Labor’s Peninsula Public Transport Hoax

Legislative Assembly 22 February 2022

Mr MORRIS (Mornington) (12:32): Once again the Andrews government has been caught misleading the peninsula community.

Yesterday a media release trumpeted ‘Improving connections on the Mornington Peninsula’. In fact it is not about improving connections on the Mornington Peninsula or the whole peninsula; it is actually about improving connections in the marginal Labor seat of Nepean and it is about punishing the Liberal seat of Mornington.

The government claims Mount Martha will now have better public transport coverage. No! The Nepean electorate will benefit because of a slight extension to a service that previously terminated in Mount Martha.

The release also claims that travel times will be reduced on the 887 route. If that is true, it is only because the route no longer serves the Mornington electorate at all. Up until yesterday the 887 stopped at Mount Martha, Mornington and Mount Eliza.

Now there is no service—not a reduced service, no service at all.

Now there are 27 stops on the 887 route in the Nepean electorate—previously there were three: at Rosebud, Dromana and Safety Beach—a ninefold increase in stops serving the Nepean electorate, while the Mornington electorate has been wiped out completely.

Local students seeking to access Monash at Frankston have been relegated to the ordinary, totally inadequate public transport system.

Quotes in the release acknowledge the population growth on the Mornington Peninsula, but the growth is peninsula wide and particularly in the seat of Mornington. It is about time the government stopped playing politics with public transport and delivered the services my community deserves.

Suburban Rail Loop – Oversight Committee Needed

Legislative Assembly 16 September 2021

Mr MORRIS (Mornington) (18:03): I thought the member for Mount Waverley had actually been here long enough to appreciate that a reasoned amendment can be moved and in the event that it does not succeed, then the position can be not opposed.

That is what the member for Ripon made very clear to start with. We would prefer the reasoned amendment. We would prefer the public works committee to get up. I understand that the support of the government is of course going to happen, but in the unlikely event that the government does not support that, then we will not be opposing the bill.

The second point in the debate that I just wanted to come to before I speak on the bill itself is the member for Eltham, in opening for the government, made an interesting claim that John Cain was the man responsible for the underground rail loop in Melbourne—interesting to claim.

The trouble with that argument is that the first sod was actually turned in 1971. For those who do not have memories quite as long as mine, Henry Bolte was the Premier in 1971. Most of the construction occurred under Premier Hamer and it was pretty much finalised under Premier Thompson. I cannot remember whether John Cain opened it or not; he may well have.

Mr Pearson: Yes, Flagstaff in 1985.

Mr MORRIS: Okay, the minister at the table says he did get to open it. But he certainly did not initiate it, so let me just make that clear.

As others have said, this bill establishes the Suburban Rail Loop Authority. It is pretty stock standard, and it enables the authority to operate and to manage the operation of the line.

Where the bill gets interesting I think is, without going into the detail of the bill, and just referring to the final few words of the long title, the bill will ‘manage development associated with the Suburban Rail Loop’—manage development associated with the Suburban Rail Loop.

So does this mean that the government is going to be acting as a developer? Because if that is the case—there are some issues with the project itself, and I will certainly come to those—and if this bill is intended to facilitate turning the government of Victoria into a land development corporation through the vehicle of the Suburban Rail Loop Authority, then that is problematic.

The second point on that issue is around—it might be part 5 of the bill—the way the area affected by the project is defined. Basically it is a declared area or an area declared by the authority or the relevant minister, which effectively gives the authority planning powers.

Local councils and local communities can potentially be and are likely to be totally sidelined by this bill. We saw a media release on 2 September talking about how communities are to play a key role in the Suburban Rail Loop. The fact is nothing could be further from the truth. Local municipalities are being sidelined, and we are talking about key areas.

If we take just one example, take Box Hill. If the City of Whitehorse is excluded from having control over planning in the vicinity of this development, then the community is totally excluded. Certainly there is a need to work together. You need to have the opportunity to get that synergy, but to have council sidelined the way that is proposed in this bill is absolutely disgraceful.

