Labor scraps secret 2062 ticket tax in panic backflip after Ben Carroll's coverup exposed

🔴 UPDATED: 9:50am, 27 August 2026

In a humiliating and desperate act of damage control, Premier Ben Carroll announced on Thursday morning that he will abolish the sneaky rail improvement charge, roughly 24 hours after the Auditor General exposed Labor’s coverup. "This charge was created and implemented without transparency and accountability," Carroll told reporters, attempting to distance himself from his own government's actions. He then shamelessly denied any personal hand in setting it up, claiming "I was not part of the creation".

The audit trail shreds Carroll’s attempt to rewrite history. While the report attributes the systemic secrecy to "the government", the paper trail pins down the exact timing. Labor first approved the hidden gouge in August 2021 when Carroll was sitting in the Minister for Public Transport chair. Cabinet confirmed the secret tax again in December 2023 and November 2024 while Carroll served as Deputy Premier. November 2024 is the exact meeting where ministers formally approved keeping the charge hidden from public announcements.

Carroll’s own handpicked department heads were aggressively defending the secret tax in writing just three weeks ago. Transport Secretary Jeroen Weimar wrote to the Auditor General on 4 August claiming the report "mischaracterises the RIC as a funding mechanism for SRL". Premier and Cabinet Secretary Chris Barrett, whom Carroll personally appointed, wrote the next day insisting the charge "does not form part of the SRL East Funding and Financing Strategy". Both bureaucratic cover letters were signed well after Carroll became Premier.

Scrapping the charge in a panic now rips the single largest revenue stream straight out of Labor's already crumbling plan to pay for the Suburban Rail Loop. The Auditor General revealed the sneaky tax was set to extract roughly $8 billion from commuters by 2062, with 60 percent, or $4.8 billion, explicitly earmarked to bail out the project. The report confirmed cabinet explicitly agreed in November 2024 that it desperately needed that commuter cash to service borrowings. This panic backflip leaves Labor in absolute financial crisis, with the watchdog revealing the project was already $5.5 billion short of approved funding as of June 2026 and that the state lacks the confirmed money to sign the contract for its second stations package.

Labor has been secretly slugging Victorians with a sneaky tax on every single train, tram and bus ticket across the state since 1 January 2025, after ministers formally approved a deliberate strategy to keep commuters in the dark.

This hidden cash grab is officially labelled the rail improvement charge. It forces an extra 1% tax onto every single fare, every single year, compounding on top of standard inflation increases all the way until 2062. Victorian Auditor General Andrew Greaves blew the lid off the coverup on 26 August in a scathing audit report. That investigation revealed this secret ticket tax will extract more money from everyday commuters than any other new revenue measure Labor has cooked up.

The watchdog’s findings shatter Labor’s spin, confirming the first stage of the project is unlikely to be built on time or anywhere near budget. Costs are now projected to blow past $36 billion, smashing the $34.5 billion figure Labor has pushed since 2021 and took to the 2022 election. The report also exposed Labor’s housing claims as total smoke and mirrors, revealing that most of the 70,000 homes ministers constantly boast about were already going to be built anyway.

Premier Ben Carroll was sitting in the Minister for Public Transport chair when Labor first approved the sneaky tax in August 2021. He was Deputy Premier when the government confirmed the secret coverup twice more. In another desperate attempt at damage control just 24 hours before the damning report was published, Carroll announced $1 billion in panic cuts to the project while claiming his government would finally level with Victorians.

How Labor’s sneaky ticket tax punishes struggling pensioners to fund decades of financial waste

Labor’s relentless tax grab hits every single fare, across every single transport mode, right across Victoria. Ministers deliberately targeted metropolitan Melbourne and regional commuters, and while they tried to exclude regional buses on paper, the Department of Transport and Planning admitted to the auditor that Victoria’s integrated fare system forces the tax onto regional bus passengers anyway.

It's called the rail improvement charge, but Victoria has a single integrated fare, so the same 1% goes on whether you board a train, a tram or a bus. Transport Victoria's own patronage data shows 512.6 million trips were taken across the network in the year to June 2026, and 55% of them were on trams and buses rather than trains. Labor named the charge after the only mode that carries a minority of its passengers.

Labor’s own Treasury modelling exposes the full financial penalty of this 37 year compounding cash grab.

