Alan Tudge (Aston, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Education) Share this | Hansard source

and it just means people drive further along until they get to the next one. They also won't be funded. There's the Rowville-Monash rail, with $475 million allocated. That would have finally connected Monash University to the rail line. It was there. It's been on the books for decades. It has also been axed. Have a look, though, at what has been funded. They've neglected the east. They got rid of the East West Link. They scrapped all these projects. What have they funded in this budget? I'll take you through some of them.

We have the one that the member for Lalor was just referring to, the Ison Road overpass, in the member's own electorate. There's another one over in Corangamite, a marginal Labor seat. There's a further one, Camerons Lane interchange, in a marginal seat in McEwen, up in the north. There's a further one in McEwen for the Macedon and shire roads—another Labor marginal seat. There's another one for a business case upgrade in the Labor seats of Hawke and Gorton. There is one little project—$10 million only—for Gippsland, a safe National Party seat.

Effectively, the money's been taken out of the eastern and south-eastern suburbs—as they always do, as they did with the East West Link scrapping—and put into Labor seats in the west and north, with one exception: $2.2 billion for Dan Andrews' pet project, the suburban rail loop, a project that will go from Box Hill down to Cheltenham—which no-one ever takes—for $35 billion. It hasn't been cleared by Infrastructure Australia. The business case didn't stack up. The Auditor-General found that it only got a 50c return for every dollar invested. But it's Dan Andrews' pet project on the eve of an election so that one gets funded as well. It's a disgrace, and the eastern and south-eastern suburban residents have been left out, yet again, by the Labor Party.

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