Coalition serves up new shadow PT minister

Last week the Coalition announced a new shadow cabinet. The most significant change for those following public transport has been Sam Groth taking over from Matthew Guy as shadow minister for public transport. Also notable is that Matthew Guy takes over major projects from Evan Mulholland. That includes the Suburban Rail Loop East, which will almost certainly be past the point of no return by the 2026 election if it isn't already.   

Success requires work

Government ministers are pretty much forced to put in a certain minimum amount of effort. In government there is a department to run, bucket loads of correspondence, decisions to make and questions to answer. There's a lot of structure and if you don't perform there's others who want your job. 

Whereas if you are an opposition shadow minister how (or how much) you do your job is more up to you. Especially if you have enough seniority or party standing to guarantee your position. 

Either you just coast along or, lacking the staff and departmental resources of government, work harder than your opponent minister to develop policy, expose mismanagement and generally hold them to account. Maintaining such energy may be harder if party morale is low, although the best people are driven internally or consider it their mission. 

Measuring the productivity of individual politicians is difficult. Some policies are team affairs so to attribute credit (or blame) on one person may be unfair. You can use quantitative measures like questions asked but that doesn't necessarily imply quality or impact. Still, scale is important; if you don't do the quantity then quality has little impact if the matter is narrow or trifling. 

Questions asked

Earlier this year I analysed who asked the most questions on transport matters in parliament. As expected opposition members asked more on average than government members. There were also differences between the houses, possibly as the Legislative Council is a house of review and in which governments rarely hold a majority.

If you use questions asked as a criteria the Coalition's best performers sit in the Legislative Council. Some of their Legislative Assembly colleagues pull their weight but not all. Matthew Guy has been a particular disappointment in this term, asking just seven questions on transport, despite this being one of his shadow portfolios. 

Does being an active parliamentary questioner help promotion prospects in Brad Battin's Coalition team? It seemed to help. The three new October 2025 entrants to the Shadow Cabinet (Nicole Werner, Richard Welch and Nick McGowan) were all above average question askers. 

Media releases

Asking questions isn't the only thing an opposition member can do to hold the government to account, especially if they are shadow minister. Media releases is another. The Liberals have all theirs (and some from their Nationals coalition partners) from 2023 here. 

The number of releases per year for transport and planning related topics is graphed below. Coalition interest in public transport (if measured by media releases) has crashed, with just 5 issued in 2025 to date compared to 20 in 2023. Interest in roads is also less than in 2023. Release volumes in Planning and Housing peaked in 2024 while 2025 has been a top year for releases on major projects. 

The topicality of issues as well as the shadow minister involved likely affects the volume of releases (noting that we are only measuring output, not whether the media runs with it).

I used Parliament's website as a source of portfolios held and tabulated them below. Click for a better view.  

Not all releases in a portfolio are from that shadow minister - other senior members may also issue releases on a topic. Radio interviews or social media posts may not be captured. Still, one can discern clear links between people and media release output. For example Richard Riordan in Public Transport, James Newbury in Planning and Evan Mulholland in Major Projects rank amongst the more active.

Conversely Matthew Guy, public transport's recent shadow, has been associated with a diminishing and now low level of media release activity. Which (unhelpfully for the Coalition's profile in transport) matches inactivity in Question Time mentioned before. 

Opportunities to roast the government on areas where it is vulnerable (such as inadequate public transport services including for major events, abandoned bus reform, continual rail shutdowns and rolling bus strikes) have conspicuously gone unexploited, much to the minister's joy. 

Others on public transport

Mr Guy has not been the sole or even dominant voice from the Coalition side on public transport.

Liberal MLCs in areas that are almost entirely represented by Labor in the lower house have a particular opportunity. This has been exploited by Evan Mulholland in Northern Metropolitan and Moira Deeming in Western Metropolitan. Some regional MPs have also been prominent. 

Trung Luu in Western Metropolitan is less publicly known but had a major recent success in getting numerous internal DTP documents tabled, thus exposing the government's ditching of promised bus  plan network reform. Such bus reform could have increased patronage by about 80 million passenger trips per year by 2030, making it bigger than what we think of as being major projects such as North-East Link, West Gate Tunnel and the Suburban Rail Loop East. 

I should also mention others supporting bus upgrades in the underserved Dandenong area before the government latched on. That includes the 2022 state and 2023 Mulgrave by-election plus more recent supportive speeches from Ann-Marie Hermans. 

