Wednesday, 26 August 2026

 Wendy LOVELL (Northern Victoria) (17:41): I also rise to speak on this disgraceful report that has been handed down today. When I say ‘disgraceful report’, I do not mean that the report itself, written by the Victorian Auditor-General’s Office (VAGO), is disgraceful but that the content of it shows the disgraceful behaviour of this government in delivering the Suburban Rail Loop. It is just an absolute scandal. First of all, let us talk about Ben Carroll’s sneaky, mean and deceptive tax. This is a tax that Labor have been charging Victorians for nearly two years, but they never told Victorians that they had actually imposed this tax. They just added it in when they did the CPI increases to public transport fares. But it is not just on metropolitan people who may use this tunnel. They extended that out to every bus service in regional Victoria and every train ticket on a V/Line carriage. Regional Victorians are actually being taxed to pay for Labor’s vanity project in the south-eastern suburbs – a rail loop that they will never use.

Yet we go without infrastructure in our area. With most trains, people are being turfed off onto buses because the train services are not good enough. The north-east line is an absolute disgrace. The buses in regional Victoria are a disgrace. In Shepparton you cannot get a bus to work if you work in the industrial estate. You cannot get a bus from Mooroopna to Shepparton in time for work. You cannot even get a bus on a Saturday afternoon or a Sunday from Mooroopna to Shepparton. God help you if you live in Tatura. There are only two buses a day to Shepparton, and only one of those is a return service. We have disgraceful public transport in regional Victoria, and yet the Labor government – Ben Carroll, Jacinta Allan and all of those people who sat around the cabinet table – think it is appropriate to tax regional Victorians to pay for Melbourne infrastructure.

The VAGO report exposes that this is going to cost about $8 billion by 2062. That is another point. It is not just for the past two years that they have been charging this; this goes on until 2062. That is almost 40 years of taxing regional Victorians to pay for Melbourne infrastructure. In the VAGO briefing the Auditor-General confirmed that the government actually knew that this project was over budget and behind its delivery time in January this year. Yet the former Treasurer and the former Minister for the Suburban Rail Loop, who have sat in this place and told us constantly that this project was on time and on budget, have been misleading this house for most of this year, because they knew that this project was not on time and was not on budget.

The tax in this actually starts 10 years before people can even use the infrastructure, which is just disgraceful. As it is, Labor have put a secret tax on all regional and metropolitan rail users – but particularly I am offended by the tax on regional rail users – in order to fund this loop in metropolitan Melbourne. The tax means regional Victorians will be paying higher prices for almost 40 years to fund a rail tunnel that most of them will never use. Labor once again has proved its disdain for regional Victorians by hitting them with a sneaky tax to pay for city projects while regional roads are left to rot and regional commuters are left to transfer onto buses most of the time because the rail services do not work. It is just a disgrace what this government has done, and the Auditor-General has done a very good job of exposing just what a dog of a project, to quote Stephen Conroy, the Suburban Rail Loop is.