Ms Anna Burke (Chisholm, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

  I, like everybody else on this side of the House, was wrapped on Saturday night to see so many people on a train ride in outer metropolitan Melbourne, in a regional area—people on a train. People actually like to catch trains, they are not always wanting to be in their cars. Unlike the Prime Minister, who wrote in Battlelines:

Mostly there just aren't enough people wanting to go from a particular place to a particular destination at a particular time to justify any vehicle larger than a car and cars need roads.

Has he been on a train line recently? Has he sat on the Dandenong line? Has he sat on the Waverley line? Has he sat on the Belgrave line? All these service my electorate and all are completely overcrowded. This is a government that said the last state election was a referendum on the East West Link. If it was, they lost. They lost that referendum.

Then the Prime Minister said, 'Victorians elected their new government in a fit of absentmindedness.' How absolutely demeaning. And then we got the federal budget that was meant to be about infrastructure which is only delivering $400 million to Victoria for infrastructure. That is a measly eight per cent of the federal government's infrastructure budget and a measly $67 per person in Victoria—the second most populous state, about to become the most populous state. Victoria needs infrastructure. It needs rail. It needs metro rail. It needs the assistance to get on and to move people around our communities.

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