Labor has bungled planning and infrastructure in Victoria for decades and now Albo is exposed
It’s late afternoon on the road to the marginal Victorian Labor seat of McEwen and drivers are having a hell of a time getting home on the Calder and Tullamarine freeways.
Wall to wall cars, trucks and utes.
It’s the same thing that happened in the morning and the same same thing every weekday on the key north and western routes in and out of Melbourne – the Hume, the Calder, Western Highway, the Tullamarine and Geelong Road.
Australia’s answer to gridlock.
Anthony Albanese should take a look at the peak hour mess and ask the question of whether or not these poor old commuters are having their lives wrecked by inadequate infrastructure.
The answer is yes.
McEwen (3.8 per cent), in Melbourne’s outer northeast, is likely to be lost by Labor and the nearby outer seat of Hawke (7.8 per cent) is also under stress, largely because voters feel neglected, consigned to a life of driving and when they get home the basic services often aren’t there.
State Labor, meanwhile, wants to pump tens of billions of dollars into an underground suburban rail loop project (SRL) that looks like a lemon and starts 90km away in Melbourne’s southeast.
The only truly effusive backer is Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan and she may soon be jettisoned if Labor can’t right its poll numbers.
A third vulnerable (inner to middle ring) northern Labor seat, Wills (4.6 per cent versus the Greens) sports a main road to Sydney and its people know a lot about congestion, too.
For Dutton to do really well in Victoria, he needs to pick up every possible seat he can, so he is backing the $13bn Melbourne Airport Rail project, opposing the first stage of the SRL and offering that the related dollar savings stay in the state. It’s all pretty reasonable.
In truth, the federal government is not white hot for SRL either. It was meant to loop from Melbourne’s southeast all the way around to the outer west; $200bn is the latest predicted cost.
But most of today’s voters will be long dead before anything serious happens.
Albanese’s problems in Victoria have an awful lot to do with state Labor and a deliberate decision 25 years ago to back a surge in population to help drive revenue growth and build a more competitive state.
The problem is state and federal governments have not poured in enough money to keep pace with the population growth.
This growth is most acute in outer Melbourne, where the voters Peter Dutton wants to attract generally live.
Labor expects to lose the seat of Aston (3.6 per cent) as well as Chisholm (3.3 per cent) and McEwen.
Beyond that, the Liberals might get gains in the two inner teal seats and no one is ruling out other Labor seats falling.
The big risk for the Coalition is that there are decent anti-Labor swings but the Liberal primary does not benefit markedly from the voter angst.
This is quite possible, especially after the Coalition decided to back a smaller commonwealth public service, something that will alarm a lot of voters in the southern state.
There were 382,823 people employed in the overall Victorian public sector at June 2024, which is nearly 10 per cent of the total workforce.
Dutton has effectively dared these people not to vote for him, even though he has no direct control over their state-based jobs.
Add to the mix his vision for work from home, and he has probably created a subtle but important hurdle for himself, given the difficulty a lot of white collar workers have getting to and from home.
In Victoria, if not the rest of the country, you‘d prefer to be Dutton than Albanese.
Albanese knows Victoria has problems. But whether that’s enough for Labor to lose a stack of seats is quite another question.
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