The consistent pattern is that a backbencher may say or get something something in parliament but without weight, support and persistence from the shadow minister the matter just dies. Or, at best, such as happened in the 2022 state election campaign the Coalition had a significant bus service policy but it didn't get the promotion it deserved.     

The new shadow

On 11 October 2025 incoming shadow Public Transport Minister Sam Groth issued a statement on his Facebook page welcoming his appointment to the role. That statement included mention of the lack of public transport options in his seat of Nepean that he wanted to address as a priority. 

His prior record includes asking 11 questions on transport matters. Not the most active but not the least active either. And more questions than then public transport's shadow minister. 

From December 2022 to October 2025 Mr Groth held a range of shadow tourism, sport and recreation portfolios. This matched his sporting background and his seat of Nepean. While normally a junior portfolio sport has been particularly prominent given the government's bungling of the 2026 Commonwealth Games bid. This contributed to a high amount of media release activity from him. 

His prior question and media release activity give some hope that we might hear more from the Coalition on public transport in the next year than we have in the last two.

Also Mr Groth can take heart from the fact that despite the political fashion to declare oneself a gunzel, this is not a pre-requisite for success and could even be a hindrance. Instead, as he may have already learned in sport, there is no substitute for the will to work and win for success in public transport politics. 

UN 214: 15 years since Melbourne's first 10 minute frequent Metro timetable

 

Executive summary: Today marks 15 years since the first every 10 minute off-peak Metro train line started in Melbourne. We've only added one more all week turn-up-and-go line since. But with the Metro Tunnel starting soon, there's prospects for the next decade to have more in store.  

There's been a lot of Metro Tunnel discussion this week.

But today I want to talk about the transformative timetable that arguably started it all. Commencing 15 years ago today, it introduced passengers to the idea that you could rock up at a station in the middle of the day and have a train within 10 minutes.

Every 10 minutes is the sort of frequency that would induce people to 'turn up and go' and not worry too much about timetables. And for Melbourne, where 15, 20, 30 and even 40 minute midday metropolitan train frequencies were (and still are) the norm, it marked a big break from the past in the traditionally slow-moving world of rail network planning. 

Faster change was driven by surging patronage taxing a fragile and unreliable metropolitan rail network that frequently made headlines for the wrong reasons. Off-peak train timetables were last significantly upgraded in the 1990s with particular gains for Sandringham, Frankston, Pakenham/Cranbourne, Alamein and Upfield on weekdays and network-wide on Sundays (in 1999). They had been stagnant for nearly a decade since. 

That drought ended, firstly with shoe-horning extra peak trips into existing timetables and then some wider rethinking that addressed root issues. Here's a look at what happened when.   

2009

It was thought that operationally grouping lines to isolate disruptions would improve reliability. An early example was the 2009 Werribee timetable that took their trains out of a crowded City Loop portal that was shared with the then Sydenham, Craigieburn and Upfield lines.

As this was viewed as potentially controversial some extra off-peak trips (running express) were added as sweeteners. That proved successful - Werribee trains were removed from the loop with minimal controversy and ultimately improved reliability. While the extra trips resulted in Werribee (for a time) having 6 trains per hour interpeak on weekdays the intervals were irregular so it never qualified as a true 10 minute service. 

2010

The honour of being the first instead went to Frankston with the timetable for that starting 15 years ago today. Frankston was neither then nor now the busiest line on the network. If you were going to introduce a 10 minute service on any one corridor then picking Ringwood or Dandenong would have benefited more passengers. However the Frankston line was unreliable and politically sensitive. And if you were planning wider network reforms then, like succeeded with Werribee, some increased frequency could be a sweetener. 

So it came to be that on October 10, 2010 the Frankston line gained increased weekday off-peak frequencies. Services improved from every 15 to every 10 minutes between the peaks and from every 30 to every 20 minutes for much of the evening. 

For more background on this see the 2019 retrospective that I wrote on this timetable's 9th birthday. 

2011

While trains ran a regular every 10 minutes between Frankston and Richmond, they had a messy alternating pattern beyond there. Half ran via the City Loop (as all previously did when service was every 15 minutes) and the other half went direct to Flinders Street. So if you were coming from the CBD end you did not have the benefit of a consistent 10 minute timetable. 

That required another timetable to fix. This happened on May 9, 2011 with my 8th anniversary item on that here. This effectively created the cross-city group with trains every 10 minutes between Frankston and Newport (before fanning out).