The next point I want to make is: why are we being rushed? The bill was second read last Wednesday—Wednesday of last week. A bit over seven days later it is going to the guillotine at 7.30 tonight.

The house will have had, if we debate this bill until the end—and I do not know what the government’s intentions are, but if we do—less than 3 hours of debate on a bill for a project of such significance that it, in the words of the government, dwarfs anything else that the state has ever done. I have got to say when you look at other major infrastructure projects—Snowy Hydro, for example—what we get in terms of bang for our buck in this bill is pretty damn limited.

Now, we know the government has form on major projects. We know they have got form on debt blowing out, and I thought the Auditor-General’s recent report Integrated Transport Planning was relevant to this debate.

The report is on the Victorian integrated transport plan, and effectively the Auditor-General found there was not one. He found that there were 11 published documents plus 21 others and that the government relied on that ragtag of documentation and called it an integrated transport plan. In fact two of those documents are not yet complete. As I mentioned, 11 of them are published, the rest are held by government and not available to the community.

So the fact is in terms of integrated transport planning the state has no plan. The Auditor-General found no whole-of-system approach and zero transparency, yet the government fronts up last week with this bill and wants to wave it through in a matter of hours when the Auditor-General has clearly indicated that the government has form.

Of course we also know that there is no independent advice. Infrastructure Victoria is simply a cheer squad for the government. They are not objectively identifying priorities. They are simply putting forward the views that are being transmitted to them.

I know government members have consistently claimed that Infrastructure Victoria is independent, that it gives independent advice. But the fact is out of a board of seven, three are secretaries of departments: the Secretary of the Department of Premier and Cabinet, the Secretary of the Department of Treasury and Finance and the Secretary of the Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning—three men who work directly for the Premier.

Now, you cannot tell me that they are going to give independent, public advice contrary to the wishes of the government. It just does not happen. So to suggest that the priorities stack up and that somehow this project fits in because Infrastructure Victoria thinks it is okay is absolutely false.

The next point I want to make is that the project is hugely expensive. Is it justified? Is it going to be $50 billion? Is it going to be $100 billion? It is going to be $150 billion? We do not know—and, as I said, there is no independent advice, there is no prioritisation.

I have said repeatedly in this chamber I have no problem at all borrowing money to invest in infrastructure. But it has got to stack up, it has got to provide value for money. It has got to be needed, it has got to either add to the economic capacity of our state or add to the livability of the state.

It has got to be needed, and it has got to be near the top of the pipeline, which we do not know in this case. And it has got to be procured effectively. Obviously procurement is still to come, but there is absolutely no evidence that this project clears any of those other hurdles at all.

Now, we have got this massive business case. Others have referred to it. Two points I want to make just very simply on this. It says clearly in the key findings document that the Suburban Rail Loop comprises three sections, yet the advice prepared is prepared for two of the three sections.

Why is that? I think the member for Ripon referred to the issue of what stacks up and what does not. But you cannot have a complete business case which does not identify what are clearly two separate but connected projects. Does each of them stack up?

The second point I want to make on this is the discount rate. The government says quite up front in this document on page 293 that if you used the normal 7 per cent discount rate it would not stack up. So they have dropped the discount rate to 4 per cent. Wonderful—suddenly it stacks up. It does not.

Simply because you fudged the numbers does not mean it is right. It means you fudged the numbers. It is marginal at best on 4 per cent. It is going to be way out of the ballpark on 7 per cent. So there are some significant issues with this proposal.

That in fact is why the member for Ripon has proposed this reasoned amendment, why the opposition is proposing a public works committee—because we desperately need something to oversight all public works.

We are seeing enormous cost overruns. We had the capex figures withheld from the late budget last year. We saw them this year and—surprise, surprise!—some had blown out by 100 per cent, and the total of the major projects had blown out by over 100 per cent. We have got grossly inadequate business cases, and the one I have just referred to is clearly one of those. We have seen totally inadequate planning.

