Reports today reveal the Allan Labor Government has abandoned one planned noise wall and more than halved the height of another that was promised to shield students from traffic noise and pollution.
The Victorian Greens say that school children should not be paying the price for Labor’s $26 billion North East Link bin fire and have been calling for an independent inquiry into the disaster-plagued project.
According to reports in the Age, Labor quietly scaled back promised protections next to Belle Vue Primary School. The revelations come after years of problems with the North East Link Project, including billion-dollar cost blowouts, sinkholes, and environmental damage causing nearby waterways to turn bright blue.
The Greens say this project was bad from the very start and has been an utter trainwreck in its delivery. They say the community deserves answers about the project’s health risks, environmental impacts and spiralling costs.
This builds on their earlier comments slamming the Allan Labor Government for refusing to protect wildlife under the toll road in Rosanna, despite past commitments to the community that this would be delivered.
Earlier this year, Greens MP for North-Eastern Metropolitan Aiv Puglielli called for an independent inquiry into the project.
Greens MP for North-Eastern Metropolitan, Aiv Puglielli:
“The community is fed up with this bin fire of a project and the laundry list of problems that continue to stem from it. We need an inquiry.
“Labor’s now selling out school kids because of their serious mismanagement of this expensive and unnecessary project that no one asked for in the first place.
“We could’ve funded 25 years of free public transport for the cost of this project, but instead Labor’s given us a private toll road that’s caused sinkholes and turned waterways bright blue with pollution.”