By 2035, the year trains are supposed to start running, Labor’s extra tax adds $1.60 to a standard daily fare. By 2062, it gouges an extra $12.10 out of commuters every single day. Even after stripping out inflation, Labor has locked in a staggering 46% real price hike, driving a standard daily fare from $10.60 in today’s money up to $15.50.

The auditor issued a sharp warning that Labor’s greedy tax "may contribute to financial hardship for persons eligible for concessional fares", directly squeezing pensioners, students, and health care card holders. The watchdog also warned that desperate passengers "may revert to private car use" as the costs compound. That finding completely undermines Labor’s flawed business case, which arrogantly claimed up to $12.3 billion in economic benefits from taking cars off Melbourne roads.

Jacinta Allan was Premier when Labor approved a deceitful coverup to hide the true cost of project debt

Labor’s deliberate pattern of deceit is fully exposed in the government’s own records from November 2024. The audit report confirms ministers formally "approved excluding the rail improvement charge from public communications about the value capture package".

Jacinta Allan was sitting as Premier when Labor orchestrated that dishonest coverup. At that exact same meeting, the government explicitly acknowledged the ugly truth behind why they desperately needed the cash. The report confirms the sneaky charge was forced onto commuters "to generate new revenue to service borrowings for the project".

To pull off the deception, Labor attempted to distract Victorians by pointing at existing land tax. Treasury experts had already warned ministers in 2019, and warned them again in 2024, that land tax is an existing statewide tax that "does not represent new, incremental base revenue". The auditor tore apart Labor’s spin, calling out the accounting trickery directly. Hypothecating land tax, the watchdog wrote, "is simply increasing the funding contribution from the state Budget".

When Labor finally made its smug announcement in December 2025, claiming it had a plan to pay for a third of the project, ministers deliberately misled the public about where the money was coming from.

That announcement told Victorians value capture meant "those who will financially benefit from the SRL" would "help to proportionately contribute to the cost of the project". Here is the auditor's assessment of the measure that was left out of it. Public transport users "will contribute more than any other group, but some may never directly benefit from the project", and they will be paying for 9 years before a train runs.

Ben Carroll and Colin Brooks resort to contradictory spin after being exposed over secret fare tax

Ben Carroll served as Minister for Public Transport from 22 June 2020 to 2 October 2023, the portfolio he held when Labor first approved the secret ticket tax in August 2021. He was Deputy Premier when the government reconfirmed the decision in December 2023 and again in November 2024.

Facing intense political fallout after the watchdog’s exposé, Carroll offered hypocritical lip service. "Victorians deserve to know what their money is buying. Under my leadership, they will," Carroll claimed in a weak statement issued after the report blew his cover.

Treasurer Colin Brooks attempted his own desperate spin, offering a feeble admission that the government "could have been more transparent" before foolishly telling reporters the charge "is not contributing directly to the suburban railway".

The auditor’s report flatly contradicts Brooks’s claim. It reveals Labor secretly planned to siphon 60% of the money taken from commuters, totalling roughly $4.8 billion, directly into the first stage of the project, making this covert fare tax "the project's largest source of value capture revenue".

The charge has already collected $6.2 million of the $17.7 million Labor booked

Labor’s desperate revenue calculations are already unravelling in real time. Treasury was forced to confess to the auditor in April 2026 that the secret ticket tax had squeezed just $6.2 million out of commuters between January 2025 and the end of February 2026. Yet an overconfident Labor government had already recklessly booked $17.7 million in expected revenue from the cash grab across the 2024 to 2025 and 2025 to 2026 financial years. Overall metropolitan fare revenue collapsed about 20% under budget in the six months to December 2025 alone.

To mask its broader cost of living crisis, Labor introduced half price fares across Victoria until 1 January 2027, free travel for children, and free weekend travel for seniors. Every single one of these short term political gimmicks actively guts the very fare base Labor claims will pay off its spiralling megaproject. The auditor highlighted the sheer absurdity of Labor’s financial strategy, noting the charge will fail to deliver any meaningful cash during actual construction because the vast bulk of the money will not arrive until decades down the track.

