Thursday, 13 August 2026

 Gaelle BROAD (Northern Victoria) (22:33): (2698) My adjournment is to the minister responsible for V/Line. Kate Kendall, the Liberal candidate for Macedon, was at Kyneton station, where the Labor government back in 2018 promised services every 40 minutes. Yet today, with increasing demand, passengers have been left stranded or sitting on the floor of trains. I often travel by train to Parliament from Bendigo or Castlemaine and experience delays and disruptions myself. ABC local radio provides V/Line service updates, similar to a traffic report, to highlight any delays. I am concerned that with the focus on Big Build projects in Melbourne, this government is treating regional rail services like regional roads: they are being left to fall apart.

On Monday this week the trains on the Bendigo, Geelong and Ballarat lines were disrupted due to a track fault. I spoke with passengers who often travel by train to work in Melbourne, and they said delays and disruptions happen all the time. But perhaps the biggest disruption followed the Telstra outage that suspended V/Line trains for two days, bringing over 550 train services to a halt on 8 and 9 July, with services gradually resuming from midday on Thursday 9 July. The entire regional rail network was halted when a nationwide Telstra communications failure knocked out the critical train radio and control systems. Between 80,000 and 120,000 passengers were impacted. Thousands of people were left stranded, some travelling to work, others returning home and many missing important medical appointments. Around 388 coaches were in operation to support passenger journeys, but it was not enough to meet the demand.

I requested a ministerial briefing to find out what action the government is undertaking to ensure that a statewide V/Line outage does not happen again. The government offered two days of free travel and compensation for additional costs incurred due to the outage, but it is still a matter of discussion with the Australian Rail Track Corporation as to what happens if an outage does occur again. There remains no backup plan. I ask the minister to outline what work is being done to increase the reliability of V/Line services and explain what happened to the Labor government’s commitment, made eight years ago, to increase the frequency of train services to every 40 minutes.