Tuesday, 19 March 2024

North East Link

Richard WELCH (North-Eastern Metropolitan) (18:36): (787) My adjournment is directed to the Minister for Transport Infrastructure regarding the North East Link. This is Victoria’s costliest road project at $26.1 billion, $16 billion over the original estimate. North East Link was promised to be finished in 2027, with the government now promising that the North East Link will be finished in 2028 or beyond. There is no clarity. Inability to deliver a project without significant delays is just the start of this project’s governance and ministerial oversight problems. The scope of the project also remains fluid. Watsonia residents are concerned at the constant changes to bridge and walkway coverage and to car parking promised and that any diagrams, illustrations or information days cannot be trusted to represent the true scope of the project being delivered.

In the case of the North East Link project, we do not know how much it will cost, we do not know how long it will take and we do not know how much resource it will take, so there is significant risk. In the private sector any project that loses control of cost, scope, time, resource and risk is rightly considered a delinquent project. When a project is delinquent, best practice requires that the governance structure above immediately intervene to take immediate control and arrest the failure and adopt close monitoring, effectively assuming direct control of the project to prevent greater loss until such time as it is no longer delinquent. A $10 billion overrun does not accumulate overnight, so either the minister and the Premier knew in advance and failed to intervene in a delinquent project or the reporting is so lax that they have lost control. This is clearly a significant project governance failure within the North East Link either way, and the current reporting program is inadequate.

The action I seek from the minister is to commit to revising the reporting cycle and producing monthly public reporting of this delinquent project’s cost, time scale, scope, resource and risk, as would be routinely available under any competent project governance structure, until such time as the project is no longer delinquent, or if not, to provide a guarantee to everyone that there will be no further changes to cost, scope, time, resource and risk in the delivery of North East Link.