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Illustration: Matt Golding Photo: Matt Golding

You'd be hard placed to find a poll in this country that does not put the Liberal Party ahead of Labor as the party most trusted to handle the economy.

But it's time to abandon the rhetoric from the Liberals that they are the better economic managers, certainly in Victoria, where the handling of the East West Link shows they exposed taxpayers to greater financial risk than they needed to, ostensibly for political reasons. That's not good economic management, that's economic sabotage.

That's not to say the economy is in safer hands with Labor but there are perhaps two reasons for the belief the Liberals are better economic managers.The first is that the conservative side of politics has typically been more, well conservative, when it comes to managing spending and the budget, while on the other side of the ledger Labor has historically been linked to various blowouts and financial mishaps.

The second related reason has to do with branding. When he was federal treasurer, Peter Costello liked to suggest that handling the economy was like driving a finely calibrated race car. One missed cue, one corner taken a foot too wide - disaster. Former Victorian treasurer Michael O'Brien was cut from the same cloth, having worked as a senior adviser to Costello for five years.

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It was his job during the recent state election campaign to capitalise on the public perception by talking up the risks of handing the keys to the economic L-platers in the Labor Party. As it turned out, his attack was blunted by the previous Labor government's solid track record at budget management, and by the fact that the Kennett government's commission of audit chair, Bob Officer, signed off on Labor's policy costings in the final days of the campaign.

The reality is that there aren't too many economic levers a state government can actually pull. Victoria's budget has been AAA and in surplus for years and, anyway, almost half of Victoria's revenue comes from Canberra in the form of general or "specific purpose" grants.

Far from handling a finely tuned race car, managing the state economy is more like driving a delivery truck. It is mostly about a decent mix of capital and recurrent spending commitments without too many financial cock-ups along the way.

At any rate, the risks of such cock-ups are supposed to be mitigated by the bureaucracy. State Treasury, for example, has a "high value high risk" team charged with ensuring taxpayers' money is not wasted on stupid decisions about major projects.

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Liberals are not better economic managers