Michael Sukkar (Deakin, Liberal Party, Assistant Minister to the Treasurer) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

With another year well and truly underway, Melburnians returning to work wouldn't be able to help but feel that the traffic on roads in Melbourne keeps getting worse and worse. According to research undertaken by the Grattan Institute last year, they couldn't be faulted for thinking that, because Melbourne has the dubious honour of being the most congested city in our country, outranking even Sydney, which for many Melburnians would come as somewhat of a shock. As previous reports from the RACV and Infrastructure Australia have confirmed, the Eastern Freeway junction with Hoddle Street and Alexandra Parade is the worst choke point in the entire country, let alone in our city. Sadly, due to the decision of Daniel Andrews and Bill Shorten to cancel the contracts to build the East West Link, there remains no solution underway for long-term sufferers who use this road, most of whom live in the eastern suburbs. It's worth recalling that in 2015 the state Labor government wasted $1.2 billion—and counting—to cancel this crucial project, a project that would have been well and truly underway by now, saving commuters on the Eastern Freeway about three hours per week in travel time.

But, to make matters even worse, the state Labor government is proposing to push ahead with the North East Link, a project that is more than 10 years away and that will ultimately funnel more than 130,000 additional vehicles onto the Eastern Freeway each day. That's 130,000 additional cars on the Eastern Freeway at peak hour each morning and afternoon. While the North East Link is rightly considered a decent project, in a speech to Infrastructure Partnerships Australia last year, infrastructure expert Sir Rod Eddington stressed that there was no silver-bullet solution and echoed the sentiment that you cannot do the North East Link before you have fixed the East West Link bottleneck. Even Labor's own hand-picked advisers at Infrastructure Victoria have stressed that the East West Link should commence as soon as possible to avoid the long-term flow-on effects to Melbourne's economy and, quite frankly, to the standard of living of everybody who lives around the Eastern Freeway.

That's why I'm pleased that the Victorian opposition leader, Matthew Guy, has committed to delivering the East West Link if a Liberal government is elected later this year. That commitment will continue to be supported by the federal government, which still has $3 billion of funding on the table to help build the East West Link. That $3 billion will be there for an incoming Matthew Guy government.