Victorian Labour party deny responsibility for VIC rail link procurement flaws

The Victorian Labour Party has denied that it is responsible for a cost blowout of Victoria’s regional rail link which will go ahead despite being two years late and up to $1.5 billion over budget.

After reviewing the Labor-initiated project, which was previously costed at $4.3 billion, the state coalition government has decided to proceed.

But the rail link won't be finished until 2016 at the earliest and is now expected to cost up to $5.8 billion.
Work on the rail link is being tendered in seven separate packages.

Opposition public transport spokeswoman Fiona Richardson says Public Transport Minister Terry Mulder is misleading the public on the project's cost because most of it has not been put to tender yet.

"We have heard a lot of weak excuses from a weak minister whose heart has never been in this project," she told reporters.

"The assertion that the minister is making is that he can somehow look into the future and see what the cost of those tenders will be."

When pressed by journalists on whether Labor's $4.3 billion price tag was actually a guesstimate, Richardson repeatedly answered that the full cost of the project would be known once all of the

Treasury has found the former government under-costed the project by between $700 million and $1.1 billion.
Signalling and control systems, land acquisition and rising construction costs have chewed up about $900 million in contingency money, which was included in the initial budget.

The revised price tag includes items not previously budgeted for - $259 million for 34 V/Line VLocity train carriages and $150 million for two grade separations at Anderson Road, Sunshine.

When the rail link is complete, major regional lines, including Geelong, Bendigo and Ballarat will, for the first time, have their own tracks into Melbourne.

It will mean V/Line trains won't be held up by breakdowns on the metropolitan network and vice versa.

Read more here.