Victoria’s Suburban Rail Loop (SRL) wins the award for Australia’s worst-ever infrastructure project.
Former premier Daniel Andrews announced the project on the eve of the 2018 state election, proposing a cost of $50 billion.
The SRL was a “captain’s call” by Andrews and was never disclosed to Victoria’s transport department before its announcement because Andrews knew that the department would object.
Even for $50 billion, the SRL never stacked up financially, economically, or socially.
Transport experts, Victoria’s Auditor General, and the Parliamentary Budget Office (PBO) each rejected the case for the SRL.
Since its announcement, the cost of the SRL has escalated from the announced $50 billion to more than $200 billion.
The project is looming as a giant financial millstone around the necks of Victorians that will plunge the state deeper into debt and crowd out the development of urgently needed infrastructure and services across the state, particularly Melbourne’s growth areas.
Over the weekend, The Age reported that the Victorian government has refused to hand over crucial details to Infrastructure Australia so that the body can assess the project before committing further federal government funds.
“Newly uncovered emails show the state government has repeatedly ignored Infrastructure Australia’s attempts over two years to get those details. When The Age asked Premier Jacinta Allan’s government about it, her office did not explain why the information had not been provided”, The Age reported.
“The Albanese government has repeatedly said that funding is contingent on the project being assessed by infrastructure bureaucrats”.
In response, a Victorian government spokesperson claimed that “The SRL Business and Investment Case was rigorously peer reviewed and demonstrates significant social and economic benefits to our growing state”.
RMIT emeritus planning and environment professor Michael Buxton disagreed, noting that the Victorian government had never adequately evaluated the project as cost-effective.
“They didn’t consider any other [transport] options properly”, he said.
Leaked modelling uncovered in July showed there would be a lack of passenger demand for the SRL:
The leaked analysis shows that by mid-century – when Melbourne houses eight million people – there would be only 24,000 trips a day between the first two SRL stations, Cheltenham and Clayton, in Melbourne’s southeast.
It shows that by the same year, trains running between Sunshine and Footscray in Melbourne’s booming west, would be crammed with a whopping 270,000 passengers…
Labor ministers say the data was not shared with Cabinet, which was kept in the dark during key decision-making processes for the SRL…
One Labor minister said the data was not shared with other MPs at the time and that there was little information provided about modelling during decision-making.
“This is exactly why they didn’t bring the SRL to the general Cabinet … at the decision-making point,” they said.
The SRL never made sense, even at its initial announced cost of $50 billion. After all, who in Melbourne is chomping at the bit to ride a train from Cheltenham to Box Hill? Nobody.
With the SRL gobbling up most of the state’s infrastructure budget, existing transport corridors and growth areas will be starved of funding for decades.
By signing the contracts to build the SRL against everyone’s advice, the Labor government has consigned Victorian taxpayers to decades of debt slavery and reduced living standards for a ghost train to nowhere.
