Tuesday, 4 March 2025

 Moira DEEMING (Western Metropolitan) (13:01): (1414) My question is for the Minister for Transport Infrastructure or the minister representing them. My residents in the Western Metropolitan Region receive $60 million per annum less than the rest of Victoria in bus funding. If families want to use the overcrowded trains, they need a car, but when they drive to the train stations the car parks are full by 6:30 am, and even the muddy, bumpy, unsafe empty fields used beside those car parks are often full by the same time. This often means that families are forced to get a loan for another car just to manage, with an average of 4 precious hours worth of petrol lost each day idling away in traffic jams just to get work. The fastest, surest, cheapest stopgap to all of this madness is to adopt John Stone’s Better Buses for Melbourne’s West proposal. Minister, why are the safe Labor seats in the Western Metro Region treated worse than the rest of Victoria and short-changed $60 million each and every year on bus funding? Why does the west get less?