Victoria’s $200 billion suburban rail loop (SRL) will be a horribly expensive white elephant that will get in the way of solving housing affordability, and many other things the state needs to do.

The Albanese government should not put in a dollar, and kybosh it, asap.

The suburban underground railway is one of the biggest infrastructure projects in Australian history – much more expensive than Snowy Hydro, 1.0 and 2.0 combined – but was not recommended by any infrastructure bodies and emerged directly from the office of former premier Dan Andrews as a political fix, with no respect for proper process and little care or understanding of transport principles.

New Premier Jacinta Allen, then transport minister, was in on the joke at the time, and has doubled down rather than abandon it, as she should have done when she took over.

It is blatant political pork-barrelling, but won’t even work as that because of the unpopular high-rise buildings that go with it.

The plan is that the SRL will lead to a series of new “CBDs” around the middle suburbs, in line with the government’s separate housing affordability plan to give councils zoning targets to be achieved largely by raising the height limit around train stations from two to three storeys to five to six storeys.

But locals don’t want high-rise buildings in their suburbs and will be chaining themselves to bulldozers and voting out the councillors. Densifying the suburbs is a good idea, and ultimately necessary to some extent, but in the short term community opposition will create delays and uncertainty.

And anyway, how many people want to catch the train from Cheltenham to Box........

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