Daniel Andrews’ rail loop funding ‘doesn’t stack up’

The Auditor-General’s reports were among 52 tabled in Victorian parliament on the final sitting day before the state election.

Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews in Melbourne on Wednesday. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Andrew Henshaw

Victoria’s Auditor-General has found the business cases for two of the Andrews government’s biggest infrastructure projects do not stack up.

Andrew Greaves tabled reports into the Quality of Major Transport Infrastructure Project Business Cases, and Major Projects Performance Reporting 2022, in state parliament on Wednesday – the final sitting day before the ­November 26 state election.

Mr Greaves concluded the business cases for both the Suburban Rail Loop and Melbourne Airport Rail “do not support fully informed investment decisions”.

The first stage of the Suburban Rail Loop, from Cheltenham to Box Hill, is expected to cost more than $34.5bn, while Airport Rail has been costed at between $8bn and $13bn.

The entire Suburban Rail Loop is intended to run to Werribee in Melbourne’s outer southwest, via the airport, costing tens of billions of dollars more.

The Victorian opposition has vowed to shelve the project, should it be elected, and divert the funds to the state’s health system.

Mr Greaves found the business case the Department of Transport and Suburban Rail Loop Authority had provided to the government for the SRL program “only analysed part of the program” and “did not fully meet” the Department of Treasury and Finance’s guidance requirements.

“DTF has provided substantial advice to the government on the SRL program since 2019. However, it is yet to complete the assessment of the business case required under its High Value, High Reward project assurance framework to give the government confidence in its deliverability,” Mr Greaves found.

He found the early development of the SRL business case was “atypical for the state’s largest ever transport infrastructure project”, because no transport agencies were involved in its planning and development, and the Department of Premier and Cabinet, which commissioned its development, “has no record of its decision to do so, or of its review of the business case before it provided it to government in April 2018”.

Mr Greaves found the Airport Rail’s case “did not fully meet DTF’s guidance requirements and was too late to inform key government decisions on the project”.

In his separate report on major project performance reporting, Mr Greaves found DTF and public sector entities “do not consistently report on major projects’ performance in a transparent way”.

“Without this information, parliament and the community cannot hold responsible entities accountable,” he found, suggesting the government establish a data dashboard to help the community “better understand how entities are managing Victoria’s major projects”.

The Auditor-General’s infrastructure reports were among 52 tabled in parliament on Wednesday. Mr Greaves also handed down reports on Victoria’s troubled child protection sector, finding the Department of Families, Fairness and Housing “does not have adequate controls to ensure its child protection data is of high quality”, resulting in “incomplete, inaccurate and inconsistent data”, and potentially affecting decisions in the lives of vulnerable children.

In a separate report, he found that “despite positive intent and action, the child protection practitioner workforce remains under-resourced, under-supervised, and under pressure”.

The Health Department’s annual report revealed former police commissioner Ken Lay is being paid $227,091 to provide advice on Victoria’s second medically supervised injecting room.

Despite commissioning the report in July 2020, the government has confirmed it will now not be published until after the election.