Wednesday, 19 February 2025

 Richard RIORDAN (Polwarth) (19:14): (1017) My adjournment debate this evening is for the Minister for Public and Active Transport, and the action I seek from the minister is the immediate release of funds to make safe and restore the historic Colac train station. I alluded some months ago in this chamber to the secret plans to decommission the Colac train station. This government has known now for the last nearly 10 years that the Colac train station, the historical Colac train station on the Warrnambool line, was not fit for public consumption. It had been condemned. It has a demolition order on it. It currently has its chimneys being held up by safety braces, and late this afternoon in rolled the temporary huts from outside of the Colac community. We did not even hire them locally; they have moved them in to act as a temporary train station.

Here is a government that has overseen the spending of hundreds of millions of dollars on a train line upgrade and has failed to keep the stations up and safe and adequate. Not only that, but they have failed to manage the rolling stock, and as I have mentioned in this place before, we now have some 6000 – can you believe that, folks – fewer seats each week to Melbourne on the trains than we had before they upgraded. It is a special kind of incompetence that sees a historical train station that has been located in Colac since the 1870s fall into such disrepair that it is no longer safe to work in or for people to sit in on cold winter nights or on hot summer days to seek shelter. They are now having to sit in little site huts sprinkled through the car park, which leads to the fact that not only is there some distance between the waiting area and the platform but we have the car park, which was fairly inadequate to start with, also clogged up with several temporary huts to provide shelter for the train station.

This government says it is serious about public transport. We know the fiasco that is going on here in Melbourne, where billions of taxpayers dollars is being spent on a fanciful notion in the Suburban Rail Loop and yet something as simple as maintaining a basic country train station seems beyond the finances and capacity of this government. Minister, I urgently seek for you to do the right thing and ensure the people of Colac can access their train station safely and have toilet facilities that are available and open at all times and a train station that is befitting of a modern First World country and not some, quite frankly, ordinary show set in an asphalt car park out the back. It is not good enough. It is not dignified, and it needs repair, maintenance and upkeep immediately.