Victoria’s Big Build leaves Labor facing hard questions over cost, control and the CFMEU
?s Labor government is under fresh pressure over its multibillion-dollar Big Build agenda, with voters still asking how a program meant to showcase d...
Victoria’s Labor government is under fresh pressure over its multibillion-dollar Big Build agenda, with voters still asking how a program meant to showcase delivery has instead fed a political scandal. The question now hanging over the state is blunt: what did Labor know, and when?
That question has sharpened after a two-year trail of investigative reporting in The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald, the Australian Financial Review and 60 Minutes, alongside a commission of inquiry holding public hearings in Queensland. The story has not arrived all at once. It has been built piece by piece.
From clean delivery to political risk
For Labor, big infrastructure once looked like a reliable winning formula. In 2008, the Brumby government opened the EastLink tollway on budget and five months early. Between 2014 and 2018, Daniel Andrews’ government removed 29 level crossings, also on time and within budget.
That record mattered. After the 2018 landslide, Liberal figure Michael Kroger described new infrastructure as “a very visual sign of a government doing something”. Labor took the hint. Under Andrews and transport minister Jacinta Allan, the state’s ambitions expanded sharply.
The political payoff was clear for a time. So was the danger.
A governing style under strain
Eight years later, Labor is fighting an uphill battle for a fourth term, and Allan is now the nation’s least popular politician by far. On Tuesday, she was humiliated out of her job. The scale of the reversal is striking in a state where infrastructure once helped Labor project competence and momentum.
The Big Build was meant to be the proof. Instead, it has become a test of trust.
What makes the scandal so damaging is not just the money at stake, but the sense that a project sold as disciplined and efficient may have drifted into something far harder to defend. Victorians want answers on how that happened, and who was responsible for letting it happen under Labor’s watch.
The inquiry in Queensland remains one part of the broader reckoning. The reporting trail in Victoria is another. Together, they have turned a state infrastructure program into a political liability with national echoes — a reminder that once the machinery of delivery begins to stall, the bill is not only financial.
It is political. And for Labor, it is getting larger.
