Premier Daniel Andrews Tells The Hot Breakfast He Won’t Build The East-West Link

Victorian premier Daniel Andrews has told the Hot Breakfast that he won’t build the East-West Link, despite pressure from the re-elected Scott Morrison government.

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“These are the basic facts. We’ve got the biggest construction program going on in our state, that the state’s ever seen, that the nation has ever seen” the premier said.

“I was at a dinner last week with… Roads Australia, so all the big constructors, engineers.

“They say to me look the pipeline of work is fantastic, but we want you to know things are getting pretty tight.

“We’re getting close to having real shortages in terms of labour, real shortages in terms of the raw materials we need, like we are at full tilt.”

Premier Andrews said building the East-West Link would throw the current regime of infrastructure works into disarray.

“What we’re really faced with here is let’s go and build this East-West Link, righto, well you’ll need to defer, you’ll need to scrap projects that I said I would build.

“So the proposition here is I should not build the projects I said I would build, things like Metro Tunnel, the North-East Link… only city in the world with a gap in its ring road and that’s us.

“That project’s 16 billion dollars, biggest road project the nation has ever seen. We’re about to start recruiting 10,000 staff for that.

“The notion that you can just pluck a project out of the air, put it into the biggest agenda that’s ever been attempted and not cause complete chaos, or drive the price up to astronomical levels, or be deadset short of the workers or raw materials you need misunderstands the fact that we’ve got so much going on.

“I won’t be cancelling or delaying — or as the paper says today ‘resequencing’, which is just insider talk for scrapping — the things that people voted for and the things I said I’d do in order to build a project I said I wouldn’t.

Daniel Andrews also spoke about the long-term future of the state, the ending of Game of Thrones and more.

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