Thursday, 15 August 2019

In reply to  Mr DAVIS (Southern Metropolitan—Leader of the Opposition) (7 June 2019)

Ms HORNE (Williamstown—Minister for Public Transport, Minister for Ports and Freight):

The Andrews Labor Government is holding Metro Trains Melbourne to account with the latest contract. The new contract includes higher performance targets and maintenance requirements, and enforces tougher penalties if targets are not met.

The contract ensures that Metro is penalised for the most common service disruptions, including early departures, late arrivals, cancellations, short services, and City Loop bypasses.

The contract also features a 37 per cent increase in maintenance and renewal investment. This investment will improve network infrastructure to reduce the number of faults on the system, including signalling failures, and overhead wires and points failures. Since the introduction of the new contracts, greater investment in maintenance has seen train faults on the metropolitan network drop almost 20 per cent, and infrastructure faults reduce by almost 30 per cent.

The government is working hard to improve reliability, frequency and capacity on the rail network. In response to growing patronage on the Dandenong corridor, the government is investing extensively in the Cranbourne-Pakenham line with a number of key infrastructure projects.

Every level crossing between Caulfield and Dandenong has now been removed. We are investing in new High Capacity Metro Trains and the Andrews Labor Government is getting on with the job of building the Metro Tunnel and the duplication of the Cranbourne line.