The Auditor-General has confirmed that. We have seen a total lack of transparency. Again, the Auditor-General has confirmed that. We need parliamentary oversight as an absolute prerequisite for this project and we need parliamentary oversight for the other blown-out major projects the government has put forward.

Mornington North Bus Improvements Long Overdue

Mr MORRIS (Mornington) (17:23): (5634) I raise a matter for the Minister for Public Transport, and the action I seek is that he investigate and allocate funding in the 2021–22 state budget to allow the extension of the existing bus services from Mornington—probably the 781 route, but I will leave that to the experts—so that a bus service is provided to serve the Mornington North community.

I have spoken often about the standard of bus services or the lack of bus services in the Mornington electorate since I have been in this place. We have had some improvements, but the only significant improvements occurred in the period between 2010 and 2014 under the Baillieu and Napthine governments.

That period saw the interchange in central Mornington completely revamped and the routes revamped. It became a far more appropriate service for that period, but of course time moves on, and while we do not have the high-speed growth the City of Casey and other similar municipalities experience, we still have some expansion of the area.

Particularly the area of Mornington North—I am talking about Bungower Road in Mornington—and particularly around the area around the corner of Bungower Road and Racecourse Road, in recent years there have been two major retirement villages developed in that area and an aged-care nursing home, and there is also St Macartan’s Parish Primary School, and there is not a bus stop within a kilometre of that area.

That is a story that is actually repeated right across the electorate. We are very poorly served in terms of services reaching the entire community. I think you would have to say that services only reach probably half of the residential areas of the electorate, but this area is particularly poorly served.

The fact that the government has failed to invest in even a basic service for that area means that there is a very real risk of social isolation for the residents of that area. Unless they own a car, they cannot get to the shops and they cannot do the day-to-day things that they need to do.

Now, I have frequently, as I have said, spoken about bus services in the Mornington electorate.

When I last raised this issue, on 29 August 2019, I mentioned that I had asked the then Minister for Public Transport to meet with the three peninsula MPs to try and do something about the services. The response I got was, ‘I’ve met with the member for Nepean’.

Well, that was terrific for the Nepean electorate, but it did absolutely nothing for the Mornington electorate. I would ask for the assistance of the minister to do something for the Mornington electorate in this coming budget.

Mornington Community Safe Link

Mr MORRIS (Mornington) (19:11:02): (1219) I raise a matter this evening for the Treasurer. I ask the Treasurer to provide an amount of $6 million in the 2020–21 budget to permit the construction of stage 1 of the Mornington community safety link. 

The safety link is the logical extension of the Peninsula Link Trail, which currently terminates at Moorooduc station. It is a shovel-ready project. It will link Moorooduc station with Mornington and lead on to the wider peninsula. It will of course enhance Mornington’s already considerable livability in many ways, but more importantly it will provide an active transport option for residents of Mornington, Mount Eliza and ultimately Mount Martha.

Recreational riders, whether they are locals or tourists, of all ages and abilities, will have the opportunity to use the path for both recreation and relaxation, and we all know the benefits of active recreation for health purposes. It is also an opportunity for commuters to travel within the Mornington area and to Mount Eliza and ultimately Frankston—but also, an important group of commuting cyclists would be the schoolchildren. There is an opportunity there in that the trail would link five schools and two major sporting facilities, and currently there are not particularly good cycling links, or particularly safe cycling links, between those facilities. Kids tend to stay off their bikes, and this sort of facility would certainly have parents encouraging their children to ride to school.

Cycling is a viable transport option in the Mornington area. It is a relatively flat town, but we lack purpose-built cycling and walking infrastructure. We have got increased traffic congestion, which I have spoken about in this place on many occasions, particularly in the vicinity of the schools and facilities that this link would serve. And of course there is the benefit of reduced carbon emissions as well from the expansion of active transport. The shire have tabled a document that identifies a direct economic benefit of some $4.5 million from the construction and a similar indirect benefit, and that is before anyone uses the path.

