Victoria is fast becoming a total basket case, but there’s still people who cannot see it.

And I’m sorry to say that there’s people in other states who think the rest of us should be making the same mistakes that Victoria is making right now. I’m sorry, but there’s no nice way to say this. Victoria is [….]. And if the rest of the country follows them, then we’re all [….]. Crime is out of control. The economy is in the toilet. And the housing shortage and therefore the housing affordability crisis well, it’s getting worse, not better. And all of these things are a direct result of bad government policy. Which is to say that all of these things are a direct result of idiots who voted for idiots.

Police numbers are falling as morale hits rock bottom. Many officers are leaving Victoria entirely, as are many other Victorians, myself included. I got my family out two and a half years ago now. And yet, incredibly, if the polls are to be believed, the people that are left in Victoria, the few that there are, would rather keep Jacinta Allan and continue the Labor domination of their state rather than trying something new. For the rest of Australia, well, we can’t save Victoria from itself, but we can use them as a cautionary tale so that we can be sure we do not follow suit. Because if we make the same mistakes, we will suffer the same consequences.

My name’s Topher Field. This is the Topher Project and I help busy people like you to keep up with the world as it changes around you. I am 100% viewer supported. So, if you appreciate having me as a no-nonsense voice of reason talking about Australian issues, then please buy me a coffee or a beer if you prefer via the button at topherfield.net. And if you like my videos, then you will love my no-nonsense books about law, government, power, human rights, and civil disobedience. Plus, you’ll find my DVDs, t-shirts, and hoodies at goodpeoplebreakbadlaws.com. And everything you buy will help me to keep the Topher project going.

All right, let’s go through each of these three topics one by one crime, housing, and the economy really quickly.

And we’ll talk about what’s gone wrong, why, and what’s needed in order to fix it so that the Victorian government can at least be useful as a cautionary tale that the rest of us learn from. First, crime. This is really simple. We have to deal with criminals properly and define criminals properly. The new stats revealed that just 1,128 children in the state of Victoria have been arrested more than 7,000 times. That shouldn’t be possible. And I’ll propose my solution for that in a minute. But first, we need to zoom out and look at the bigger picture.

There is a maxim that’s been around for thousands of years in one form or another that says that having too many laws breeds contempt for the law. If everyone is a criminal, then no one is a criminal. Victoria is a state that is famously strict on all kinds of petty victimless crimes. From jaywalking to speeding by the tiniest amounts to taking your beer from one pub to another. There’s all kinds of things that you can get in trouble for. And it’s not just the laws. There’s also all of the petty regulations and the licenses and the permits. You need to get a permission to breathe in the state of Victoria. And it’s no coincidence that Victoria is the state that most resembled a prison state during Covid because of course it did.

But the problem with all these petty laws is not only the contempt for the law that you breed. It’s also that you tie up the police dealing with meaningless BS and you flood the courts and the prisons with people who really should not be there. Which means you lack the resources to deal with the actual crimes and criminals you know, the thieves and the carjackers, the rapists and the killers. When you add to that a bleeding heart approach to youth crime, particularly youths with an immigrant background, you end up where Victoria is right now with prisons full of people who should not be there and streets overrun by the people who should.

Machete street fights are continuing despite the machete ban. Cars are being stolen with babies in the back seat. Bashings and home invasions are a nightly occurrence. And every other week, some teenagers kill themselves in a high-speed car crash in a stolen car. And Jacinta Allan’s much vaunted, toughest bail laws are still nowhere to be seen. Because we’re told the prisons don’t have the capacity to keep all those young, violent criminals in remand. You couldn’t bugger this up worse if you tried.

So, what’s the solution? Well, you’re going to notice a theme as we go through these three different issues in this video because the first step is always a massive deregulation. Repeal immediately all the petty laws. Stop turning everyone into criminals and you’ll magically be able to tell the difference between the real criminals.

Again, there is a simple principle that can be applied. If there is no victim, then there is no crime.

Jaywalking should not be a crime unless a vehicle has to take evasive action. If no car has to slow down or swerve, then where’s the crime? Where’s the harm? Where’s the victim? The same with speeding. The idea that 3km an hour over the posted speed limit is always and everywhere a danger to public safety is ridiculous and we all know it. It’s offensive to anyone with an intellect. But because the Victorian state budget is a shambles and they need all the cash they can get, you’ll find Victoria police officers, not to mention cameras, located all over the state ready to cash in on a moment’s indiscretion, regardless of whether it was actually dangerous in those specific circumstances or not.

