Victoria's Suburban Rail Loop (SRL) was announced in 2018 with a $50B price tag. By 2023 the Parliamentary Budget Office estimated full lifecycle cost at $216B — a 540% blowout before a single station opened. The Victorian Auditor-General found the business case was never independently validated and the cost estimate understated risk by 300%.
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$125.0B of Australian taxpayer money was wasted at Major Transport Infrastructure Authority. Victoria's Suburban Rail Loop (SRL) was announced in 2018 with a $50B price tag. By 2023 the Parliamentary Budget Office estimated full lifecycle cost at $216B — a 540% blowout before a single station opened. The Victorian Auditor-General found the business case was never independently validated and the cost estimate understated risk by 300%.
Spread across Australia's 10.8 million households, that's roughly $11,574 per family — enough in total for funding roughly 1042 public hospitals for a full year.
The Suburban Rail Loop was announced in November 2018 with an estimated cost of $50 billion for the full orbital loop from Cheltenham to Werribee via the eastern and northern suburbs of Melbourne. The project was not subject to a published business case or independent cost review prior to the 2018 announcement. By 2021, Infrastructure Victoria's independent review placed the cost at $94–125B. The Parliamentary Budget Office 2023 analysis estimated the full lifecycle cost (build + operate + maintain for 60 years) at $125–216B — representing a 250–540% increase on the original $50B figure. Stage 1 (Cheltenham to Box Hill, 6 stations) alone is now estimated at $34.5B, up from $9B in 2018. The Victorian Auditor-General's Office 2023 report 'SRL Stage 1: Early Project Decisions' found: the business case was completed after the project was announced (post-decision rationalisation); no peer review of cost estimates was commissioned; transport modelling assumptions about patronage were 'optimistic and not supported by evidence'; the project's BCR (benefit-cost ratio) was calculated at 0.35 under central assumptions, meaning it destroys $0.65 of value for every $1 spent; and Cabinet was not provided with the range of cost estimates. The State has committed to SRL before funding is secured from the Commonwealth.
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