Ben Carroll says decisions about airport rail are personal. That is a problem

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Four years ago, as Victoria was heading into a state election, then public transport minister Ben Carroll announced that work would soon start on a long-promised rail line to the airport, with a new station at Keilor East by 2028.

On Wednesday, with Victoria heading into a state election, now Premier Ben Carroll stood next to Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to announce that work would soon start on a long-promised rail line to the airport, with a new station at Keilor East by 2031.

Apparently, this is what progress looks like in Victoria.

It is also what pork barrelling looks like, when done on a multibillion-dollar scale.

Keilor East is a well-established suburb in Melbourne’s north-west which sits in the middle of Carroll’s marginal electorate of Niddrie. It is not a particularly fast-growing suburb. It is an ageing community. It is not high on anyone’s list of Melbourne suburbs most in need of a new train station.

The only person in government who thinks building a new station in Keilor East should be a priority is Carroll, who needs residents of Keilor East and neighbouring suburbs to vote for him in sufficient numbers on November 28 to retain his seat.

The original business case for the Melbourne Airport Rail Link (MARL) considered but did not recommend building a new station in Keilor East. It concluded the additional cost and travel time between the airport and city were not justified by the projected “low initial usage” of the station in the years to 2051.

A station at Keilor East was added to the project, backed by a supplementary business case, only after Carroll lobbied then premier Daniel Andrews and then minister for transport infrastructure Jacinta Allan and argued for it in parliament.

“The whole concept of a Keilor East station was never factored in to the original airport rail line,” opposition public transport spokesman Matthew Guy said. “This has only come in, in the last few years, because of his seat. There is no public-interest case for it.”

A Labor MP described the case for Keilor East station as “entirely a political construction”.

The Carroll government has now brought forward plans to start work on the $3.98 billion “second stage” of the Melbourne Airport Rail Link, including the new station at Keilor East. The first stage is $4.1 billion of works at and around Sunshine station.

Airport rail, a concept first envisaged more than half a century ago, has in recent years had a start-stop history. The reason the completion date for a new station in Keilor East slipped from 2028 to 2031 is because Andrews, to the frustration of Carroll, put the whole project on ice in his final year in office.

The reason Andrews did this is that negotiations on the project had broken down between the government and Melbourne Airport and Andrews wanted to push ahead with the Suburban Rail Loop and other major transport projects.

Andrews confirmed as much in a handwritten note he passed to Carroll during a cabinet meeting. “We’ve got the sequence (at last) right on MARL,” it read.

Things only thawed out for airport rail in March last year, when the state and federal governments signed a memorandum of understanding with Melbourne Airport to resume negotiations. Those negotiations are far from complete.

The Melbourne Airport Rail Link, at this point, does not have a final price tag or completion date. It was costed in 2022 at $11.5 billion but much has changed with the project since then.

The government was on Wednesday unable to say how much compensation Melbourne Airport will receive for putting the airport station next to its terminals instead of underneath – a well-placed source put the figure north of $1 billion – or what a “premium” ticket to ride the MARL will cost to help finance the project.

And so far, no one has been able to explain how airport trains will be able to squeeze into a Metro Tunnel which, according to its own business case, will by 2031 be running at capacity with peak-time trains from Sunbury, Watergardens and Melton.

Andrews was besotted with the SRL because he believed it helped win him the 2018 and 2022 elections. Carroll never much liked the SRL, but he loves airport rail. Same pork, different barrel.

On Wednesday, as Carroll stood with Albanese and other government ministers in a dusty Tottenham rail yard, he introduced himself as the airport rail premier. “This is personal for me,” he said.

It shouldn’t be. Not when you are committing to spending nearly $4 billion of public funds. This isn’t one of Scott Morrison’s phantom car parks or a fistful of dollars for a local gun club. It is a project that carries an enormous cost and opportunity cost.

The state and federal governments have earmarked $12 billion for airport rail, so no further funds are needed to start laying tracks towards Keilor East. But bringing forward expenditure on this project leaves less money to spend on others.

At the start of this week, Carroll committed a comparatively modest $80 million to study the proposed duplication of the Upfield rail line – in effect, an announcement to delay something the government should already be doing.

Duplicating the Upfield line will increase rail services to fast-growing suburbs in Melbourne’s north. Once this is done, it opens the possibility of extending the metropolitan network to satellite towns like Donnybrook, Wallan and Beveridge.

When Carroll is making decisions as premier, the needs of people living in these communities should be no less important to him than those of his local electors.

When did the bastardisation of major projects start in Victoria? It is a question that Chris Kourakis, the retired judge running the royal commission into the Building Bad scandal, has already posed, albeit in a more polite form of words.

Carroll established the royal commission. He should start thinking about what he’d say in the witness box.

Chip Le Grand is state political editor.

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