The path also has the strong support of the Mornington Railway Preservation Society, which currently operates the tourist railway. There are a number of alternatives in terms of funding, but most of those do not have the significant quantum that would allow this project to proceed in full. I am asking the Treasurer to consider this opportunity as a standalone item, objectively consider the considerable benefits of this project for the community and set aside $6 million in the next budget.

Morris calls for bi-partisan approach to public transport

Mornington MP David Morris has called for a bi-partisan approach to public transport on the Mornington Peninsula.

In Parliament this week Mr Morris called on the Minister for Public Transport to convene an urgent meeting with all Peninsula MP’s and Mornington Peninsula Shire Councillors to address our public transport problems.

Mr Morris pointed to the campaign launched by the Shire after years of frustration, saying the Shire “…rightly make the point that at present 82 per cent of the peninsula is not serviced by public transport. Mornington Peninsula shire residents are almost five times less likely to travel to work by public transport than those in greater Melbourne. A mere 3 per cent take public transport to work compared with 15 per cent across Melbourne.”

Mr Morris told the Parliament “Labor has been in power for 16 of the last 20 years and the population has increased significantly but nothing has been done on their watch. “Most recently—one of many times I have raised public transport matters on the peninsula in this house—I raised the issue of the route 788 bus. Ventura,the operator, agreed there was a problem. They had a solution. The minister would not agree… the final response I got was: The member’s interest in these services has been noted, and will be included in considerations for planning in the future.”

“Well, the kids who cannot get on the route 788 bus are not interested in planning for the future. They want the problem fixed now.”

“I am suggesting we need to all sit down around the table—the three local members, the shire councillors and the minister—and try and get some resolution, because the government cannot keep ignoring the Mornington Peninsula when it comes to public transport.”

Call for better bus services – Bungower Road

Mr MORRIS (Mornington) (09:46:10): Last night during the adjournment debate I called on the Minister for Public Transport to meet with the three peninsula MPs in this house and Mornington Peninsula shire councillors in a bid to get the government to finally do something about local public transport.

This morning I tabled a petition bearing 472 signatures calling for improved bus services in the Mornington North Bungower Road precinct.

The area is home to two large retirement villages, Peninsula Grange and Beleura Village, also St Macartan’s Parish Primary School, and both new and established residential areas, yet there is no bus service east of the tourist railway line. Bus services in this part of my electorate have not changed since the area was a sea of paddocks. There were no services then and there are none now.

The area has been completely ignored by public transport planners and by the government. Public transport is a basic service, and it should be reasonably available to all citizens. Simply because you live in an area that was not developed 15 years ago does not mean you should be forced to make do without a bus service now.

The government’s failure to invest in even a basic peninsula-wide public transport service means the residents of this community are at risk of isolation, and unless they drive a car they are unable to access essential services and facilities in Mornington and beyond. The people of this community deserve better.

I call on the minister to take immediate action to provide a long overdue public transport service to the Bungower Road area of Mornington North.

Call for Urgent Meeting on Public Transport

Mr MORRIS (Mornington) I raise a matter this evening for the Minister for Public Transport.

The request that I make of the minister is that she arrange an urgent meeting with the councillors of the Mornington Peninsula shire and the local lower house members of Parliament, the members of Parliament for Mornington, Nepean and Hastings.

I have repeatedly raised in this house the concerns that I have about public transport on the peninsula. The only investment in public transport that has occurred in the last 20 years on the peninsula occurred under the Baillieu and Napthine governments.

Labor has been in power for 16 of the last 20 years and the population has increased significantly but nothing has been done on their watch. Most recently—one of many times I have raised public transport matters on the peninsula in this house—I raised the issue of the route 788 bus. Ventura, the operator, agreed there was a problem. They had a solution.

