Wednesday, 5 June 2019

 Ms ALLAN (Bendigo East—Leader of the House, Minister for Transport Infrastructure) (11:13): Yesterday morning, I was very pleased to meet Bella, the first tunnel boring machine (TBM) that will start digging out the West Gate Tunnel. This morning the Premier and I were very pleased to meet Joan, the first tunnel boring machine that is going to start digging the Metro Tunnel. Now, Joan is coloured red and of course named after our wonderful Joan Kirner, and she is the first of four massive tunnel boring machines that are going to dig out the twin 9 kilometre tunnels that will create the five underground stations to unlock the city loop bottleneck and allow more trains to run more often across Melbourne.

And indeed right now across Melbourne, indeed particularly at the North Melbourne worksite, crews are working around the clock to prepare the remaining TBMs—they are in 16 different pieces—for lifting and lowering. In the past week three pieces have already been lowered into the station box, and once they are put together and launched this mega machine will excavate around 100 000 cubic metres of rock and soil.

Why are we doing this? Joan’s work will mean that we are creating room for an additional grand-final-day-packed MCG crowd on our train network every single day during the peak hour. Each day these 100 000 people will get where they need to go quicker as well, because of course the Metro Tunnel is not just about more trains more often, it is getting people there more quickly as well.

As I said, there is a monstrous amount of work going on at sites right across the city. The Premier has spoken of some of the disruption to our normal train network that is needed to facilitate this massive construction effort as we create more space on our network, so we can buy the new trains to run on the network, so we can overhaul the Sunbury line to run more trains on the Sunbury line and get on and deliver the Metro Tunnel project.