Derailed: Victorian Suburban Rail Loop project turns magically into houses

Former Victorian premier Daniel Andrews at the site of the Suburban Rail Loop at Clayton. Picture: Andrew Henshaw/NewsWire

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Labor’s Suburban Rail Loop is the biggest and most expensive transport infrastructure project in Victoria’s history, with construction spanning generations and pumping tens of billions of dollars of extra state debt into future budgets.

Premier Jacinta Allan has dug in behind Daniel Andrews’s legacy, which presumably suggests she believes it is a vote-winner in addition to being a critical link in future-proofing the city’s rail network.

Yet it barely rated a mention in the Treasurer Jaclyn Symes budget speech on Tuesday.

And when it was referenced, the train line magically transformed into a housing development.

“The Suburban Rail Loop is Australia’s largest housing project,” Symes said.

“With Melbourne expected to reach the size of London by the 2050s, it will deliver 70,000 more homes on the doorstep of healthcare, education precincts and jobs.”

It’s consistent with the gradual change in government language around the unfunded rail loop that over the past year it has shifted focus to associated housing developments rather than the trains. The rebadging being included in the budget speech affords this transition official status.

We know Victorian Labor does very little without extensive polling. Data is like catnip for ALP leaders. Don’t forget all the industrial-scale secret polling of Victorians during the pandemic lockdowns.

So it’s quite possible this trains-to-homes switch has been driven by secret polling. And if that is the case, then the polling must have left Labor in no doubt that people weren’t buying the SRL.

So just like that, it’s become a $125bn-plus unfunded housing estate.

If in fact this theory is right, and polling told Labor enough people thought the SRL to be an expensive dud, why not just dump it and move on?

This would also go a long way to detoxing the state’s medium and long-term debt profile.

One explanation could be that so much money has already been poured into the SRL that the political pain would be too great to axe it.

Remember, Labor had already blown $1bn not to build the East West Link and $600m not to host the 2026 Commonwealth Games.

But whether it’s a rail line or a housing estate, it remains the state’s biggest and most expensive infrastructure project. So you would expect it to be referenced in detail in the budget papers.

But it’s not.

To discover what little detail about the unfunded project – the first stage is expected to cost $34.5bn – you have to dig into the reeds of Budget Book No. 4.

Suburban Rail Loop map

Even here, in a book specifically designed to detail the ins and outs of capital works, financial information about the SRL was scant. Sure, the government was still claiming in the budget a third of the cost, about $11bn, will come from Anthony Albanese (although the Prime Minister has refused to commit to more than $2bn).

The budget listed some early expenditure: $967m for initial early works, $33m for power works, a $3.6bn contract for tunnelling between Cheltenham and Glen Waverley. Another tunnelling contract for $1.7bn also got a line.

Yet on every detailed line item from “total estimated investment”, “estimated expenditure to 30 June, 2025”, “estimated expenditure 2025-26”, “remaining expenditure” and “estimated completion date”, all we were told was “TBC” – to be confirmed.

That should alarm every Victorian.