Cross River Rail

Six mornings a week, a physiotherapist named Priya boards a Beenleigh line train at Salisbury and rides it into South Brisbane, then crosses on foot to reach the Princess Alexandra Hospital, because the connecting service she needs funnels through the same two rail tracks as every other train in South East Queensland. Those two tracks sit on the Merivale Bridge, the only rail crossing of the Brisbane River inside the inner city, carrying every cross-city service — from the Sunshine Coast, from Ipswich, from the Gold Coast, from Cleveland — since it opened in November 1978. When one train anywhere on that shared spine runs late, Priya's trip runs late too, because the network has nowhere else to send it.

That single point of failure is the reason Cross River Rail exists. Brisbane's rail network was built for a city a fraction of its current size, and for more than four decades it has run every line through one bridge and a handful of shared city platforms. The project the Palaszczuk Labor government approved in 2017 — a new 10.2-kilometre line, including 5.9 kilometres of twin tunnel, running from Dutton Park under the river and the CBD to Bowen Hills — was sold as the fix. Under the Crisafulli LNP government that inherited it in October 2024, it has also become the clearest case study available of how Queensland prices, and repeatedly re-prices, its biggest builds.

What the government built, and what it inherited

The project itself is simple to describe, even though delivering it has not been. Four new underground stations — Boggo Road, Woolloongabba, Albert Street and Roma Street — sit beneath the tunnel, alongside upgrades to eight above-ground stations from Salisbury to Exhibition (Cross River Rail Delivery Authority, Project Overview, 2025). A public-private partnership consortium is building the tunnels and station boxes; a separate rail alliance is rebuilding six southside stations and fitting out signalling and control systems; and a third contract covers the train control system that will let services run closer together through the new line. When the Palaszczuk government committed to the project in June 2017, it did so at a publicly stated cost of $5.4 billion, targeted for completion in 2024.

None of the heavy construction happened under David Crisafulli. By the time his government took office in October 2024, the tunnels had already been bored and the station boxes substantially built; the project was deep into its most expensive phase, fitting out four underground stations with escalators, platform screen doors, ventilation and communications systems, and testing them (Queensland Audit Office, Major projects 2025, Report 8: 2025-26, Dec-2025). What Crisafulli's government did do, within weeks of taking office, was open eleven months of renegotiation with the project's contractors over a cost and schedule that had, on its own account, become unmoored from the figures still being cited in Parliament. That renegotiation closed in October 2025 with a locked-in total cost of $19.041 billion and a first-passenger-services date of 2029 (Queensland Government, ministerial statement, Oct-2025). The government has framed that outcome as getting an inherited project "back on track." It is also, on any measure, one of the largest cost escalations in the state's infrastructure history — and it is worth being precise about which government owns which part of it before assessing it further.

The evidence: cost, schedule and capacity

None of the figures in this section are contested; they come from the state's own Budget Papers, the Cross River Rail Delivery Authority and the Queensland Audit Office, which has tracked the project's cost and schedule through a "major projects" report to Parliament in most years since 2018. That tracking shows a consistent pattern of upward revision: from the $5.4 billion committed in 2017, the government's own reporting moved to roughly $8.1 billion by April 2019 and roughly $9.5 billion by March 2023 (approx.), then to more than $17 billion by December 2024, before the Crisafulli government's contractor renegotiation locked in $19.041 billion in October 2025 (Queensland Audit Office, Major projects reports, 2019-2025; Queensland Government ministerial statements, Dec-2024 and Oct-2025). The promised opening date moved on a similar path — 2024, then 2025, then 2026, and now 2029 — a five-year slip from the date first put to voters.

