East West Link

The Senate voted 32 to 30 against a motion by Janet Rice, Australian Greens Senator for Victoria. The motion primarily sought to call on the government to reallocate funding set aside for the East West Link to the Melbourne Metro Rail project.

The motion in its entirety was as follows:

That the Senate—

(a) notes that:

(i) Australia suffered a severe underfunding of public transport under the Abbott Government,

(ii) the former Prime Minister, Mr Abbott, labelled the 2014 Victorian election as a 'referendum on the East West Link', and that there was a change of government in Victoria because of that election, and

(iii) the Turnbull Government has this week [11 October to 17 October 2015] labelled the East West Link toll road as 'indispensable and inevitable', and included it in a publicly-released list of their priority infrastructure projects for Victoria; and

(b) calls on the Government to withdraw the allocation of federal funding set aside for East West Link and to reallocate this funding to the Melbourne Metro Rail project.