The Suburban Rail Loop will play a major role in the 2026 Victorian election. Why is it so controversial?

One of the key legacies of the nearly 12-year-old Labor government in Victoria has been a massive investment in infrastructure.

The Suburban Rail Loop has been a prominent project in this debate.

So why is it so controversial? The rail loop is an example of a long-term problem in Victoria: prioritising ad-hoc infrastructure projects over coordinated planning.

When it was first elected in 2014, the Andrews Labor government promised to create 10,000 construction jobs by building the Melbourne Metro Tunnel, and Western Distributor (which would link the Westgate Freeway with the Port of Melbourne), and removing 50 level crossings.

It later added the Monash and Tullamarine Freeway widenings and the North East Link to that list.

But there was no overarching integrated land-use and transport plan that explained the need for these projects or how they related to each other.

Infrastructure is a long-term investment with high up-front costs, so it requires careful planning to avoid misallocating public money.

Infrastructure plans should follow well-prepared long-term metropolitan plans, based on deliberative and transparent analysis of alternative future scenarios.

They also need strong public input.

The rail loop has not had any of this in a meaningful way.

And now it is set to play a significant role in the Victorian state election in November.

Such is the political sensitivity of the issue that new Premier Ben Carroll has announced $2 billion in savings on the project by cutting back on some of the associated infrastructure.

Victoria’s big – and expensive – build None of the infrastructure projects developed after 2014 followed an integrated metropolitan transport and land-use plan for Melbourne.

In 2021 the Victorian auditor-general rang the alarm bell by saying: The absence of a transport plan as required by the [Transport Integration] Act, during a decade of unprecedented investment in transport infrastructure, creates risks of missed opportunities to sequence and optimise the benefits of these investments to best meet Victoria’s transport needs.