Wednesday, 5 June 2019

 Mr ANDREWS (Mulgrave—Premier) (11:04): I am pleased to rise to advise the house of the government’s winter construction blitz, which will see further work to transform our suburban and regional rail network. This is the latest instalment of the biggest ever boost—the biggest ever program of works—in road and rail that our state has ever seen, and on some measures the biggest boost and the biggest program that the nation has ever seen.

I was very pleased this morning to be joined by the Minister for Transport Infrastructure down in North Melbourne at the site where two tunnel boring machines will be very soon launched—two TBMs, a very, very important milestone to mark. That station box, together with the broader Metro Tunnel, thousands of jobs—it is not only on budget but it is ahead of time. We are delivering on the commitments that we made.

In order to continue that infrastructure program on large and small projects there will need to be substantial disruption to the Cranbourne-Pakenham line and of course the Frankston line and the Ballarat line in coming weeks. We are trying to give Victorians as much notice as possible. There will be alternative arrangements and we apologise for the progress that we are making. We apologise for the inconvenience that will come from those works, but they are essential. We are getting on with it. We are delivering the projects that we said we would deliver. The point that needs to be made is that these projects are creating thousands of jobs. They are getting us closer to that turn-up-and-go system. The alternative of course is to not build these projects, and then instead of having some construction-related disruption today we will have nothing but disruption and congestion into the future because the system will simply not be able to cope. These will be difficult to shut but critical to delivering our record agenda.