Peter WALSH (Murray Plains) (12:46): I am here to express the growing frustration and anger of communities across north-west Victoria regarding the appalling state of the Melbourne–Swan Hill rail service. The Swan Hill line is one of the longest regional rail journeys in Victoria. It connects communities from north-west Victoria to essential services, employment, education and family, yet it has become synonymous with unreliability, delays, cancellations and poor service standards. My constituents are rightly asking why they continue to receive what appears to be the worst rail service in Victoria. Time and again, passengers are left stranded, forced onto replacement coaches or subjected to significant delays. For regional Victorians these are not mere inconveniences; they disrupt medical appointments, business commitments and family responsibilities. What compounds this frustration is an increasingly frequent failure to provide a buffet car on the service. On a journey which can run for 5 hours passengers should reasonably expect access to food and refreshments. Instead they are regularly boarding trains only to discover no buffet service is available. This is simply unacceptable. No-one travelling on such a long-haul train service should be expected to undertake such a journey without access to basic amenities. They deserve reliable trains, properly maintained rolling stock and certainty that a fundamental passenger service will be available. I call on the Minister for Public and Active Transport and V/Line to urgently address the chronic reliability issues on the Swan Hill line and ensure that the buffet car service is restored and consistently provided. The people of the north-west deserve better than a second-rate service.