Victorian State Budget falls short as rural rail and roads miss out

Victoria’s rural road and rail network have been left off the state’s budget agenda, while city roads receive a major funding boost.

The Victorian Budget failed to deliver for rural communities keen to see more road and rail funding.

Rural Victorians feel they’ve been left behind as the Andrews Government’s 2021-22 State Budget pours billions of dollars into already overblown metropolitan Melbourne road and rail projects.

“You can’t tell me there’s not one rule for regional and another for metro,” Victorian Farmers Federation grains group president Ashley Fraser said. “The budget shows there’s a real lack of interest in regional Victoria.”

The original $9 billion cost of Melbourne’s metro rail tunnel project has blown out to $12.43 billion and the $5.5b Westgate tunnel to $6.33b, while $14.8b is spent on level crossing removals.

Yet there was nothing in the budget to match the Federal Government’s commitment of $5m to undertake planning for the full standardisation of the Victorian freight network, which at this stage has been left with a mix of standard and wider broad gauge track.

And grain and horticultural exporters reliant on the Mode Shift Incentive Scheme, which acts as a subsidy to move produce off roads and onto rail, have seen it cut from $5m in 2014, to $4m last year and now $3.6m in 2021-22.

But there was good news in the Budget for CFA volunteers who gained a much needed one-off $22-million boost to upgrading their ageing tankers in 2021-22, plus a long awaited $138.8m to replace their ageing radios.

Volunteer Fire Brigades Victoria chief executive Adam Barnett welcomed the seven-year investment to replace CFA’s ageing radios.

But he said one-off $22m investment in the CFA fleet did not meet the “critical gap in truck funding”, with VFBV analysis showing the CFA needed $29m a year just to return to year-on-year replacement of current trucks.

“Every year that funding does not meet the minimum $29m threshold is another year CFA trucks get older. With some trucks well over 30 years of age, it is already one of the oldest emergency fleets in the country.”

In a bid to find more funding for the CFA and FRV the government will raise the Fire Services Property Levy for all Victorians rates’ notices by $80m to almost $800m within two years.

VFF president Emma Germano said overall last year’s budget invested $6.9 billion in regional Victoria, compared to just $3.7 billion in the 2021-22 budget.

Ms Germano said there were some welcome investments in areas including regional mental health services, traceability and emergency services.

But she said the Government had “failed to adequately invest in the maintenance and upgrades required to make rural and regional roads safe”.

However determining just how much the government is investing in regional roads is almost impossible to extract from the budget papers or Department of Transport annual reports, despite the government establishing Regional Roads Victoria.

Opposition Roads spokeswoman Roma Britnell said there was “no transparency about how much of the road funding is spent on the rural network compared to the metro network”.

Even the Department of Transport performance measures have changed from one budget to the next, making comparisons difficult.

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