Thursday, 27 August 2026

 David DAVIS (Southern Metropolitan) (09:57): Today I want to draw to the house’s attention the shocking discoveries from the Auditor-General’s report yesterday. Victorians I think will be absolutely shocked and infuriated by what they have discovered. The state government plans to take $8 billion out of Victorians in a transport tax to backfill and pay for the cost blowouts and the underfunding of the Suburban Rail Loop. The Suburban Rail Loop is a project that nobody requested and nobody wanted. It was dreamed up through a bad process – a corrupt process, actually – and now we discover that Ben Carroll and others in the government, including the former Premier Jacinta Allan, knew about this tax, discussed it first in 2021 and again in 2024 and imposed it from 1 January 2025. But they did not take the Victorian people into their confidence to say, ‘We’re imposing a new tax on every transport ticket in the state.’ I have to say it is an absolute outrage to think that they could impose this massive multibillion-dollar tax on every single transport ticket in the state. People coming from the country and people moving around the city all have been hit with Labor’s secret tax and will continue to be hit until 2060 and beyond. It is an outrage. It is one of the most corrupt things I have heard of in public life.