VAGO to audit Victoria's Bus Plan

The Victorian Auditor-General has included a performance audit of Victoria's bus planning in his 2025-26 annual plan tabled in state parliament last week. VAGO's review will examine the performance of Victoria's bus services, including if the Bus Plan is on track to achieve its intended objectives and targets.

Other transport topics to be examined include myki ticket modernisation, the progress of major projects, road maintenance and customer service of outsourced Vicroads functions like driver licensing. A follow-up of the audit on integrated transport planning is also pencilled in for 2027-28. 

An audit is timely

Back to buses. An auditor-general review of bus services is both desirable and due. One was proposed six years ago but got put off. However, with it being nearly 1500 days since Victoria's Bus Plan was announced sufficient time has elapsed for an auditor to form an opinion on its effectiveness or otherwise.

Not only that but the dollar amounts involved are, in auditor-speak, material. Victoria spends the better part of $1 billion each year to run bus services, mostly through payments to private bus operators. Unlike train and tram contracts (which appear to have got more generous over the last 20 years) payments to bus operators per service kilometre delivered appear to have been fairly constant relative to CPI.

Just because we're getting a reasonable amount of service kilometres per dollar for bus does not mean that these bus and driver resources are optimally deployed to be useful to the most number of people for the most number of trips. The key determinant of this is how well routes and timetables are planned and meet the public's travel needs. 

With routes and timetables for maybe two-thirds of Melbourne's bus network substantially unchanged for 15 - 40 years, network reform (the first priority of the Bus Plan) has a far greater bearing on the value we get from buses than certain other initiatives (eg fleet electrification that may have merit for other reasons). The 'health checks' I've done on the bus network are here and here, with only a slow rate of improvement between them. 

The extent and quality of bus network reform can be difficult to measure but is easy to obfuscate. This makes it vital for an independent party like the Auditor-General to properly examine the performance record here.  

link to count-up Bus Plan clock

Audit role

What might the audit cover? VAGO audits don't always cover everything some would like. It's worth taking a step back to understand why this is.   

Different independent institutions established by parliament to monitor the executive have different  roles and emphases as set out briefly below.

The deliberations of parliamentary committees like Parliament's Accounts and Estimates Committee are shaped by the politicians on them. The Independent Broad-based Anti-Corruption Commission (IBAC) is a specialist corruption investigator with quasi-judicial powers. The State Ombudsman is a 'last resort' complaints investigator, although they may also comment on policy, especially where it may be improved. Infrastructure Victoria is a major giver of advice on transport policy (including through the media where it is more open than DTP) but this does not extend to cases where the policy has been adopted by government. Thus you won't find IV commenting about the merits or otherwise of the Suburban Rail Loop (a project of this government). Indeed their reports tend to avoid even mentioning the SRL unless necessary. 

Then there's the Auditor-General, the oldest government accountability office dating way back to Victorian self-government in 1851. Being independent and being seen to be independent is central to how auditors general do their work. They are in the camp of institutions who do not analyse or comment on government policy. But they are very interested in it being well carried out.  

The pitfalls of those who are not ministers commenting on policy are explained here

 

The difference between the policy of administration (a political responsibility) and the administration of policy (a job for bureaucrats to do and auditors to review) is explained here

Potential audit topics and departmental responses

When asked about their record, the government and DTP can (and likely will) rattle off a long list of bus service upgrades that it attributes to Victoria's Bus Plan. They represent, with few if any exceptions, progress.

But something being good might not entirely satisfy a probing auditor if the methods used to determine priorities have not been robust. 

I have suggested that past departmental secretaries might have used counting methods of doubtful rigour to exaggerate their achievements in bus network reform when under scrutiny. Including from PAEC, which is the same committee the Auditor-General reports to. I would expect that the appropriateness of performance metrics would feature in a performance auditor's test program. 

An audit might also be interested in monitoring operational characteristics such as bus route patronage and acting on the data received to optimise resourcing. An examination will likely find that such data is collected (though one might query its accuracy). The department could give legitimate examples where resources have been transferred between routes (mostly involving Transdev/Kinetic routes) for an overall greater good.

Although they will probably cite new bus contracts as making this easier, DTP might find it harder to argue that this is being done in a particularly systematic way (eg tackling low productivity and/or duplicative routes first) even though the Bus Plan flagged resourcing/patronage productivity mismatches as an issue. 

Auditors (especially) hate things being funded without an implementation plan. Even if what gets funded is sensible, likely consistent with what a plan would recommend and proves successful in practice.

They're not fans of 'bait and switch' either. That is if a department would promise something (as being consistent with the plan), not continue with it but switch to doing something else. The party being audited may claim that that something else was consistent with the plan. Or they could just write a plan that is so vague that almost anything could count as being consistent with it, with the real detail coming later.  

DTP may have left itself exposed here as it:
(a) failed to produce the Bus Plan's promised Bus Reform Implementation Plan by its 2023 deadline (with a weak answer from then Secretary Younis when quizzed here),
(b) apparently stalled on the North, North-East and Mildura bus reviews promised before the 2022 state election, and
(c) ran trials that either had no apparent progress (eg Rapid Running being extended to more routes) or were reasonably foreseeable duds (eg FlexiRide) that distracted attention from beneficial bus network reform or service upgrades (such as Greensborough will finally get after flip-flopping on FlexiRide).   

Scale is important when planning transport in a big city. One or two little route upgrades might be successful but you need to replicate it across hundreds to have a metropolitan-wide effect. Has bus plan facilitated reform to the scale needed and that it aspired to? The record so far is that it has not, with the pace of reform both slower than other cities (eg Perth) and our own record in the 2006-2010 period. Achieving the aspired pace of reform requires changes within DTP as current processes have more in common with cottage industries than the mass production needed for large-scale delivery.  

The government releasing the Bus Plan without substantial funding in 2021 and the department's inability to argue its case for this in the 2023 and 2024 state budgets wouldn't have helped its standing either. Rather than being a substantive program or project (like the WGT or SRL), the Bus Plan has been demoted to be more a thinking approach to be applied if or when the government wants to do things with buses.

Essentially the Bus Plan has been an unloved orphan for most of its first four years. There are welcome signs of revived government interest in buses in the 2025 state budget, though many are more 'catch-up' growth area additions than established area network reform as envisaged in the Bus Plan. 

Conclusion 

The audit's findings are a matter for the Auditor-General after weighing all evidence.

However based on what is known publicly I would imagine its conclusions may be more than a 'good job keep it up' type result. After all VAGO performance audits almost always find something that can be improved, even if minor. 

Consequently the Bus Plan audit promises to be interesting with meaty recommendations that could give the department some worthwhile guidance on improved performance. Especially if laced with big helpings of reality from auditors who are not so remote as to forget to occasionally GOTB!