And this deregulation that is so desperately needed must be applied right across the board. If the police can’t point to the specific victim, then they should not waste their time chasing or punishing a supposed offender because there hasn’t been an offense. If a person or property has been harmed, then absolutely the perpetrator needs to be held to account, of course. But if there’s no victim, stop wasting everyone’s time and money. That’s step one.

Step two, no one gets bail a second time for violent offenses. If you’re on bail after a violent offense and then you are charged with committing another violent offense while you’re out on bail, you ain’t getting bail a second time. No exceptions. I don’t care what your sob story is. We gave you a chance to get on with your life while your first lot of charges were going through the system and you threw our kindness back in our face. You stay in jail till you get sentenced. No exceptions.

Step three, legalize self-defense. The laws as they exist right now disarm law-abiding Victorians for the protection of the violent criminals who commit assaults and carjackings and home invasions without fear of their victims fighting back. If you’re attacked, you have a human right to defend yourself from that attacker. But too often today, that right is being violated by the state, prosecuting victims of violent crimes for the crime of protecting themselves, their belongings, and their families.

Castle law is long overdue in Victoria, as it is in all of Australia. This shouldn’t be controversial. If someone uses force to enter a home while there are people inside that home, then the presumption has to be that the person using force to enter a home is up to no good and the occupants should be allowed now, scratch that the occupants should be encouraged to defend themselves with extreme prejudice. And when the police arrive to pick up what’s left of the attackers, the occupants should get a pat on the back, not slapped in handcuffs. The spasm of record violent crime that has gripped the state of Victoria right now could be ended in a week if Jacinta Allan had the guts to strip all time-wasting victimless crimes off the books, round up all the repeat violent offenders who are currently on bail on the streets and give the green light to law-abiding residents to defend themselves in their own homes, cars, shops, and of course on the streets.

Okay, that’s crime could be fixed in a week. What about housing? Well, that is going to take a little bit longer.

New numbers have been released showing that exactly as I’ve predicted in past videos, thanks to landlords being demonized, investors being taxed, and regulations strangling the building sector, the number of new homes under construction is not keeping up with demand. Not even close. And in fact, builders are now collapsing in record numbers. Now, this was inevitable. And the people who will suffer the most because of this are the very renters which the government pretends to be helping.

The theory of these rules and restrictions and taxes and minimum standards was that by increasing renters’ rights and increasing the minimum standards of renters’ properties then renters would be better off. In practice, of course, these extra costs just go on top of the rent. And now there are more families living on the streets or under bridges or in share housing because they can no longer afford even the bottom end of the rental market or even if they can afford it, they simply can’t find one. The theory was that by making investment less attractive that landlords would sell their investment properties, freeing up housing supply for owner occupants to buy. But in practice, well, yeah, investors have stopped investing but in new construction, taking their money to other states or into other investment types, which means that supply is even lower than before, and the shortage is getting worse.

The solution? Well, again, it starts with deregulation. Right now, half or more of the cost of a new build is actually the cost of government, either directly through taxes and fees and charges or indirectly through restrictions, overlays, public land contributions, and building regulations. This media report here is about Sydney specifically. This is a problem that is not unique to Victoria, but it certainly applies in Victoria. To say this headline another way, that $800,000 starter home way out in the outer suburbs of Melbourne, well, that should actually be a $400,000 starter home if it weren’t for the cost of government.

So step one is to slash the thousands of pages of building regulations and codes to reduce costs, reduce or eliminate over-the-top energy efficiency and environmental and accessibility requirements and all the reports that go with them, but also change the codes to make it possible and profitable to build smaller starter homes. I grew up in Melbourne in Preston to be specific and all over the place you could find humble single-story brick units, usually three or four to a block. You can’t build those anymore. In many places, you’re simply not allowed to subdivide down to that size. But in the places where you can build multiple dwellings on a block, single-story units are not financially viable because a developer or a builder has to cover the cost of government all those taxes and building codes and assessments and reports.

And after all of those fixed costs, the only way they can make money is to build double-story, allegedly luxury townhouses, which end up costing as much as a house would cost on its own block of land. People say houses have too many bedrooms. That’s the problem. Well, no. Houses have too many bedrooms for the same reason that cars have too many seats. Because the cost of increasing the number of seats or bedrooms is relatively small compared to the costs of actually building the thing in the first place, getting the design and the building approved, the subdivision through council, and all a plethora of costs and costly delays that apply to every dwelling, no matter how big or small. Just like crash testing and regulatory approval costs the same for every car, no matter the number of seats.