In theory you could jump on a train at a station like South Yarra or Richmond and have a one-seat ride through the CBD to North Melbourne, Footscray, Newport or beyond. Not only that but it would be a turn-up-and-go service thanks to the 10 minute frequency. This would provide the sort of cross-city access that passengers in cities such as Sydney, Perth and Brisbane routinely enjoyed (as did Melbourne though at lower frequencies before the City Loop).

It's a great idea but the doctrine that 'every train terminates at Flinders Street' remains embedded in operating culture and passenger information so transposals and inconsistencies in information remain common.

Credit however should be given as the timetable changes above reduced interactions and knock-on delays. They contributed to a huge rebound in metropolitan rail reliability. An almost continuous 8 year fall between 2003 and 2011 was arrested with vastly better reliability by 2013. 

2012

The next frequency upgrade was not (as you might expect) weekdays on busy corridors like Ringwood and Dandenong but weekends on those lines plus Frankston. Introduced in April 2012, new timetables upgraded weekend service from every 20 to every 10 minutes to the above between 10am and 7pm. That 10am - 7pm slot actually originated with the 1999 Kennett era Sunday upgrades which boosted service in that 9 hour span but not outside it. 

Weekend evening services remained at every 30 minutes, with a sharp fall-off after 7pm. 30 minute gaps also remained on Sunday mornings with sleepy ~8am starts not addressed until Night Network started in 2016 (though they remain an issue on Good Friday and most Christmas mornings when Night Network doesn't run). 

After this change Frankston became the first line to enjoy a 10 minute daytime frequency on all days of the week. Dandenong and Ringwood also had this but only on weekends. 

NDP

The Network Development Plan (Metropolitan Rail) of December 2012 proposed a program to spread 10 minute Frankston-style frequent all day timetables across the network. Had it been followed the busiest lines would have got frequent service by 2016 with most of the rest done by 2021. The Metro Tunnel would thus have commenced in a context where lines feeding to it were already running frequently all week. 

2014 

The very large bus, train and tram timetable upgrade of 27 July 2014 also included the Dandenong line going from every 15 to 10 minutes on weekdays interpeak with Pakenham and Cranbourne going from 30 to 20 minutes. By that time Dandenong had become the busiest line, overtaking Ringwood. This was a well-received upgrade with Dandenong joining Frankston as being being one of Melbourne's two long rail corridors with seven day frequent service (though weekend evenings and Sunday morning service remained limited at every 30 minutes). 

2015 - 2025 (a lost decade for service)

There was a change of government late in 2014. 

Political interest swung from service to infrastructure builds, unlike Sydney which managed to do both. 

No major rail corridors gained 10 minute 7 day service. 

This made 2015 - 2025 virtually a lost decade for service, with large scale frequency upgrades for metropolitan rail, metropolitan tram and bus reform all basically stalling, particularly after 2016 (V/Line trains and regional buses got a lot though). 

2026 - 

The next year is already looking more promising than the last decade.

At least one more line will get frequent 7 day service. This will be the Sunbury line (as far as Watergardens) in February 2026 when full service on the Metro Tunnel starts. 

This will be followed (in mid 2026) when the Sandringham line goes to every 10 minutes on weekdays. This upgrade will be integrated with a restored cross-city line to Newport and beyond. Craigieburn and Upfield will have maximum waits cut from 40 to 20 minutes while Werribee will gain some peak upgrades. 

Much more roll-out of 10 minute 7 day service is needed just to catch up on the previous lost decade.

There's been no announcements or even promises. I would suggest these as the top five front-runners (in about this order):

* Ringwood: busy line, marginal seats, needs peak stopping pattern reform, very poor Belgrave and Lilydale frequencies, cheap to do as weekends mostly already done. 

* Craigieburn: busy but currently infrequent, outstanding from Metro Tunnel business case, growth area pressures. 

* Mernda: high usage potential but currently infrequent, large densifying catchment, growth area pressures. 

* Werribee: good usage, potential to relieve busy Geelong line, potential speed boosts, growth area pressures. 

* Sandringham: requires finishing off with frequent weekend service and Sunday am boost.  

Let's hope they happen! 

Index to other Useful Network items here

Metro Tunnel opening - What's happening when?

Yesterday we were told the most important date associated with the Metro Tunnel. 

Sunday, February 1, 2026 

This is the first day that a full service timetable will operate on Metro Tunnel stations. 

The government is calling it The Big Switch. 

