It is 4:52am at a bus stop on the edge of Cranbourne North, in Melbourne's outer south-east, and the first service of the day is the only way a cleaner rostered onto an early shift at a Dandenong distribution centre can make it to work on time. She taps her myki on the reader by the driver's cab. The light stays red. She taps again. The bus pulls out before a third attempt registers, and there is no attendant to ask and no way to know until the statement arrives whether she has been charged for a trip the reader refused to acknowledge — or whether an inspector three stops later treats the failed tap as evasion. Multiply that morning by the tens of thousands of outer-suburban Victorians who rely on a bus-then-train commute every day, and the failure becomes a policy question: whether a ticketing system now in its third decade, and its fourth contract, is still fit for the job.
Myki was meant to have solved exactly this kind of failure. Victoria's ticketing system has run through three commercial operators and a combined contract value in the order of $4 billion (approx.) since the first tender in 2005, and the government elected in 2022 under Daniel Andrews — led since September 2023 by Jacinta Allan — inherited both the card and its history. What the Allan government has done with that inheritance, and what it is now paying to replace it, is the subject of this audit.
What the Allan government did: caps, free youth travel and a fourth ticketing contract
The fare architecture Victorians use today was mostly set before Jacinta Allan became Premier, but her government has extended it and placed a large bet on replacing the machinery underneath it. Since January 2023, Melbourne's metropolitan network has operated as a single fare zone — the old Zone 1/Zone 2 boundary, which had made travel to and from outer suburbs more expensive, was abolished. A full-fare two-hour trip now costs $5.70 (approx.), capped at $11.40 (approx.) a day regardless of trips taken, with a weekly cap equal to five daily caps and a lower cap on weekends (Transport Victoria, myki fares schedule, current). Two further changes followed: free travel for every Victorian under 18 from 1 January 2026, costed at roughly $320 million (approx.) in the 2025-26 Budget and reaching more than one million young Victorians and their families (Premier of Victoria, media release, 2025; Victorian Budget 2025-26, Budget Paper No. 3); and, from 1 June 2026 to 1 January 2027, a statewide fare halving — the full-fare daily cap falling from $11.40 to $5.70 and the concession cap from $5.70 to $2.85 (approx.) — a temporary discount rather than a permanent reset of the fare table (Transport Victoria, fare notice, 2026).
Underneath the fare settings sits the ticketing hardware that makes them enforceable, and that is where the Allan government made its largest decision. In May 2023, then Public Transport Minister Ben Carroll announced a new 15-year contract, worth $1.7 billion (approx.) at signing, handing myki to Conduent, an American ticketing company, and ending NTT Data's tenure as operator (Premier of Victoria, "New Public Transport Ticketing Contract," 15 May 2023). Conduent took over day-to-day management from December 2023, with the first phase of a genuinely new system — letting commuters tap on with an ordinary bank card or phone rather than a dedicated myki card — trialled from 2024 and originally intended to be substantially complete well before decade's end.
The strongest case
Cheaper, simpler fares and a genuine bet on modern ticketing
Put the government's defence at its best, and it holds up on several counts. Collapsing two fare zones into one in 2023 was a real cost-of-living decision: it stopped penalising outer-suburban commuters — disproportionately lower-income, disproportionately reliant on a bus-then-train trip — who previously paid more simply for living further from the centre. The caps mean no Victorian pays more than a fixed, predictable amount no matter how much they travel, which matters most to shift workers and multi-job households making several trips a day. Free travel for under-18s and the mid-2026 half-price window put real money back into stretched budgets at a moment when the government's cost-of-living record is under scrutiny across the board.
The ticketing contract deserves the same fair reading. Myki's mid-2000s technology requires a dedicated card and cannot easily support the tap-on-bank-card model now standard in London, Sydney and comparable systems. Replacing it is not optional extravagance, and Victoria's own auditor found in March 2026 that, despite a rocky start, the modernisation project is now tracking to its reset schedule, with new reader devices already performing as expected in early testing (Victorian Auditor-General's Office, Modernising myki, 18 March 2026). A government that fixed a contract dispute, reset an unrealistic schedule and kept the door open to scrutiny is not the same as one that simply ignored the problem.
The evidence: three contracts, one repeating pattern
The primary record shows myki has never been delivered at the price first advertised. Kamco won the original tender in July 2005 at $494 million (approx.), due in 2007; by rollout, cost had grown to roughly $1.5 billion (approx.), about three years late — a blowout the Auditor-General documented in 2012 and 2015 (Victorian Auditor-General's Office, Fare Evasion on Public Transport, Aug-2012; Operational Effectiveness of the myki Ticketing System, Jun-2015). NTT Data, which had acquired Kamco in 2010, was handed a further contract in 2016, reported at around $700 million (approx.). Summed across all three operators since 2005, disclosed ticketing contract values run to something in the order of $4 billion (approx.) — before counting the revenue lost to evasion along the way.
The Conduent contract has followed a similar early trajectory. VAGO tabled an independent assurance report on 18 March 2026, finding the Department of Transport and Planning had not resolved known risks before awarding the contract to Conduent Victoria Ticketing System — a decision that produced early disputes, a six-month standstill and a formal reset. That reset added 18 months to the schedule, pushing delivery out to 2028, and increased cost by $136.8 million (approx.), though VAGO noted this remained within the government's original cost target. The contract is now valued at roughly $1.96 billion (approx.) over 15 years, alongside a $34 million (approx.) concession-verification contract with HCLTech and a 2025 capital allocation of $680 million (approx.) (Victorian Auditor-General's Office, Modernising myki, 18 March 2026). Most pointedly, the report states plainly that value for money "is unclear," because the department's benefit management plan is underdeveloped and leans on anecdotal claims rather than Victorian evidence.
