Wednesday, 3 December 2025

 Michael GALEA (South-Eastern Metropolitan) (17:21): I am pleased to rise to speak on this year’s budget papers, specifically budget paper 3, page 88, which refers to switching on the Metro Tunnel. What a terrific event it was and what a terrific day it was on Sunday for the official opening of the Metro Tunnel – a year ahead of schedule in fact, and indeed it just snuck in a day earlier even than the recent announcement that it would be December this year. It was so fantastic to see the summer start and opening of the Metro Tunnel. We know that more than 70,000 Victorians came down to Anzac, to Town Hall, to State Library, to Parkville and to Arden stations across these five wonderful new stations going right through the heart of our city and inner city to check out the fantastic new trains and tunnels to see how it is all working together and the new stations and facilities.

We know, of course, that Town Hall connects in with Flinders Street and State Library connects in with Melbourne Central as well. It is all part of providing great new infrastructure for that part of the city and providing those opportunities for new housing and densification in places like Arden. It is also about connecting the Pakenham and Cranbourne lines through to the Sunbury line and freeing up other lines, including from 1 February allowing the Frankston line trains to run through the city loop. It is a very, very exciting project for those of us in the south-east, with the new high-capacity metro trains (HCMT) using the tunnel, and indeed we even see platform screen doors for the first time being used in Victorian stations, which coordinate the doors with the trains.

Earlier this year the Liberal Party made some bizarre statements about the Metro Tunnel. They were not their first and will not be their last statements about the Metro Tunnel. They claim that some of the new trains that are coming in, the new X’Trapolis 2.0s, will not actually be compatible with the Metro Tunnel. They said what an outrage it was: ‘You should be fixing it; you should be making these doors compatible with the Metro Tunnel.’ Never mind the fact that these trains are not actually going to ever be using those lines that run through the Metro Tunnel. Apparently the former and now, somehow, again Shadow Minister for Public Transport Matthew Guy seems to think that the government should be spending money to make these doors compatible with the new tunnel stations, despite the fact that these trains will never actually be using them. We have a dedicated fleet, the fantastic HCMTs, which are already running on the Pakenham and Cranbourne lines and will soon take over full services on the Sunbury line too. Apparently he deserves, in that bright-thinking Liberal Party, a role back in the shadow cabinet as public transport shadow again.

Maybe that is where the latest brainwave came from last week: the shock horror of discovering that if you walk into State Library station, where there is easy connectivity with Melbourne Central connecting those two parts of the network, and then you walk across to Melbourne Central and then you tap out, you might have to pay – the shock horror of it. Now we have actually resolved the issue, if you can even call it an issue. Frankly, it is a bizarre claim from the Liberal Party. If you have already travelled into the city, you are going to have to pay the daily cap anyway, but they think that if you want to cross La Trobe Street, the simplest thing to do is not to just cross La Trobe Street but to go down into one station, walk across into another, and then take the three or four escalators that it takes to get out of the maze of the shopping centre in Melbourne Central. If they think that is the biggest issue, well, wow, what a good issue to have.

Victorians know that this is a fantastic project, and Victorians also know that it is only Labor governments that deliver these projects. The Liberal Party were outspoken from the get-go on this project. When they were in office for four years, it was four years of wasted opportunity. They supported it, then they did not, then they supported it but wanted it to run through Fishermans Bend and actually not connect any of the points that have been opened up by the new tunnel – any of the university precincts, the hospital precincts – or through the central spire of the city. They wanted to waste resources on a project that was, frankly, a dud, and it took the Andrews, now Allan, Labor government and Jacinta Allan, first as transport infrastructure minister and now as Premier, to see this project through from start to finish.

We have seen what happens when you elect Labor governments. We deliver services and we deliver infrastructure, and that is exactly what the Metro Tunnel represents. With the big switch coming from 1 February we are going to see that uplift in services on the Pakenham–Cranbourne–Sunbury corridor of course through the Metro Tunnel but across lots of other parts of the railway network as well. We are already seeing some of those frequency uplifts announced in these same budget papers that I am referring to. As our city grows, whether it is the inner city, whether it is the outer suburbs or whether it is indeed the regions, that is exactly why we need these state-shaping projects. Like the city loop 40 years ago, which the same naysayers over there would have been opposing as well, we need these projects. This is exactly what Labor governments do – they deliver, and that is exactly what the Metro Tunnel is doing.