On Monday, Victorian Treasurer Tim Pallas said the state was in the midst of a construction boom not seen since Premier Henry Bolte in the 1960s and 1970s. It's getting hard to find the right workers and hard to find steel and cement.

Much of it is the result of government road and rail projects, as in NSW. Much of that is due to the previous Australian treasurer Joe Hockey, who in 2014 awarded incentive payments to states that "recycled assets", selling roads and other things they owned in order to build new ones. Victoria and NSW started early, recycling some of their assets before the Commonwealth incentives.They made use of the riches that had been flooding in to their treasuries as Sydney and Melbourne property prices pushed stamp duty takings sky high.

Once it was thought that government investment "crowded out" the private sector. Not at the moment. It's because of the government investment programs that the private sector is investing too, building projects on contract, handing them over to state governments (which will later sell them) and then starting on the next one. The known pipeline stretches out beyond 2027.

It's not the same as widespread employment growth (employment in the finance sector and in administration went backwards) but it's worth having.

It's centred around Melbourne. More than half of those 61,600 extra workers found their jobs in Victoria. Over the past year more than one-third found their jobs in Victoria, 35 per cent when measured on a trend basis. Thirty per cent found their jobs in NSW.