State Budget 2026

It was a budget day last week. I haven’t had a chance to write a blog post so I thought I’d try this: I’ll do a quick video.

Hmm yeah okay it turned out to be 7 minutes long. Not as quick as I thought.

If you prefer to read, no problem. The rest of this blog post is a transcript of the video, with light editing.

On Budget day these books are highly sought after for just a few hours. We get them in the budget lock-up. When you go along there, you have to give up your phone and you get to read the books for a few hours until they get tabled in Parliament and then they’ll let you go.

Worth looking for is how public transport services are going and what the increase is going to be like for the coming year.

And what we can see is there’s a reasonable boost for bus services. Service kilometres are forecast to go up by about 8%. That’s thanks in large part to a package of bus upgrades which was announced before Budget day, totalling around about $100 million over over four years, with a number of routes getting upgrades particularly in middle and outer suburban Melbourne, which is really good.

It’s not solving every problem with the bus network of course, because some of those areas really do have very poor very rudimentary bus services, but it is a big help to those growing parts of Melbourne where those upgrades are going to happen.

For Metro Trains there seems to be an upgrade of about 6% in service kilometre terms over the coming year. That’ll be partly due to the Metro Tunnel coming online a few months ago with increased services but also the services that were funded last year to the Sandringham Craigieburn and Upfield lines mostly and further upgrades coming for the Hurstbridge, Mernda, Belgrave/Lilydale lines that have just been announced. A handful of others as well on some of the other lines.

V/Line service kilometres also appear to be rising which is good, that’s partly thanks to upgrades such as the Gippsland line but also the funding in this budget for the Shepparton line to increase services out there.

In terms of patronage, we don’t know if the estimates for the year ending June 2026 takes into account the growth thanks for the free travel period. But it appears has risen, particularly on Metro, up about 7% over the previous year, expected to rise further about another 2%. I guess we’ll see what actually happens there given there’s going to be half price travel for half of the financial year at least, as well as service improvements which you would expect result in growth.

V/Line has risen 8% say the numbers; I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s going to end up higher than that. With a target of another 2% over the coming year. Again that might be an underestimate given what we know is going on at the moment.

Tram interestingly shows a drop of about 4%. The budget papers say this is down to changes in the methodology for how they compile that data.

Bus patronage is relatively steady but expected to rise about 4% in the coming year so again we’ll have to see how that tracks hopefully that’s an underestimate, but given the changes to fares that are happening at the moment with the free travel and half price fares from July, there might be a few curve balls, a few unexpected results.

Finally in terms of infrastructure there’s a number of relatively low profile kind of investments in better maintenance and other minor projects, including on the train network CCTV at some stations as well as accessibility upgrades.

On the trams there’s not a great deal to see but certainly tram platform stops are proceeding on a couple routes. Nowhere near the rate which is needed to actually completely resolve accessibility issues, but at least there is some progress there.

On the rail network there’s a couple of items that are important in terms of planning for future projects, particularly progressing the Melton electrification which the government says is taking a while due to all the dependencies that have to be resolved and the sequencing of that the broader project to get that done. Hopefully it’s going to accelerate with this planning funding.

And the other one is related related to Upfield/Wallan, which some of you may recall was the first flagged in the (PTV) Rail Network Development Plan about 12 or 13 years ago and that was related to duplicating the northern of the Upfield line but also connecting it through to the Craigieburn line, with the ultimate goal of providing trains not only just go to Upfield also through the Craigieburn and then extend up to Wallan which is where development on Melbourne northern fringe has extended.

So providing suburban trains up there would be a big help.

There’s also a longer term plan to run V/Line Seymour and Shepparton trains down the Upfield line instead of the Craigieburn line. Now I guess this is based off the Craigieburn line being very busy and the Upfield line even with extension up to Wallan being less busy less congested so I guess it’s about ultimately the expansion of the network which is a good thing. 

It’s only planning money at the moment but hopefully that is the first step in terms of actually getting the funding to start to deliver those upgrades – obviously the duplication of the Upfield line is a really key one.

So while the big high profile stuff was pre-announced in the Budget, It is good to see some other investments coming along for public transport.

Particularly good is that shift towards investment in service upgrades. For so long the government has been prioritising infrastructure and now it’s good to see service upgrades really getting a go.

It’s not fixing everything by any means. There’s still going to be some 30+ minute gaps on the Metro train network for instance. But a lot of 40 minute gaps are disappearing with the investment flagged in this year’s Budget as well as last year’s Budget. So as those upgrades come in, I think that’s going to make a real difference to people.

Hopefully this is the next step in improving the public transport network and we continue to see more investment going into the state election period coming up in November but also future State Budgets. 

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Footnotes:

• I wasn’t trying to list out everything in the Budget. Read the Budget Papers if you want to see it all. (The other big one was the extra trains)
• This video was a bit of an experiment. We’ll see if anybody actually watches it.
• Predictably perhaps it turned out to be a lot more effort than just writing the blog post!
• Jeremy Burge came along to the lock up for the first time, and wrote about it
• PTUA’s media release on the State Budget