Victorian Premier Ben Carroll has defended his handling of a secret $8bn rail charge after it was revealed the levy was disclosed to the full cabinet more than two years ago.
The Australian revealed on Wednesday that the details of the Rail Improvement Charge were contained in the briefing pack for a June 2024 cabinet meeting, in minutes recording a December 2023 meeting of the government’s budget and finance committee of cabinet.
Mr Carroll on Wednesday did not deny the report, but said it was “very unfair to say something was put in a cabinet minute that was decided on seven months earlier”.
“It was conceived, designed and implemented by previous leadership. I’m the leader now, and I have abolished it,” he said.
“I’m not going to sit here and talk about everything I debated inside the cabinet room.
“It’s very well known that I disagreed with the former leadership on a range of matters around financial management and integrity. I will not relitigate what occurred in those meetings, except to say it was conceived wrongly, it should never have been conceived the way it was done.
“It was unfair from the very first day that cabinet meeting occurred with (Daniel) Andrews, (Tim) Pallas, (Jacinta) Allan and (James) Merlino in 2021 – they should have said ‘this is what we’re looking at and be transparent with the public’.”
The revelation had intensified pressure on Premier Ben Carroll and his deputy Gabrielle Williams over what they knew about the charge and when.
Senior Labor figures close to former premier Jacinta Allan have laid the blame on Ms Williams for keeping the levy secret – claims strongly denied by sources close to the Deputy Premier and Mr Carroll.
Mr Carroll, Ms Williams and other cabinet members have sought to distance themselves from the now-scrapped levy despite holding senior positions in the government when it was introduced. Mr Carroll was deputy premier at the time; Ms Williams was public transport minister.
The June 2024 cabinet material indicates the charge had been disclosed to the broader ministry months before Mr Carroll joined the government’s budget razor gang in September 2024 and reportedly gained visibility over the levy, and before Ms Williams became aware of it in the second half of 2024.
The revelation of the cabinet material means any minister who maintains he or she was unaware of the levy by June 2024 either did not read the relevant subcommittee minutes provided to cabinet or did not register the details contained in them.
One senior Labor source sympathetic to Ms Allan claimed Mr Carroll and Ms Williams were rewriting history. “Everyone in cabinet should have known about this charge,” the source said. “If people didn’t read their cabinet briefing packs, that’s on them.”
Asked to comment on whether the levy was disclosed to cabinet in the middle of 2024, a Victorian government spokesperson said: “The rail improvement charge was not transparent and we will abolish it.”
The cabinet disclosure was recorded as part of minutes for five separate meetings of the budget and finance committee, and many cabinet ministers insist they never saw it. It also recorded a decision to tie 60 per cent of the revenue from the charge to the controversial Suburban Rail Loop, which was overruled in a decision by the subcommittee in November 2024 to direct the revenue into the existing Public Transport Fund and use it to improve services on the wider network.
An internal Labor blame game over who was responsible for keeping the levy from the public has escalated, centring on a press conference Ms Williams held on December 20, 2024.
Multiple senior Labor sources have sought to lay responsibility at the feet of Ms Williams, claiming she resisted announcing the charge ahead of the press conference at which she was announcing public transport fare increases for the following year.
Sources close to Ms Williams strongly dispute that account. They say the then-public transport minister initially pushed back against plans to use the charge to help fund the SRL and did not want to be responsible for announcing the policy under those terms. But after the decision was made in November 2024 to direct the revenue into improving services for the general transport network, they say Ms Williams did not oppose publicly announcing it. One source said: “Claims to the contrary are being peddled for pretty nefarious reasons.”
Ms Williams was briefed on how to answer questions about the levy ahead of the December 20 press conference and, according to sources close to her, was surprised when reporters did not ask about it. They also pointed to the fact that the budget update a week prior did not disclose the levy as evidence that it was not Ms Williams who decided to keep it secret.
“The biggest clue that it was others who kept it secret lies in the fact that it was not in the budget update on December 13, 2024,” one source said.
Other senior government sources directly involved in deliberations over the charge reject that version of events, saying Ms Williams and her office were adamant she did not want to announce the levy at the time.
“Gab is the reason it did not get announced. She as minister could have made it public,” a source said.
The conflicting accounts expose deep divisions within Victorian Labor in the wake of Mr Carroll’s leadership challenge against Ms Allan.
Last week, Ms Williams said she had expected the charge to form part of the government’s “broader communications” and she had been unaware of any “proactive” decision not to disclose it.
“I’ve been part of a new leadership team with Premier Ben Carroll that has made it very clear that integrity is at the heart of our agenda, that it’s in our DNA, and that it is introduced in everything we do,” she said.
The 1 per cent levy on top of all public transport fares was last week exposed in a report by the Victorian Auditor-General’s Office, which found that the levy was conceived as a new revenue source to finance the SRL. It was forecast to raise $8bn over the next 36 years, but ended up only netting $6.5m before Mr Carroll announced last week the government was scrapping it.
The government first approved a plan to use 60 per cent of RIC revenue – an estimated $4.8bn between 2025 and 2062 – to repay borrowings for the SRL. But towards the end of 2024, a decision was made to instead direct the revenue from the RIC into the existing Public Transport Fund to be spent on the wider transport network.
Robert Redlich, a former Supreme Court judge who was commissioner of the Independent Broad-based Anti-corruption Commission from 2018 to 2022, said the secrecy around the charge may amount to corruption under expanded integrity laws promised by Mr Carroll.
Mr Redlich, now chair of the Accountability Round Table, said it might be that the RIC was imposed for improper motives that did not serve the public interest. If so, it would constitute a “breach of public trust” under the broader definitions of corruption used by the federal National Anti-Corruption Commission and NSW’s Independent Commission Against Corruption.
“Such conduct, if established, would fall within IBAC’s proposed expanded jurisdiction – assuming it takes a similar form to the ICAC and the NACC – and IBAC would have jurisdiction to investigate and determine the motives and knowledge of those deciding to implement the charges in order to determine whether it constituted corruption,” he said.
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Anthony GallowayVictorian political editor