Victoria is in the middle of the largest infrastructure program in its history. The state government markets it as the Big Build, and by the most recent published estimates the combined value of in-flight projects sits around $140 billion. Our newsroom watches this program because the public is paying for it, the contracts are vast, and the integrity questions raised by the Victorian Auditor-General and the Independent Broad-based Anti-corruption Commission are not going away.
This article sets out what the Big Build actually is, who runs it, what the Auditor-General has found about its costs, and why a publication like Victoria Crime News considers it part of the integrity beat rather than a transport story.
What the Big Build covers
The Big Build brand bundles several mega-projects under a single political identity. The Victorian Government’s published portfolio includes:
- Metro Tunnel — twin nine-kilometre rail tunnels and five new underground stations beneath central Melbourne, with the budget revised upward more than once since the original 2016 business case.
- Suburban Rail Loop East — the first stage of an orbital rail line from Cheltenham to Box Hill, currently the single largest line item in the program.
- North East Link — a tolled motorway and tunnel system connecting the Eastern Freeway to the M80 Ring Road in Melbourne’s north-east.
- West Gate Tunnel — a road project linking the West Gate Freeway to the inner west, originally an unsolicited proposal from a private toll-road operator.
- Level Crossing Removal Project — the removal of more than 110 level crossings, branded the LXRP, delivered through a series of alliance contracts.
- Regional Rail Revival and a long pipeline of road upgrades, hospital builds and school replacements that sit under the same political umbrella.
None of these projects is small. Several are individually larger than the entire annual capital budgets of smaller Australian states.
Who actually runs it
The Major Transport Infrastructure Authority, known as MTIA, is the administrative office inside the Department of Transport and Planning that oversees the largest projects. MTIA contains a series of project-specific delivery agencies, including Rail Projects Victoria, Major Road Projects Victoria, the Level Crossing Removal Project office and the Suburban Rail Loop Authority.
Each delivery agency lets contracts to private consortia. The contracting models vary — public-private partnerships on Metro Tunnel and North East Link, alliance contracting on level crossings, design-and-construct on smaller jobs. The point that matters for accountability is that the public sector retains the risk on the largest projects even where the headlines suggest otherwise.
Above MTIA sits the Minister for Transport Infrastructure, and ultimately Cabinet. Project Definition Plans — the documents that lock in scope, schedule and budget — are signed off at ministerial level. Once a Project Definition Plan is approved, the published budget figure is anchored. Subsequent variations do not always travel back through the same scrutiny.
What the Auditor-General has found
The Victorian Auditor-General’s Office, an independent officer of the Parliament, has published a string of reports on Big Build cost performance. Across those reports, the recurring findings are consistent: business cases are built on optimistic assumptions, scope creep is rarely costed transparently, and the public sees a final number long after the decisions that produced it have been made.
The Auditor-General’s 2021 report on Metro Tunnel found that contingency was being drawn down faster than expected and that some risk-sharing arrangements with the private consortium had been re-cut after financial close. The 2020 West Gate Tunnel audit examined a multi-billion-dollar variation arising from contaminated soil disposal, an issue the Auditor-General described as foreseeable. Subsequent audits of North East Link and the Level Crossing Removal Project have raised concerns about the way “early works” packages are scoped before a full business case has been finalised.
None of those findings allege corruption. They describe a governance pattern: large public sums committed early, on numbers that move later.
Where the integrity beat enters
The Independent Broad-based Anti-corruption Commission is the state’s anti-corruption body. Its public special reports — Operations Watts, Daintree and Sandon — set out findings on the misuse of public resources, the role of ministerial offices and the planning system. None of those operations was a Big Build investigation. But each report describes the cultural and procedural environment in which Big Build contracts are signed.
Operation Sandon, which examined planning decisions at the City of Casey, identified the risks created by ministerial discretion and a lack of transparent record-keeping around development decisions. Operation Daintree found that contracts had been issued in ways that bypassed normal procurement rules. Operation Watts described pressure on electorate staff to perform political work on the public dollar. Read together, IBAC’s findings describe a public sector under pressure to deliver politically, fast, and at scale.
That is precisely the environment in which the Big Build is being delivered.
The CFMEU administration
In 2024, following the Building Bad investigation jointly conducted by Nine newspapers and 60 Minutes, the federal government legislated to place the Construction Forestry Maritime Employees Union into administration. The administrator’s published findings have included references to suspect operators on Victorian construction sites, including some sites linked to Big Build delivery. We cover that timeline in detail in a separate article.
The administration has changed who is allowed on Big Build sites. It has not, of itself, changed how contracts are let or how budgets are set. Those remain matters for MTIA, the relevant delivery agency and the responsible minister.
Why we watch this beat
Our newsroom watches the Big Build because integrity reporting in Victoria has historically been concentrated on policing, courts and the public service. Construction-sector integrity has been comparatively under-covered, despite involving sums of money that dwarf almost everything else on the public ledger. Our chief courts reporter, Eliza Hartman, leads our Big Build Watch coverage because the questions raised by the Auditor-General and IBAC are governance questions, not engineering ones.
We will continue to read the published reports of statutory bodies, the public court record, and the administrator’s findings, and to translate those into plain English for readers who do not have time to wade through 200-page audit documents themselves. We do not speculate beyond what those bodies have published. Where matters are pending, we use the language of allegation.
If you have information that should be on our radar, the safest first step is usually to take it to the relevant statutory body — IBAC, the Auditor-General, or the CFMEU administrator’s office — all of which have formal disclosure protections. We do not handle whistle-blower material directly because we cannot offer the legal protections those bodies can.
For general public-sector misconduct concerns, IBAC’s published guidance on how to make a complaint is the right starting point. For matters of immediate criminality, Crime Stoppers Victoria can be reached on 1800 333 000. In an emergency, call 000.
