In the past 12 months, 82,800 Australians have moved to Victoria from interstate, around 500 carloads a week.At the same time, 65,600 Victorians have left.The gap - a net influx of 17,200 - is an all-time record.
The myth about budgets is that they can achieve much at all.
In decades to come few will be remembered for anything other than the introduction of Medicare, the national disability insurance scheme and the goods and services tax.
But in six weeks' time the government will have an opportunity to actually do something that will last; something far more important, and more transformative, than the apparently doomed plan to cut the rate of company tax.
Open your purse or wallet. If it's empty, apart from cards, you're part of something big.
In Melbourne, gas cooktops are only the start.
Melburnians use gas for stoves, hot water, central heating and room heating. Ninety per cent of Melbourne homes have gas, compared to only 50 per cent in Sydney. Victoria accounts for two-thirds of all the household gas used in Australia. And Victorian industry uses little else.
Because it's been astoundingly cheap.
Anyone would think Victoria had single-handedly reignited the housing crisis.
The critics leapt on the weekend announcement of a (small) pilot program in which the government would take an equity share in private homes, saying it would "drive up prices" and force homeowners to borrow from both a bank and the government.
Melbourne has become so important it now accounts for all of Victoria's economic growth, with the rest of the state contributing nothing in net terms.
New regional figures compiled by SGS Economics and Planning show inner Melbourne's economy grew by a blistering 3.9 per cent in 2015-16, the city's north-east grew by 4.1 per cent, its north-west by 4.7 per cent, its south-east by 3.9 per cent, and its west by 3.9 per cent.
Stamp duty is the worst tax in Australia, so bad that according to calculations by the federal Treasury for the aborted tax white paper, it destroys 70¢ of economic value for each dollar collected. Yet more than most governments, Victoria is addicted to it.
President Donald Trump will declare economic war on our biggest customer, wipe unprecedented amounts off global stock markets, usher in extraordinary financial instability, and risk turning the world's biggest economy into a basket case by pushing its national debt past 100 per cent of GDP.
There's another massive deal you've never heard of. The Trans-Pacific Partnership – negotiated in secret between Australia and 11 other nations over 10 years – appears to be dead.
It would have allowed US corporations to sue Australian governments in offshore tribunals, as they have long wanted to do, effectively trumping our own High Court. Donald Trump himself opposes it (bless him) as does Hillary Clinton, although she once helped to draw it up.
