Thursday, 24 March 2022

Ministers statements: North East Link

Mr ANDREWS (Mulgrave—Premier) (14:38): I was very pleased recently to visit Victoria’s biggest ever road project, the North East Link, to celebrate a number of significant milestones that have been reached. There are 1000 workers working on that project at the moment. They have done a total of 4 million hours of hard work delivering that project. A hundred of those workers are apprentices, trainees and cadets, and they have done 100 000 hours of work alone. They will have the skills for a lifetime of work, a lifetime of building in our state, and those skills will be attained and accumulated—their tickets will be granted, their qualifications will be secured—working on this project. It is a fantastic project, one that ought to have been built many, many decades ago. We have that dubious honour of perhaps being the only great city in the world with a ring-road that has got a great gap in the middle of it. It does not make any sense. But we are getting on and we are doing it now.

We are also hiring. We need many more workers in the trades, in engineering, in project management, in environmental management—the whole sweep of different skill sets—to get this project done. As I said, it is the biggest ever road project in our state. We have set up a jobs and skills centre. We are hiring. There will be 10 000 people working on this project, 35-minute travel time savings and 15 000 trucks off local roads. This is a great project. Some have described it rather colourfully. They are wrong, of course. This is a project Victorians voted for, and it is a project that we are getting on and delivering. Do you know why? Because it will link communities, not divide communities based on how much income their parents have, for instance. It is about linking communities. This is a valuable project—a project that ought to have been done 30, 40, 50 years ago. It is being done now, and it is being done now by a proudly Labor government.

Mr Wells: On a point of order, Speaker, it seems to be a weekly occurrence that I raise a point of order about unanswered questions. I am wondering if you could follow up questions 5885, 5945, 6000, 6100 and 6174. The first one, for example, was due on 7 July last year.

The SPEAKER: I will follow that matter up for the member for Rowville.