Carroll manufactures fake savings by slashing vital infrastructure that was never budgeted

On 25 August, just 24 hours before the auditor’s scathing report hit the public, Ben Carroll staged a panic press conference to announce $1 billion in immediate savings, a technical review to hunt for another $1 billion, and the demotion of the bloated Suburban Rail Loop Authority into the Victorian Infrastructure Delivery Authority. "Overpasses, walkways, car parks, community grants are nice to haves but they are not needed to build the orbital railway line," Carroll claimed, callously dismissing crucial commuter infrastructure.

Labor’s biggest slash and burn victims were the critical underground interchanges at Box Hill and Glen Waverley, which have now been downgraded to cheap surface transfers.

The auditor’s investigation exposed Carroll’s claims as total deception, revealing these interchanges were never actually funded in the first place. The three major station interchanges were priced at $1.7 billion, and the watchdog confirmed "at least $1.6 billion is not covered in the project's current budget". In fact, the authority had already admitted to the auditor that it was considering recommending building only one single interchange out of the three.

Carroll scrambled to flag alternative parking arrangements for Glen Waverley, but the report explicitly notes that the Glen Waverley multi level car park "is required to meet one of the project's environmental approval conditions".

Labor is also shutting down the community projects fund, abandoning local communities. That money sits inside $1.5 billion Labor originally dangled for more than 170 local precinct projects. The report confirms that local councils and frustrated residents had already repeatedly raised funding for that basic infrastructure as a major concern during consultation, only to have Labor pull the rug out from under them.

None of those figures include the $3.9 billion Labor quietly committed in December 2025 just to run and maintain the railway for its first 15 years. Labor kept this staggering operational cost outside the official project price tag, meaning the authority will inevitably have to go begging back to the government for even more taxpayer billions.

How arrogant Labor elites rejected independent oversight while hiding dodgy consultant deals

Rather than taking responsibility for their failures, Labor’s top bureaucrats aggressively attacked Auditor General Andrew Greaves and tried to discredit his findings. The auditor issued 8 clear recommendations to fix the mess, but the Suburban Rail Loop Authority arrogantly rejected every single one of the 6 recommendations directed at it. Its interim chief executive, Kevin Devlin, fired off a defensive letter claiming the report "has not met a threshold level of completeness or accuracy and therefore SRLA is unable to accept the associated recommendations".

The heads of Labor’s key public service departments jumped in to defend the spin. Department of Premier and Cabinet Secretary Chris Barrett and Department of Treasury and Finance Secretary Camille Kingston wrote that they stubbornly refused to agree the project is unlikely to be delivered on budget or on time, or that its funding strategy lacks transparency. In a bizarre display of bureaucratic denial, they even claimed the ticket tax "does not form part of the SRL East Funding and Financing Strategy".

Yet in a humiliating backflip, Treasury turned around and accepted the recommendation that it advise the government on "publicly disclosing more transparent information about its funding decisions and value capture package for the project".

The auditor’s report also exposed a disturbing integrity scandal inside Labor’s authority. Officials handpicked an adviser on a sole source contract approved by the board for up to $1 million, then quietly bloated the deal twice until it exploded past $2.7 million. The authority allowed work priced above $1.5 million to start before variation approvals were signed off, and completely ignored the adviser's "readily apparent conflicts of interest" with the property development sector.

Labor’s secret ticket tax lives on while ministers cover up years of fiscal betrayal before election

It took the auditor dragging the charge into public view before Premier Ben Carroll moved to scrap it, and until that actually happens Labor keeps extracting it from unsuspecting commuters every single day.

Opposition Leader Jess Wilson slammed Labor’s secret gouge as a “fundamental breach of trust” with the Victorian people, committing to pause and review the entire project while legislating a strict charter of budget honesty if the Coalition wins government.

Carroll tried to manufacture a phoney image of transparency by calling a royal commission into the Big Build during his first month as Premier, promising a clean break from the toxic secrecy of the Andrews and Allan years. Yet this marks the second time this month that Labor has been exposed hiding major decisions from the public for years, following revelations that Treasury advice regarding the partial privatisation of Melbourne Water sat buried and unannounced for five full years.

Victorians head to the polls on 28 November to deliver their verdict on Labor’s decade of deception. Meanwhile, temporary half price fares expire on 1 January 2027, the exact day Labor’s annual fare hike hits commuters with the hidden 1% tax increase still baked right into it.