The minister would not agree. There was no interest in even looking at the proposition, and in fact the final response I got was: The member’s interest in these services has been noted, and will be included in considerations for planning in the future.

Well, the kids who cannot get on the route 788 bus are not interested in planning for the future. They want the problem fixed now.

I note that the member for Nepean in June sought a meeting with the minister and the Mornington Peninsula CEO. I do not know whether that meeting has
occurred or not, but certainly if it has, it has done absolutely nothing to mollify the councillors of the Mornington Peninsula shire, who recently—in fact I think
it was yesterday—launched a program calling for better buses on the Mornington Peninsula.

They rightly make the point that at present 82 per cent of the peninsula is not serviced by public transport. Mornington Peninsula shire residents are almost five times less likely to travel to work by public transport than those in greater Melbourne. A mere 3 per cent take public transport to work compared with 15 per cent across Melbourne.

They are looking for improvements to the 781 route, the 782 route, the 783 route, the 784 route, the 785 route and the 788 route, plus a cross-peninsula service.

As I say, nothing has been done in this space by successive Labor governments for the last 20 years.I am suggesting we need to all sit down around a table—the three local members, the shire councillors and the
minister—and try and get some resolution, because the government cannot keep ignoring the Mornington Peninsula when it comes to public transport.

Petition to improve bus coverage in Mount Eliza

DAVID MORRIS MP: “The current bus services in Mount Eliza are simply not up to standard and in need of an urgent expansion”

To the Legislative Assembly of Victoria, the petition of the residents of the Electorate of Mornington, draws to the attention of the house, the urgent need for improvements to bus coverage in Mount Eliza, east of Nepean Highway.

The petitioners therefore request:
An urgent expansion of bus services in Mount Eliza, east of Nepean Highway.

Click here to download a printable petitionDownload

788 Buses – Extra Services Needed Now

Mr MORRIS (Mornington) (17:20:24): (416)

I raise a matter this evening for the Minister for Public Transport.

The action I seek from the minister is that she agree to the provision of an additional bus service, on the 788 route, to run in scheduling terms just immediately after the current 7.50 a.m. service southbound from Frankston.

I have spoken on many occasions in this house about the impact of population growth on the Mornington Peninsula and drawn the contrast between the expansion of the metropolis into greenfield sites and the provision of new services, and we all know they do not always keep up with the pace.

But the difference between that type of population growth and an established area like the Peninsula, and in particular Mornington is that, because those areas already have existing services, they are rarely expanded to accommodate the additional demands that are placed upon them. Certainly there was a bus service review in 2008, and there were some infrastructure improvements and service improvements proposed.

I am pleased to say that under the Baillieu-Napthine governments the infrastructure improvements including the bus interchange in Mornington itself were in fact implemented, but unfortunately with Labor in power for 16 of the last 20 years we have not had improvements in the services to keep pace with the demands that are being placed upon them.

Beyond the general issue of public transport services, the specific issue is the 788 bus service.

There is a great degree of congestion on the southbound service in the morning and the northbound service in the afternoon, and it has become a particular problem at school times, particularly for students travelling beyond Mornington—hence the reference to the 788 service, which goes beyond the Mornington area. It is worse in the mornings, but it is a problem in the afternoons as well.

We are not talking about a shortage of seats or a bit of squashing up; we are talking about large number of students who are being left behind.

I have spoken to schools about this and I have spoken to Ventura Bus Lines about it, and they both agreed that while overcrowding is often a problem at the start of the year, this year it just has not backed off. Ventura have advised me that they are now in a position subject to government agreement to provide an additional service, which would be designated the 788S, and that would largely solve the problem.

Such a service would of course benefit not just the electorate of Mornington but also the electorate of Frankston and the electorate of Nepean as it travels south through Rosebud.

So I seek the assistance of the minister in authorising the provision of this additional service on the route. It is long overdue, and I urge the minister to support it.