There is no entry-level housing being built anymore, except for apartments, which are a whole other can of worms.

Most apartment buildings being built now are just the Australian equivalent of a trailer park. People are crammed on top of one another in a building that will probably never increase in value, which means that the owners are trapped in a dead-end asset. While all the houses that they actually want to buy, they thought they were on the first rung towards, they keep going up in value, while the apartment that they’re in does not. Apartments aren’t a first step on the property ladder. They are a dead end.

So, step one: slash regulation on construction and planning. Step two: slash the holding costs for landlords. Land tax is just one part of this, although an important one, but also the minimum standards demanded of a rental property are now the primary driver of rising rents. People get mad at me when I say this. “You want renters to live in a hole.” No, I want renters to have housing options that they can afford rather than living under a bridge or in a share house with a bunch of druggies. If landlords can’t make money, they won’t invest. And contrary to what socialists want you to believe, that’s not good for renters.

Now, there are some renters at any given moment in time who are almost able to buy. And in their particular case, forcing landlords to sell, which in theory will cause a slight reduction in house values well, that will make all the difference for this tiny sliver of renters. The people who are at the margin, who are almost there. But that’s only ever a tiny slice of the rental market. The vast overwhelming majority of the rental market need to rent and need to keep renting at least for a while either because they haven’t yet saved the deposit or because they don’t have the credit history to get a loan or perhaps the place where they want to live because of family or work isn’t an area where they would actually like to buy or for a host of other reasons.

We need a strong supply of affordable rental homes.

And that means we need landlords to have an incentive to invest in building new construction rental homes. Okay. Slash regulation on construction and planning and slash the holding costs for landlords. Even if that means a reduction in minimum standards for renters. If we do that, then in about 18 months to two years investors will get back into the market and supply will increase again, helping to improve the rental and housing crisis.

All right. Finally, the basket case economy in Victoria. We are seeing record levels of bankruptcies. The downtown area of Melbourne is half empty and businesses are leaving Victoria in droves. The fact is that Victoria is the highest taxed state in Australia and that matters, especially in a country that is already one of the highest taxed countries in the OECD. It is easy to ignore economists when they warn about the inflationary effect of government borrowing or the stifling effect of increased taxation or the I don’t know macroeconomic impact of using Slater bugs as organic engine grease. Whatever it may be, it all sounds like a bunch of weird baloney until it comes true.

I’ve simplified it all down to a single metric which I believe is the ideal way for a lay person you and me, an average Joe to make sense of it all and to make sense of what’s going on and whether things are going to get better or get worse. This particular metric that I’ve come up with, I don’t believe anyone else has actually really covered this exact metric before. So, I could probably give it a name if I wanted to, like the Topher coefficient or the Topher delta or something wanky like that. But never mind the name. Let’s talk about what it is. This single vital metric is this. It’s the difference between the purchasing power an employer spends on an employee compared to the purchasing power that the employee actually gets to use and the benefit of. Now follow me here because this is a little more subtle than it might at first appear.

If you’re on, let’s say, an $80,000 salary plus superannuation, then you’re costing your employer $80,000 plus $9,000 in superannuation plus another $4,000 in payroll tax in Victoria plus a bunch of other costs that aren’t directly taxation, excuse me, but they are the cost of government regulation applied to employment. For example, most of what HR departments do these days is just make work to keep bureaucrats happy with process documents and mountains of mostly useless paperwork. Time and productivity destroying meetings and trainings and all of that is largely because of government regulation. It’s fair to say that an employee who gets an $80,000 a year salary is probably costing their employer something like $100,000 a year. That’s the purchasing power lost to the employer which that employer then has to recoup when they set their prices that their customers have to pay.

And that’s the important key to keep in mind. All businesses are setting their prices to recoup the total cost of every employee. But of course, the employee doesn’t get the benefit of that $100,000 that’s being spent by the business. Nor do they even get the $80,000 that they are supposedly being paid. Far from it. I did a video about this 13 years ago, and already back then about half of a full-time salary was lost to the cost of government.

This is the combined cost of direct taxes such as income tax, GST on most of what you buy, fuel, alcohol, tobacco taxes, council rates, and other direct taxes. But then there’s also all of the indirect stuff your licensing and registrations that you pay on all sorts of things. Then there’s the fact that regulation and keeping bureaucrats happy has driven up the prices of everything you buy. Then there’s stamp duty on your insurances.