Sunbury and Pakenham/Cranbourne line trains will shift out of separate City Loop portals to being joined via five new stations at Arden, Parkville, State Library, Town Hall and Anzac. That will form a through line underneath the CBD with frequent service. 

How frequent? We are told every 3 to 4 minutes in peak periods. Not a lot different to now, especially from the Dandenong side. I would expect that there will be some use of the West Footscray turnback. 

Outside peaks a service will operate every 10 minutes or better from first to last train between West Footscray and Dandenong stations. That's good for suburbs like Dandenong but is a bit light on for the inner core where a 5 minute service would be much more compatible with Metro-style high volume short trip needs. Without such a frequent core you can't really do tram reform and thus reap the full cascading benefits of the Metro Tunnel project.  

East of Dandenong trains are likely to alternate between East Pakenham and Cranbourne, to provide the outer portions with a 20 minute service. That compares to now where gaps can be 30 minutes at night and as long as 70(!) minutes on Sunday mornings. The other great thing is that forced transfers will be pretty much a thing of the past for Pakenham and Cranbourne passengers with the trunk almost always double the frequency of the branches.

Something that's not clear is Night Network. If they stick with the network-wide hourly frequency then that could feature hourly trains from Sunbury to either East Pakenham or Cranbourne with the other line getting a shuttle from Dandenong. Although if they were feeling generous then they could avoid that by running a half-hourly service to Dandenong with trains alternating east.   

On the west side some trains will terminate at West Footscray, some at Watergardens and others at the end of the line at Sunbury. The termini will alternate between Sunbury and Watergardens most of the time, with Sunbury generally getting a 20 minute service and Watergardens a 10 minute service. 

However the latter won't be to last train; in something bound to annoy after 9pm travellers half the trains will finish at West Footscray. Hence the premier's media release saying that the frequent service to Watergardens is 6am to 9pm only. Still, the every 20 minute late evening frequency that Tottenham - Sunbury will get is better than the current 30 minute gaps.  

You need to be aware that this is a government whose record is to love spending on capex (ie building stuff) but hate opex (ie running stuff). Largely as new hospitals and stations can be built on borrowed money and opened with ribbons while nurses and service frequency need funds raised from taxes (or efficiencies) and are less visible.

A period of low interest rates made the skew even more notable, though it is probably fair to say that without it the Metro Tunnel that we can talk about today would not have been built. But conversely it meant that various attempts to add service hatched within the department (eg 2012's Network Development Plan (Metropolitan Rail), the 2016 Metro Tunnel Business Case and bus reform in 2015 and 2023) were either canned entirely or happened in much reduced form. Sydney, in contrast, continued to invest in frequency, leading to a widening Sydney - Melbourne gap in public transport service levels.  

Having said that the need for better service over longer 7 day spans is an enduring truth that occasionally sees the light of day, even if behaves like a recessive gene compared to infrastructure builds. One such understanding is the 14 hour rule - that is public transport should operate at a relatively high frequency for about 14 hours a day, every day. That is significantly better than current rail timetabling practice (particular on weekends) where even our best served lines see frequent service for only about 9 hours (comparing unfavourably with both Perth and Sydney).

When DTP is asked to plan things you sometimes do get longer periods of frequent service specified or happening. The Metro Tunnel Business Case (which was heavily informed by the NDP) typically specified 10 minute service on main lines for all but late night periods. And recently tabled bus reform documents define a 6am to 10pm (actually 16 hours) core period where rapid and connector buses should run every 10 minutes. While that plan's bold bus reforms were rejected, the idea of running frequent service for more of the day did guide some things that did happen.

Notable recent examples that continued relatively frequent service into the mid-evening include bus upgrades like for 905 and 907 in Manningham, 170, 180 and 192 in Wyndham, and most recently a selection of Craigieburn routes funded in the 2025 state budget.

You'll be able to add the Metro Tunnel to that next year. Tottenham to Watergardens will enjoy a 10 min or better service from 6am to 9pm. That is 15 hours which while inferior to Dandenong (18 hours) and Sydney (20 hours) still beats any Melbourne line today (including Frankston).    

It's not just the Sunbury, Pakenham and Cranbourne lines that are changing. 

A big justification for the Metro Tunnel is the cascading effect where it frees up capacity. In this case the Frankston line returns to operating via the City Loop, like it did 15 or so years ago. Like the Pakenham and Cranbourne line it will be running anti-clockwise all day. 

The February 1 2026 changes are summarised on the Big Build website and below. 

