Wednesday, 1 April 2026

 Wendy LOVELL (Northern Victoria) (17:35): I rise to speak on the Department of Transport and Planning annual report for 2024–25. Particularly I want to speak about public transport opportunities in Greater Shepparton, or should I say the lack of public transport opportunities in Greater Shepparton. Last Sunday we woke to the news of the government’s big fanfare announcement that there would be free public transport for all Victorians on trains and buses in Victoria as a cost-of-living relief measure. That is all very well if you actually have trains and buses, but we do not have very much in the way of a service of trains or a bus network in Greater Shepparton. In fact what trains we do have going between Shepparton and Melbourne are often overcrowded. Constituents are reporting to me and to the member for Shepparton Kim O’Keeffe that they are being forced to stand on trains – all the way from Melbourne to Shepparton – or sit on the floor of the carriage, and this is just not good enough.

It is particularly not good enough because this government promised Shepparton that they would have nine return weekday services Monday to Friday and they would have five return services on a Saturday. Those additional services have not been forthcoming. They were supposed to have been delivered by 2023. We know this government fell behind with the track work and signalling work that needed to be done in order to deliver those additional services, but the government put out a press release last year to say that the track work and signalling work would be completed by 14 December. They then issued a new train timetable, in February. There are dozens of extra services for other regional lines, but not a single extra service on the Shepparton line. The nine return services Monday to Friday and the five on the weekend that were promised have not been included in their new timetable, despite them claiming that they have now finished the work on the tracks and the signals.

The government have also now changed their rhetoric from that we would get the nine services and the five on the weekend to ‘The work creates the capacity for that number of trains’, rather than actually delivering those services to the people of Greater Shepparton. They could solve some of the overcrowding by putting some extra carriages on the trains. There are only three carriages on most of the trains, and that causes a lot of the overcrowding. The people of Shepparton are demanding those additional services that they were promised by the Premier. The Swan Hill train on the weekend was also overcrowded. People were standing on that. They were actually packed in like sardines – and it is a very long way from Melbourne to Swan Hill. That was a huge concern, and I know that Jacqui Felgate raised that particular issue.

What we also need in Greater Shepparton is a review of our bus services. We have not had a bus service review for at least 15 years. We have a lot of new estates in Shepparton that were not even existent 15 years ago and are not connected to the public transport service via a bus service. You cannot get a bus in Shepparton that takes you to the industrial estate for work. So if you work in the industrial estate, forget getting public transport to work, because there is not a bus that goes there. It is not part of the bus network. If you live in Mooroopna, you could get a bus that would drop you in the CBD of Shepparton, right in the heart of the shopping centre, if you happened to work there. But if you work at the Marketplace, you could not possibly get a bus that would get you there any earlier than 10:38, or if you work at the Riverside Plaza it would be 10:20. These bus services are not friendly for people who are travelling to and from work, and they are not servicing our community adequately.

There are no buses to Mooroopna or to Tatura on a Saturday afternoon or a Sunday. People cannot get around our city without a better bus network. The Tatura bus – every day, Monday to Friday – actually leaves Tatura at 9:30, so there is no hope of it getting you to Shepparton in time for work. I think it takes about 40 minutes to get to Shepparton; it is a trip that should take 20. There are no bus connections to areas like Congupna and Nathalia or Tallygaroopna. Our public transport system in regional Victoria is almost non-existent and needs to be upgraded.