Wednesday, 18 March 2026

 Melina BATH (Eastern Victoria) (17:30): I rise tonight to speak on the Victorian Auditor-General’s Office’s Modernising Myki from March 2026, just released this week in Parliament. I have the deepest respect for VAGO, but I really think that the topic, modernising Myki, is a bit of a misnomer, because for as long as I have been alive – and that is quite a long time – and as long as Myki has been alive it has been on the back foot in terms of modernisation. It was supposed to modernise and replace Metcard. I even remember coming in from the country and using that from time to time. But fancy modernising something that has been dogged by a botched rollout for the past 20 years. As I said, it replaced Metcard. It was around $1 billion in budget, but it rapidly became notorious back in the day for cost overruns and delays. We have seen that even previous VAGO reports from 2007 and 2015 referenced audits around the plagued name of Myki. One of the things that the government also just does not seem to get right – whether that is the former Bracks and Brumby governments or this one – is software rollout issues. Again, it consumed a whole lot of blowouts with faulty readers and poor reliability setting the tone for decades to come.

One of the things that I often think about – I digress slightly from Myki – was a thing called Ultranet. It was going to revolutionise the interaction between educators, teachers and students. It had the most massive rollout – I was a teacher at the time – and they had this whole song-and-dance show. It was like a spectacular and it was ‘I’m an Ultranet girl and I live in an Ultranet world.’ Well, the first day that we went to log on and use it – millions of dollars for that campaign, mind you – all across the state in the public system, it crashed and died, and then they just packed up Ultranet and put it away in the bottom drawer. It died a sad death. Maybe unfortunately for Myki, Myki never died because it kind of had life support systems going on for many years, and now the government is about to refresh it. Let me see: in 2023 the contract changed and we saw that the government was now going to bring out something that New South Wales has had for years and years, and that is a tap-and-go system. My goodness, if you go up there, they used to have the Opal system and they may still have it. When I go to visit my family up in New South Wales, I tap my credit card or I tap my debit card. It works on any sort of –

Members interjecting.

Melina BATH: I see I am firing up the folks on the other side. I have hit a little nerve. Let me tell you what the Auditor-General says:

The myki modernisation project is on track to meet its reset timeline.

So it is already going to blow out until 2028. It is going to cost more money – $138 billion. The Auditor-General says this:

But it did not resolve known issues before awarding the project contract.

What a shock that is for this side of the house – that the government did not resolve contract issues.

This led to early disputes between DTP and the main contractor, which resulted in a contract standstill –

again, no surprise here –

and project reset.

This extended the project timeline by 18 months and then out to $136.8 million. That is what the Auditor-General says. And further:

The project’s overall value for money is uncertain.

Well, again, there is no shock to anyone on this side of the house that this current Labor government cannot manage money. It certainly cannot manage simple things like Myki rollouts or the new contact payments. Let me just in my last 30 seconds give you a snapshot from Gippsland, in my electorate, of what we see. What we see is that for the poor old people – wonderful people – that live in the country it has never extended that far. It extends to Traralgon, and thank goodness for that, but does not extend down into all of the towns around South Gippsland. You do not get that; you get old-fashioned paper-clipped copies. You do not get contact, you do not get Myki; you just get a bit of old paper, and Lord help the person if they do not have the right cash sometimes, because they cannot get on the bus.