted and released at times that suit government narrative, not public understanding. Political staffers shape the flow of information and access to ministers, ensuring damaging revelations are either delayed or diluted by the time they reach the opposition or the press. Parliamentary scrutiny, already limited in the unicameral Legislative Assembly, is further hobbled by the dominance of the government benches. Public service leaders, aware that career progression depends on their ability to avoid embarrassment for their ministers, have every reason to underplay problems and oversell modest achievements.
This closed loop leaves only the public itself as a final check on excess, mismanagement, and waste. And, while no democracy is ever immune to the risk of complacency, citizens in Canberra face exceptional barriers to meaningful engagement. Complex financial data is buried beneath technical jargon, outreach is patchy, and new forms of engagement, citizens’ juries, participatory budgeting, genuine consultation, are rare and almost always tightly choreographed by those in power.
The result is a system in which personal responsibility is diffused until it disappears altogether. When debt rises and interest costs soar, no single person is held accountable. When projects fail or services shortchange those who need them most, blame is apportioned to processes, “challenges of scale,” or “difficult economic conditions.” For 25 years, these rationalisations have been allowed to stand, as the political and civic culture of the ACT has allowed failures to be written off as the inevitable price of innovation, rather than the predictable cost of avoidable mistakes.
The Ultimate Accountability: The Cost to Citizens and Communities
For residents of the ACT, the cost of this fiscal and political carelessness is not only measured in dollars and cents. It is felt in the tired disappointment of parents who see their children’s education undermined by underinvestment and disruption. It is endured in the anxiety of patients facing interminable waits for routine procedures or emergency care. It is acknowledged, bitterly, by those who navigate a housing market whose affordability is permanently out of reach, despite years of pledges and policy bluster.
More fundamentally, it is recognised by those who understand that public debt is not simply an abstraction. Every additional dollar borrowed, beyond what can be serviced without mortgaging the Territory’s future, is a dollar that will need to be paid in interest, taken from future investment or, worse, demanded once again from the pockets of ordinary citizens. The borrowing binge of the past decade, and the inexorable rise of interest costs to nearly 9 percent of all government expenditure, mean that tough choices will remain deferred only for so long.
The sad irony is that Canberra, uniquely in Australia, should have been able to avoid these traps. It is a small, well-educated, and relatively wealthy jurisdiction. It has benefited handsomely from stable Commonwealth employment, a well-developed education sector, and a vibrant community life. With these advantages, there was every opportunity for prudent, honest, and strategic government. Instead, an entrenched political class, unchallenged by real accountability, has overseen the squandering of that potential in the service of political comfort and electoral convenience.
Towards a Path of Reform: Breaking Complacency
It is, of course, not enough to simply identify failings. The challenge now must be, for all concerned residents and civic actors, to force the monotonous cycle of inertia to a halt and to demand, once more, a government worthy of Canberra’s promise. This means a fundamental rethink of the relationship between public money and public value.
At the most basic level, the unsustainable escalation of government debt and interest payments in the ACT must be recognised for what it is: a crisis of management, not one of capacity. The government must submit itself, and its policies, to real and regular scrutiny. Proper, independent auditing processes should be mandated, with full and timely public disclosure of all significant fiscal decisions. No more half-hidden supplements, no more obfuscation, the financial future of the Territory should not be at the mercy of political communication strategies.
A genuine audit of all outstanding debt, and a public mapping of interest servicing costs against service delivery outcomes, must form the foundation for reform. If debt has been incurred to fund wise, productive, and lasting infrastructure, let those successes be shown. If, as is too often the case, debt has been used for recurrent or non-essential spending, the government must admit its error and reverse course. Only with honest reckoning can trust begin to be rebuilt.
Beyond these core measures, there must be a determined focus on shrinking the deficit between the size of the ACT public service and the quality of services delivered. Every government employee, from the highest paid executive to the most junior case officer, must be held to clear, transparent, and tough standards of performance. Remuneration and tenure should be linked, directly, to real outputs: faster, better, and less bureaucratic service for residents. The culture of risk aversion and blame deflection must be ended, with genuine consequences for failure and overdue recognition for those who innovate and deliver.
Transparency must be the new watchword. The best way to counteract the political insulation enjoyed by the current administration is to place decision-making, spending, and project outcomes fully in the public eye. Citizens should be allowed meaningful voice and oversight, through open data initiatives, participatory budgeting, and a wholesale revamp of engagement procedures, that hold decision-makers to account before, not after, critical mistakes are made.
Lastly, Canberra’s residents themselves have a role to play. The lesson of the past 25 years is clear: when an electorate becomes disengaged, resigned to the inevitability of government inertia and low expectations, it grants license to complacency and waste. It is time for citizens to reassert their demands, not just in the ballot box but through daily engagement with civic life, holding both politicians and the public service to account for every dollar, every report, and every broken promise.
Conclusion: A Call for Accountability and Ambition
After a quarter century of Labor rule, the ACT’s public finances, service delivery, and governance culture stand in urgent need of renewal. With rising interest costs set to consume ever larger shares of taxpayer money, with persistent underperformance in critical areas like health, education, infrastructure, and housing, and with a political system more intent on survival than reform, the status quo is unsustainable.
This is not merely a question of political competition or party preference. It is a matter of good governance, of respect for the taxpayers whose money is spent, and of justice for the next generation who will inherit both the successes and the failures of decisions made today. Only bold action, rooted in accountability, transparency, and a reinvigorated commitment to real public value, can put the ACT back on track.
The time has come for a government that does not simply spend more, but spends better. A government that recognises debt as a tool for future prosperity, not a means of laundering political convenience. A government that does not hide behind process, but embraces innovation, efficiency, and rigorous scrutiny. And, most of all, a government, of whatever stripe, that treats the trust of its citizens, and the power of its office, as a privilege to be earned each and every year.
Let the lesson of the ACT be heard loud and clear: unbroken rule breeds complacency, and complacency breeds decline. Only by confronting uncomfortable truths and demanding relentless accountability can the community secure the future it deserves. The challenge is immense, but the opportunity, if seized, is even greater. The people of the Territory deserve nothing less.
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If you value honest government, real outcomes, and a financial legacy of prudence over political self-interest, now is the time to speak out, get involved, and demand better from those entrusted with Canberra’s future. Let us not accept another 25 years of the same. The stakes, both fiscal and social, could not be higher.