But I’ve saved one of the big ones to last stamp duty on the house you live in. And guess what? You pay for that even if you are a renter because the landlord has to recoup that cost from who? From you. On average, Australians sell their house every 7 years or so. And stamp duty on a median Melbourne house value of $956,000 is nearly $55,000. Approximately every 7 years, that works out to more than $75,000 per year per household. Which means that if you’re on $80,000 before tax, that means about $65,000 after tax. And that stamp duty every seven years adds up to more than 11 and a half% of your after-tax income, which you have to spend on a tax that I’ll bet you never realized was costing you so much until now.

What’s the end result? Well, individual results will vary, but for most people on an $80,000 salary, the costs that cost their employer $100,000, they will be left with the purchasing power of about $40,000 after paying all of the obvious as well as all of the hidden costs of government for the year. But here’s the real kicker, and this is why this metric matters so much. Because all of these businesses have to set their prices to recover the total cost of every one of their employees. The prices of everything that we buy are set to recover the total cost of every one of that business’s employees. But we’re trying to pay those prices with only 40% or so of the purchasing power that we have left from our salaries after government has taken its share.

So if it feels like it’s hard to make ends meet right now, that’s because it is. And if it feels like prices are rising faster than your salary, no matter how much of a pay rise you get, that’s because they are. Even people who are making good money, the best money they’ve ever made, are getting a rude awakening. Because no matter how much they make, it never seems to go as far as it feels like it should. And this right here is why.

Because every business you’re buying from is setting their prices to recover the total cost of their employees.

But all the employees that are doing the shopping people like you you’re shopping with a fraction of the purchasing power that’s left. This is why increasing minimum wages, and in fact you getting a promotion or a pay rise, it just doesn’t seem to have the effect that you would expect it to. Because to increase your real purchasing power by $1, we would have to increase how much you cost your employer by about $2.50. And your employer then has to adjust their prices accordingly. And that’s happening right across the economy inside of every business that you buy from every single day.

Now there is another layer on top of that which is that even when you save money, it keeps losing its value over time due to inflation. So every time the government spends, it either costs you in the form of the Topher delta getting worse which is taxes and the cost of government taking even more of what you earn and widening that gap or it costs you in inflation, which is the erosion of the value of your savings and that relentless increase in prices that we see all around us. The solution, the only solution, is to reduce the spending of government, no matter whether it’s paid in taxes or paid in inflation, and to reduce the cost of government caused by regulation and micromanagement, so that we keep more of our earnings and that gap between the purchasing power that we actually get to use and the purchasing power businesses have to recover gets smaller.

In my opinion, reducing the Topher delta is the answer and it’s a single metric that we can look at to assess every government action: Is this going to enlarge that delta or shrink it? Any changes that enlarge that delta are going to be bad for us. We can already see that. We don’t need to wait for the results to come in. We can tell instantly. So yeah, Victoria is a basket case, a cautionary tale for the rest of Australia, failing on every important metric from crime to the economy to the housing crisis. And all of it is because the people of Victoria have bought in to the lie that the government is the solution to their problems and not the cause of their problems.

So where do we go from here? Well, go out of Victoria would be a good start. I believe that Victoria has a few more decades of this madness ahead of it. It actually needs, in my opinion, to get a lot worse before the majority of Victorians will realize what’s happened to them. Much like California has been going down a similar path for decades as well, and yet they still vote Democrat. Victoria is the California of Australia, just without the sunshine.

But if you’re determined to stay in Victoria for whatever reason, okay, suit yourself. But have a think about how you’re going to protect yourself from the actions of your own government. Because you may think that it’s noble to be loyal to Victoria, but your first and highest loyalty must be to your own family and the loved ones closest to you. And I suggest that you keep them first and foremost in your thinking as you decide what you do next. Cuz that’s what I did. I kept my family first and foremost in my thinking. And that’s why I left. For the rest of Australia outside of Victoria, watch and learn. Learn from their mistakes so that we don’t repeat them.

My name’s Topher Field. This is the Topher Project and I help busy people like you to make sense of the nonsense that surrounds us. I am 100% viewer supported. So, if this video has given you any aha moments or helped you in your thinking as you decide what you should do, then please buy me a coffee via the button at topherfield.net. And if you like this video, then you will love my books, DVDs, and merch, which you’ll find at goodpeoplebreakbadlaws.com.

Thank you for watching to the end. The algorithm loves you and so do I. Please like, subscribe, leave me a comment if you’ve left Victoria or if you haven’t, what’s made you decide to stay?

And as always, think free.