Tuesday, 22 February 2022

Ministers statements: Metro Tunnel

Ms ALLAN (Bendigo East—Leader of the House, Minister for Transport Infrastructure, Minister for the Suburban Rail Loop) (14:14): It was a great morning this morning to join with the Premier and our colleague a member for Northern Metro Sheena Watt at the opening of the Metro Tunnel site in Kensington and to be with the workforce to mark the arrival of the first of the railway tracks that are going to be laid through the tunnel to support the new Metro Tunnel project. This is a big milestone for this project. The arrival of track means that we are on track to complete this project in 2025, a full year ahead of schedule.

Almost 40 kilometres of track has arrived, and over the next year it will be laid through the twin 9-kilometre tunnels through the new five underground stations. When it opens the Metro Tunnel will create that end-to-end line from Cranbourne and Pakenham in the south-east all the way through to Sunbury in the north and then also join up with the Melbourne Airport project when that is completed later in the decade. This will provide opportunities for more than half a million more Victorians to travel through the city when the Metro Tunnel opens during our peak periods and also slash travel times by up to 50 minutes a day, and it will free up room in the rest of the city loop to run more trains more often on other lines.

Now, the new Melbourne-manufactured trains that will run on the new tracks in the Metro Tunnel will also run on those new tracks that we have just marked the opening of out at Cranbourne, where we have duplicated the Cranbourne line—another project a full year ahead of schedule—giving those extra services to the Cranbourne community. The tracks for the Metro Tunnel project and the tracks for the Cranbourne line upgrade are all made with 100 per cent Australian steel as the result of our determination to support local jobs through our local jobs program. Seven thousand jobs on the Metro Tunnel, trains made in Melbourne, a pipeline of road and rail works—it is a pipeline of jobs for Victorians. These are the jobs that those opposite want to put on the stops. They do not want to support jobs and an infrastructure pipeline; only the Andrews Labor government does.