Wednesday, 1 April 2026

 Evan MULHOLLAND (Northern Metropolitan) (18:59): (2476) My adjournment tonight is for the Minister for Public and Active Transport, and it is once again about my favourite topic Donnybrook Road. Specifically I would like to raise with the minister the boom gates at Donnybrook railway station, which add even more delays to the commute times of my residents on the two-lane farm track that her government stubbornly refuses to urgently upgrade. To make matters worse, I am regularly contacted by local residents and commuters who tell me that the boom gates are jammed and are stuck closed for extended periods of time. To quote one of my constituents:

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This is like every other week now that traffic is banked up. A 5-minute supermarket run is now taking 90 minutes because of this. It feels like they are just patching it up instead of fixing this.

I could not have chosen a better metaphor for how Labor treats the northern suburbs when it comes to infrastructure – patching it up. This is something that my colleague Wendy Lovell has spoken about as well. Labor continues to neglect the northern suburbs with piecemeal projects while taking their hard-earned tax dollars, including all the stamp duty revenue from the Donnybrook, Kalkallo and Mickleham area, and spending it on things like the $50 billion Cheltenham to Box Hill rail line in the Suburban Rail Loop or giving it to their mates in the CFMEU to rort $15 billion of taxpayers money. As a result, serious infrastructure needs like upgrading Donnybrook Road or removing this level crossing are ignored, and it is my community that continues to suffer from Labor neglect.

Just last year the federal and state governments announced another delaying tactic: that they would duplicate the bridge over Kalkallo Creek and blow up a roundabout at Mitchell Street where they only in 2023 upgraded and completed construction of a slip lane for $125 million, of which the state probably only contributed about 10 to 15 per cent. I will continue to raise this issue of the need to properly duplicate Donnybrook Road and to remove this level crossing with relevant ministers, and I seek the action of the Minister for Public and Active Transport to urgently investigate faults with the level crossing on Donnybrook Road so that my constituents are no longer condemned to even more of Labor’s traffic chaos. Enough is enough. Donnybrook Road is a disgrace. It is a two-lane farm track, and my constituents keep getting stuck at the level crossings. It is almost every day or every second day that the boom gates are stuck and everything is shut down.