Regional Victoria's neglect

Ballarat, Bendigo, Shepparton and the Latrobe Valley are Victoria's four largest regional hospital catchments, and for the eighteen months to mid-2025 each recorded worse average ambulance-to-emergency-department transfer times than the state average in nearly every quarter (Victorian Agency for Health Information, ambulance services performance reporting, 2025, approx.). A paramedic crew waiting on a hospital ramp in one of those towns is not living through a single dramatic failure; it is living through an ordinary Tuesday in a system where, statewide, only around 65 per cent of patients were handed over within the 40-minute target in 2023–24 (Ambulance Victoria / VAHI performance reporting, 2023–24, approx.) — and where the regional centres do worse than that average, not better. The same pattern shows up on the roads those ambulances drive: a state road network the government's own auditor warned, as far back as 2017, was heading toward "very poor condition" across half its length without more money (Victorian Auditor-General's Office, Maintaining State-Controlled Roadways, 22 June 2017). And it showed up loudest of all in July 2023, when the government cancelled the one project explicitly built to put four regional cities on the map — the 2026 Commonwealth Games — citing a cost blowout that had turned a $2.6 billion budget into more than $6 billion (Premier of Victoria, 18 July 2023). None of this means regional Victoria has been abandoned. It means the gap between what a booming capital gets and what the country gets has become measurable, dated and hard to argue away.

Some of this gap is old. Victoria's rural ambulance response times have lagged the metropolitan area since at least 2010, when the state's auditor first found that "response times have worsened more in rural regions than in the metropolitan area" following the 2008 merger of ambulance services (Victorian Auditor-General's Office, Access to Ambulance Services, 6 October 2010). The road-funding crunch identified in 2017 traces back to cuts that began under a Coalition government before Daniel Andrews was elected in 2014. Jacinta Allan, who became premier in September 2023, did not create rural Victoria's geography, its thinner population base, or the decades of underinvestment that predate her. What she and the government she leads do own is the decade of choices layered on top of that history: which projects got the money when money was tight, and how the country was treated when a promise built specifically for it collapsed.

What the government did

Since 2014, Victoria's infrastructure program — branded the Big Build — has been dominated by a small number of very large metropolitan rail and road projects: the Metro Tunnel, the West Gate Tunnel, the North East Link and, since 2019, the Suburban Rail Loop, an orbital rail line under outer Melbourne whose first stage alone carries a funded-cost range of $30.0 billion to $34.5 billion in the government's own budget papers (Victorian Budget 2023–24, Budget Paper No. 4: State Capital Program, 23 May 2023). Regional Victoria has its own line items inside the same Big Build brand — Regional Rail Revival upgrades and the Regional Roads Victoria maintenance program among them — and, from the 2024–25 Budget, more than $2 billion earmarked for regional infrastructure and services in a single year, including $186 million for rural and regional healthcare (covering Ballarat Base Hospital and the expanded Latrobe Regional Hospital), $133 million for regional rail network operations, and $105 million for regional road pavement rehabilitation on top of an earlier $2.8 billion road-maintenance and flood-recovery package (Victorian Budget 2024–25, Service Delivery, 7 May 2024). On paper, regional Victoria has not been ignored.

The clearest test of the government's regional priorities came in April 2022, when Victoria won hosting rights to the 2026 Commonwealth Games on a promise to spread events across four regional cities — Geelong, Bendigo, Ballarat and the Latrobe Valley — with Melbourne hosting only the opening ceremony, at a budgeted cost of $2.6 billion. Fifteen months later, on 18 July 2023, Premier Daniel Andrews cancelled the Games outright, saying the real cost had blown out to more than $6 billion and that he would "not take money out of hospitals and schools" to cover it (Premier of Victoria, Commonwealth Games Costs Too High At Over $6 Billion, 18 July 2023). In place of the Games, the government redirected $2 billion into a Regional Legacy package: $1 billion for a Regional Housing Fund to build around 1,300 social and affordable homes across regional Victoria, $60 million for a Regional Community Sport Development Fund, $40 million for an All Abilities Sport Fund, and a commitment to still deliver the permanent sporting-facility upgrades the Games had promised.