The Crisafulli government's own account of the blowout points to a mix of causes: contractor claims over deferred and disrupted work, supply-chain and labour-market pressure across the east coast construction sector, and, as Transport and Main Roads Minister Brent Mickelberg said when the final figure was released, more than 140 days of protected industrial action that slowed productivity on site (Queensland Government, ministerial statement, Oct-2025). The Audit Office's account is more measured but points the same direction: its 2025 report cites material and labour cost escalation, workforce shortages, supply-chain disruption and reduced productivity linked to industrial action as continuing pressures through 2024-25 (Queensland Audit Office, Major projects 2025, Report 8: 2025-26, Dec-2025). On the more reassuring side of the ledger, the same report found that, as at 30 June 2025, the project's contingency remained within its repeatedly revised budget — evidence that the current phase of delivery has at least been tracked and managed against the estimate the government was working to at the time.

The capacity case has not gone away; if anything, rising patronage since the fare change strengthens the argument that Brisbane's network needs the extra room Cross River Rail is built to create. But the economic case that justified the original price has not kept pace: a benefit-cost ratio of 1.41 was calculated against a $5.4 billion cost base and 2016-17 patronage assumptions, not a $19 billion one, and it has not been publicly re-tested at the price the state is actually paying (Building Queensland, Cross River Rail Business Case, 2016-17; Queensland Audit Office, Major projects reports, 2019-2025). A project can still be worth building at a higher cost. Whether this one clears that bar is a judgement no public document currently answers.

The critique: sequencing risk and a mega-project pattern

Start with the arithmetic, because it is the least contestable part of the critique. A cost that has risen from $5.4 billion to $19.041 billion is not a modest overrun to be absorbed within contingency; it is a project that now costs roughly three-and-a-half times what voters were told in 2017, opening five years later than promised. Some of that gap reflects inflation and scope genuinely added since 2017; nothing in the public reporting suggests inflation alone explains a change of this size. The remainder is the accumulated result of a decade in which the project passed through four premiers and several transport ministers, each inheriting a budget number set by a predecessor and each choosing, for years, to keep citing it rather than formally rebasing it before Parliament until the gap became impossible to sustain.

The clearest sign of poor sequencing between Queensland's mega-projects sits at Woolloongabba station. It was designed and built, at real expense, to give the Gabba its first-ever direct rail connection, explicitly framed by the delivery authority as how tens of thousands of spectators would move to and from the 2032 Olympic opening and closing ceremonies (Cross River Rail Delivery Authority, Woolloongabba station materials, 2024-25). That framing survived the tunnel boring, the station excavation and the escalator installation. It did not survive a change of plan: in March 2025, the Crisafulli government scrapped the rebuilt Gabba as an Olympic venue altogether, opting instead for a new stadium at Victoria Park — a site the Premier had campaigned against using only months earlier — with the Gabba itself now slated for demolition and replacement by housing after the Games. Woolloongabba station will still serve the redevelopment precinct that follows, and it still connects a busy inner-city suburb to the network. But the specific, marquee justification used to sell the station's design — moving an Olympic ceremony crowd — was decided by a different agency, on a different timetable, after the infrastructure built to serve it was already largely in the ground.

Cross River Rail was engineered around a stadium decision Queensland's own government later reversed.

This is not simply a story about one station. It is a pattern visible across Queensland's biggest builds: announce a headline cost before design is finished, treat that number as fixed in public even as internal estimates move, and only formally reset it — in a Budget Paper, an Audit Office report or a ministerial statement — once the gap has become too large to manage quietly. Cross River Rail is the largest and longest-running example of that pattern, spanning enough premiers and ministers that no single office-holder can be made to answer for the full $13.6 billion gap between the 2017 promise and the 2025 outturn.

Credit is due for one part of this record. Rather than continuing to cite a budget its own advisers no longer believed, the Crisafulli government spent eleven months forcing a final number out of its contractors and put it on the public record. An unresolved, drifting cost estimate is worse for accountability than an ugly but final one. Locking in $19.041 billion in October 2025, however belatedly, at least gives Queenslanders, and the Audit Office, a fixed figure to hold the project to for the years remaining before the city it runs through hosts an Olympic Games.