"Giant waste of money": West Gate Tunnel to open on Sunday

The Socialist Bulletin Staff - 13/12/2025

VICTORIA'S West Gate Tunnel now has an opening date, with the road tunnel set to open on Sunday, 14 December, more than three years after the promised opening date of 2022.

When it was first announced, private company Transurban, who collects tolls on many of Melbourne's roads, promised to pay a majority of the costs, with the benefit for the company that they would be able to collect tolls on CityLink for an extra ten years, up until 2045.

Transurban promised to pay as much as $5.1 billion of the $5.5 billion project, leaving the state to only cover $400 million. Today, the West Gate Tunnel has cost over $12 billion, and the state will cover at least $4.2 billion, with final costs still under dispute as the tunnel opens.

This tunnel, the idea of corporate interests that was forced onto the government, has been a large hole in the state budget for years now, taking up money that could have been used to fund schools, hospitals, or, keeping with the intent of the Tunnel, improvements to freight rail. These improvements could have included finishing the standard gauge track to Mildura, which would have drastically decreased the travel time for freight trains to get to Mildura, and would have reopened the door for passenger rail to the town.

Even people that do not use the West Gate Tunnel will still pay for the tunnel directly, with tolls on CityLink, a much more popular road, now working to reimburse the private company for the money it spent on a project it wanted to do, that no party actually campaigned on, that existed purely for corporate interests.