The evidence

The 2017 VAGO road audit is the clearest primary-source account of how the current backlog took shape. It found real funding to VicRoads had fallen by roughly 49 per cent since 2010–11, with the specific maintenance budget cut by around 60 per cent over the same period (Victorian Auditor-General's Office, Maintaining State-Controlled Roadways, 22 June 2017, approx.). The consequence was arithmetic: resurfacing was covering only 4.19 per cent of the network a year — a 24-year replacement cycle against the state's own 15-year target — while rehabilitation covered just 0.23 per cent, implying a 435-year cycle. The auditor forecast that, without a funding correction, half the state road network would be in "very poor condition" by 2025. Regional roads bore a disproportionate share of the damage even where extra money had been directed at them: cracking on roads in the state's South Western region rose 143 per cent between 2005–06 and 2015–16, against a 94 per cent rise across Melbourne's north-west.

Almost a decade on, the trend the 2017 audit warned about has not reversed. The Department of Transport and Planning's own 2023–24 annual report recorded the share of the regional road network meeting the state's cracking, roughness and rutting safety standards falling again — from 98.5, 95.9 and 98.4 per cent respectively in 2021 to 98.1, 95.5 and 97.9 per cent in 2023–24 — with each 0.1 percentage point of decline representing around 174,000 square metres of road that no longer meets the standard (Department of Transport and Planning, Annual Report 2023–24, as reported in regional media, approx.). The same reporting recorded a sharp fall, cited at around 95 per cent, in the volume of regional resurfacing and rehabilitation work completed in 2023–24 compared with the year before, which the government attributed in part to crews being diverted to flood repair. On ambulances, the disparity flagged by the auditor in 2010 persists in the current data: Ballarat, Bendigo, Geelong and Shepparton each recorded worse average ambulance-to-ED transfer times than the state average in almost every quarter across the eighteen months to mid-2025 (Victorian Agency for Health Information, ambulance services performance reporting, 2025, approx.), even as the government put $146 million in new funding into Ambulance Victoria in the 2024–25 Budget and a further $50 million specifically into regional hospitals to address ramping.

The regional legacy package is smaller than the uncertainty band on the cost of one Melbourne rail project.

Where the big money actually goes

Set side by side, the numbers make the government's regional record harder to defend than its media releases suggest. The $2 billion Regional Legacy package announced in July 2023 is real money, but it is smaller than the $4.5 billion gap between the low and high cost estimates the government itself has published for just the East section of the Suburban Rail Loop (Victorian Budget 2023–24, Budget Paper No. 4). Victoria's Auditor-General found in September 2022 that the business case for that project "did not support an informed investment decision" and had not been tested against a full range of alternative options (Victorian Auditor-General's Office, Quality of Major Transport Infrastructure Project Business Cases, 21 September 2022) — yet the project proceeded, and its funded envelope has only grown since. No comparable business-case audit has been run on the Regional Roads Victoria maintenance program in the eight years since the 2017 road audit, even as the network's own condition data shows the deterioration that audit predicted continuing.

The Games, and what four cities lost

The Commonwealth Games cancellation makes the pattern concrete. Geelong, Bendigo, Ballarat and the Latrobe Valley were promised nine days of events, global broadcast exposure and permanent venue upgrades funded specifically because they were not Melbourne. Fifteen months later those cities got a media conference instead, and a legacy package in which half the money — the $1 billion Regional Housing Fund — was housing spending the government could plausibly have found room for regardless of the Games. The $60 million sport-development fund and $40 million disability-access fund are real, but they are a fraction of what four host cities had been promised in facilities, visiting spend and international attention. The government's own explanation for cancelling — that hospitals and schools should not fund an over-budget event — was a defensible call on the Games. It does not explain why the same test was not applied earlier, and just as firmly, to the Suburban Rail Loop, whose cost range was published in the same budget cycle and which draws on the same finite capital budget that regional roads and hospitals compete for.