Fare evasion sits alongside the ticketing cost as its own persistent leak. Official compliance surveys put the revenue impact at $9.8 million (approx.) in the first half of 2022 alone — $7.1 million metropolitan and $2.7 million regional trains (Public Transport Victoria, Victorian Official Fare Compliance Series, May-2022). By 2024 the estimated annual loss had grown to around $28.1 million (approx.), with an estimated 3.8 per cent (approx.) of surveyed metropolitan commuters found to have evaded a fare, concentrated on buses where there is often no barrier or staff to check (Transport Victoria, Victorian Official Fare Compliance Series, 2024 editions, approx.). No contract since 2005 has closed this gap for good.
Reliability data completes the picture, because a cap or a free fare is only worth what the service behind it delivers. Metro Trains generally meets its punctuality standard, but V/Line tells a different story: against the government's 96 per cent reliability target, most regional lines run reasonably well, but punctuality is a weak point — the Gippsland line ran on time only 80.2 per cent (approx.) of the time and the Warrnambool line 80.3 per cent (approx.), averaged across February 2024 to July 2025, per an independent analysis of Transport Victoria's own on-time-running data (Melbourne on Transit, transport-data analysis, 2024-25, approx.; Victorian Government, Public Transport Monthly Performance dashboard). An affordable fare on an unreliable regional train buys only part of what it promises.
The critique: cheaper fares built on top of a system nobody can price
Read together, the primary record does not describe a single misstep; it describes a pattern repeating for the third time in twenty years. Every one of Victoria's ticketing contracts — Kamco's 2005 tender, NTT Data's 2016 extension, and now Conduent's 2023 contract — has cost more, or is already costing more, than the figure announced at signing. The Auditor-General's own words on the current project are the most telling part of the record: a near-$2 billion (approx.) commitment whose value for money "is unclear," made by a department that, on VAGO's finding, awarded the contract without resolving risks it already knew about. That is not a criticism of ambition — replacing outdated hardware is overdue — it is a criticism of execution repeating a mistake the state has now made three times with three vendors.
The fare-evasion numbers sharpen the point. Two decades and roughly $4 billion (approx.) in cumulative contracts have not closed the leak the system was built to plug: evasion still costs the network tens of millions of dollars a year, concentrated on buses where tap-on-bank-card technology is not yet fully deployed and will not be until 2028 at the earliest — itself already 18 months later than planned. Every year the rollout slips is another year the state collects less revenue than the fare settings are designed to raise, on top of the billions already spent trying to fix the collection mechanism.
Reliability undercuts the affordability message from the other direction. A daily cap of $11.40, halved to $5.70 for the second half of 2026, is genuine relief on paper, but it is worth less to a commuter on the Gippsland or Warrnambool line, who has roughly a one-in-five chance of a late train, or to the bus rider for whom evasion enforcement — not fare price — is the more visible sign of a straining system. Affordable travel and reliable travel are not substitutes, and Victoria is stronger on the first than the second.
The timing of the half-price window invites its own scrutiny. It runs 1 June 2026 to 1 January 2027, a seven-month window rather than a permanent change. That does not make the discount illegitimate; temporary relief is still relief. But a temporary cut is a different policy to a permanent restructure of the farebox — and it arrives as net debt climbs from $167.6 billion (approx.) in 2025-26 to $194 billion (approx.) by 2028-29, with debt-servicing costs already at $10.6 billion (approx.) a year (Victorian Budget 2025-26, Budget Paper No. 2). A discount reverting in January 2027 does not, on its own, say whether fares are being reset for good or simply timed for the ballot box.
Twenty years, three vendors and roughly four billion dollars after the first myki tender, the Auditor-General's own verdict on the latest contract is that nobody can yet say whether it is worth the money.
The risk to the future
A fourth blowout, on a schedule with no room left in it
The Auditor-General's clearest warning is structural, not a headline number: the project's new master schedule carries no time contingency, so any delay in the phases still to come — regional expansion, concession verification for pensioners and students, contactless bank-card integration at scale — will flow straight through to the 2028 completion date, exactly as the first 18-month blowout did. Victoria has been here three times with three vendors, and each time the early warning signs were treated as manageable until they were not.
The financial risk compounds the schedule risk. A near-$2 billion (approx.) contract that its own auditor cannot yet call value for money is being funded inside a budget already carrying rising debt and a rising interest bill, while a temporary halving of fares removes revenue the network was counting on and evasion keeps leaking tens of millions the modernised system was meant to recover. If the next phases slip again, or bank-card tapping does not cut evasion as the business case assumes, Victoria will hold a bill approaching $2 billion with neither proof it worked nor an easy way to reverse the fare cuts stacked on top of it.
The deeper risk is to trust. Myki's original blowout became a byword for infrastructure mismanagement in Victoria; a modernisation project that repeats the pattern, on a system every commuter touches daily, does more lasting damage to confidence in the state's capacity to deliver than almost any single big-ticket rail project, because it is the one piece of infrastructure nearly every Victorian uses before breakfast.