Thursday, 20 November 2025

 Jacinta ALLAN (Bendigo East – Premier) (14:43): Just like the Metro Tunnel, the West Gate Tunnel and the North East Link, the Suburban Rail Loop will also change how Victorians move around this great city and state. By next year there will be 4000 Victorians working on the Suburban Rail Loop and tunnel-boring machines will be in the ground and driving towards that completion in 2035. But of course we know that the Suburban Rail Loop is not just a big and important transport project, it is a big and important housing project as well, with 70,000 more homes in exactly the right locations – affordable, livable homes in the places where people want to live.

There are other suburbs in our community that people want to live in – it could be in Brighton or it could be in Kew – and we need to focus on building more homes everywhere, because over the last 30 years Victoria has grown by 65 per cent but not evenly. Our outer suburbs, places like Melton, have grown by 433 per cent, but in Boroondara the growth was the lowest in Victoria at 24 per cent. We have seen a recent report from KPMG that shows that in Boroondara, in places like Kew, the population of working-age people – you might call these people millennials – shrunk by 6000 people from 2019 to 2023. Why? Because they have been locked out of the places that they want to live – the good, connected suburbs. It is one thing –

Members interjecting.

The SPEAKER: The Premier will be heard without assistance.

Jacinta ALLAN: As we are working on the legislation to overhaul our planning system, which the member for Kew opposes, to get more people in homes, they are marching up and down the main street of Brighton, like the member for Brighton. Only Labor will back millennials to get into their homes.