The 1000 weekly services on the Sunbury line largely comprise off-peak frequency boosts that add 3 trains per hour each way as far as Watergardens to double frequency from 20 to 10 minutes. Half of those will extend to Sunbury, doubling their 40 minute frequency to 20 minutes. Evenings also gain an upgrade from every 30 minutes to every 20 minutes at worst and every 10 minutes at best. There will likely be some Sunday morning uplifts improving to 20 minute maximum waits. 

The 100 extra weekly services at the Dandenong end will largely be additions to cut maximum waits to 20 minutes for Pakenham and Cranbourne. The main times to benefit are after 7pm weekends and Sunday mornings. As an example improving from 30 to 20 minutes requires 1 train each way per hour extra. Multiply by 2 (for return trip) and by 2 again (for both lines), then by 10 (for number of week you are upgrading) and you get 40. Fixing up early weekend mornings and adding shoulder peaks would likely get you to 100, noting that counting trains is a poor measure as lengthening runs to avoid transfers and improve frequencies from Dandenong inwards is not rewarded.   

There may be other changes but they're not mentioned above (or on the interactive map), even though they have been the subject of public announcements. I'm talking about things like already funded Werribee, Craigieburn, Upfield and Sandringham timetable upgrades. And also what happens to the generally neglected but potentially convenient cross-city group (which shows as broken on the map in this video). More on them later. 

December 2025

The next date, though sooner, isn't known precisely yet. But we do know it will be in early December 2025.

That was announced yesterday at 7:01am via social media. That's the exact same time and means that the Suburban Rail Loop was announced in 2018.

Major rail openings involving the public most commonly take place on a Sunday so December 7 is a likely hot favourite, though checks and sign-off need to be done first.

The government is calling this the Summer Start, that is the commencement of public services through the Metro Tunnel. You could call it a 'soft opening'. Basically a limited frequency, limited hours service mainly for testing but also for the curious to see the new stations for themselves.

It's a showground ride more than serious transport but it helps people get used to navigating the new stations and features new to Melbourne such as platform screen doors. Timed to suit Christmas shopping, it might even draw people into the city and allows the government to claim that they opened the Metro Tunnel early.

All these have benefits but as I say it's not practical transport for most. For that you should keep using existing services on existing timetables as you currently do.  

The government will be hoping that there will be minimal disruption to existing travel patterns as the new trips will operate in addition to existing unchanged routing and timetables on all lines.

Two months of free statewide weekend travel will be offered, starting from when the Metro Tunnel opens in early December.  

Mid 2026

Now we move to a mid-2026 date that the government is even vaguer about. Indeed it's not in the media release. To the contrary, that leads one to the view that everything will be happening on February 1 2026 with quotes like "A new timetable will be in place everywhere – including buses, trams, regional and metropolitan trains".

However The Age carried an article stressing a third, mid-2026 timetable change with more service improvements. 

These may well include the May 2025 state budget upgrades, including peak boosts for Werribee,  and reduced maximum waits for Craigieburn and Upfield. 

A Sandringham line weekday upgrade to 10 min frequencies was also funded. That would be frequency harmonised with lines from the west such as Werribee and Williamtown. And it would partly compensate South Yarra station for the frequency it lost when Dandenong trains were rerouted to skip it.

This is one of the big uncertainties of the Metro Tunnel project - will the cross-city service continue beyond February 1 or will it be broken (with all trains terminating at Flinders Street) only to be potentially restored mid-year? Not taking it seriously may be one of those cases where operational ease may take a higher priority than passenger convenience.

An up side, as I noted here, the Metro Tunnel experience of seamless cross-city travel, something that Melbourne has so much more difficulty than other cities in mastering, may force an expectation that the cross-city group should be more seamlessly and reliably operated. There is also hope in that the network map the minister is holding in this Reddit thread has a Werribee - Sandringham line in a uniform pink colour, unlike this Metro Tunnel video whose map has them separate.  

It may also be that at least some of the "new timetable in place everywhere" may be implemented in the mid-year tranche rather than 1 February, though again we don't know. The government is talking up the effort this involves. But unless there is a mystery bucket of money it is unlikely that recoordination can be any more than minor tweaks here and there. Although you never know - the recent Ballarat and Gippsland line bus recoordinations are examples where significant sums from unknown sources were found with substantial service increases delivered. 

As we get nearer the start dates more details about the various service levels and patterns will likely come to hand.

Know anything else? Please leave them in the comments below.