Tunnel Vision: How Melbourne's Infrastructure Binge Stacks Up Against the World's Big Builders

Victoria has more kilometres of tunnel under active construction right now than any other state in Australian history. The North East Link, the Metro Tunnel's final commissioning works, and the Suburban Rail Loop's first stage between Cheltenham and Box Hill represent a combined capital outlay that Infrastructure Victoria pegged at roughly $125 billion across the forward estimates — a figure that has crept upward with each successive budget update. The Allan government confirmed in May that the Suburban Rail Loop Authority had revised its Cheltenham-to-Box Hill cost to $34.5 billion, up from the $30.9 billion figure used during the 2022 election campaign.

The timing matters because Melbourne is not alone in this predicament. Cities of comparable size and ambition — London, Toronto, and Singapore — have all wrestled simultaneously with cost blowouts, union disputes, and community disruption from multi-year megaproject pipelines. What separates them is not the scale of spending but the machinery behind delivery, and that gap is growing harder for state ministers to explain away.

The comparison the government doesn't want to make

London's Elizabeth Line — Crossrail — ran nine years and roughly £4 billion over its original budget before opening in stages between 2022 and 2023. Painful, but the project covered 118 kilometres of new or upgraded track and is now carrying more than 700,000 passengers a day through central London. Singapore's Thomson-East Coast Line, a 43-kilometre metro extension, opened its final phase in June 2024 on a timeline that slipped by less than 18 months despite construction through one of the world's most congested urban environments. Both cities maintained independent project delivery bodies — Crossrail Ltd and the Land Transport Authority respectively — with ring-fenced budgets and statutory reporting obligations that sat outside the normal departmental machinery.

Melbourne's model is different. The Suburban Rail Loop Authority operates under the Department of Transport and Planning, and its governance arrangements have drawn sustained criticism from the Auditor-General's office. A November 2024 audit found the Authority had not completed a full business case update since 2022, despite material changes in construction costs and interest rates. The CFMEU's ongoing enterprise bargaining disputes on Level Crossing Removal Project sites added roughly four months of delay to works at Merri Creek and around the Fitzroy Gasworks precinct in North Fitzroy last year, a disruption that had no direct equivalent on the Elizabeth Line or Thomson projects.

Where Melbourne has the edge

Not every comparison runs against Victoria. Toronto's Eglinton Crosstown LRT is perhaps the most cautionary tale in the anglophone world — a 19-kilometre light rail line that was more than three years overdue as of mid-2026, with Metrolinx and contractor Crosslinx Transit Solutions locked in a $600 million dispute over defects. Melbourne's Metro Tunnel, by contrast, opened its five new city-loop stations — including the striking Town Hall station beneath Swanston Street — broadly on schedule in October 2025, with the final signalling system handover completed the following January.

The Level Crossing Removal Project, now past its 90th completed removal since 2015, has consistently met its individual site milestones even where industrial action created temporary setbacks. The program's bundling of contracts — awarding packages of eight to ten removals to a single consortium — is a procurement model that Transport for NSW studied in 2023 and has since partially adopted for its own Western Sydney infrastructure package.

The practical question now is whether Victoria can hold that delivery discipline as project complexity escalates. The Suburban Rail Loop's Cheltenham-to-Box Hill section involves tunnelling beneath 26 kilometres of established suburban land, including the Monash Freeway corridor and the Knox and Whitehorse council areas. Utility relocations alone are projected to take until mid-2027 to complete. Community consultation sessions in Glen Waverley and Nunawading in recent months have surfaced sustained concerns about surface disruption on Springvale Road and Blackburn Road running well into the 2030s.

Infrastructure Victoria is due to release an updated State of Infrastructure report before the end of September. That document will, for the first time, benchmark Melbourne's project delivery performance directly against London, Singapore, and Toronto using a common set of cost and schedule metrics. Whatever it finds, the Allan government will need a sharper answer to the question of why the city that pioneered modern tram networks is still working out how to build a train line on time.