Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Victorian Premier Ben Carroll have declared Melbourne Airport Rail is moving forward again, announcing a new 7.4-kilometre section of track and a long-promised station at Keilor East.
But beneath the headline announcement sits an awkward reality for a project Melburnians have been promised in various forms for more than six decades: Labor still cannot say when passengers will actually be able to board a train at Melbourne Airport.
Albanese announced on Wednesday that Stage 2 of Melbourne Airport Rail would proceed, saying:
“Melbourne needs a train to the airport. Labor is building it.”
The new stage will extend rail from Albion towards the airport precinct, build a new station at Keilor East and include a roughly 500-metre bridge over the Maribyrnong River. Site investigations, procurement and development work are expected to begin within weeks, followed by community consultation and early design work next year. Major construction, however, is not scheduled to start until 2028, with the Keilor East station expected to be completed in 2031.
That is tangible progress.
What Wednesday’s announcement does not provide is a construction or opening date for the final section from Keilor East into Melbourne Airport.
That distinction matters because the project being promoted as “Melbourne Airport Rail” will, under the newly announced timetable, reach Keilor East by 2031 without any guarantee that trains will reach the airport at the same time.
In other words, Labor has now put a date on the next section of Airport Rail — but still not on the airport.
Albanese said the federal and state Labor governments were “building Victoria’s future” and creating capacity for more trains, while Carroll said the government was getting on with delivering a direct rail connection to Melbourne Airport.
The governments say the Keilor East stage will eventually connect directly through the Metro Tunnel, forming part of the planned service between the airport and Melbourne’s CBD.
Government planning material says Keilor East residents would eventually have a turn-up-and-go service every 10 minutes, with trips to the CBD taking around 27 minutes and journeys from Keilor East to the airport taking about six minutes once the full line is operating. The new station is intended to give more than 150,000 people in the broader Moonee Valley area improved access to the rail network.
Those are substantial potential benefits for Melbourne’s north-west.
But they also expose just how far the project timetable has shifted.
When the federal and Victorian governments released the Melbourne Airport Rail business case in 2022, they said the new Keilor East station and the airport rail line would open in 2029.
The promised service was to take passengers from Melbourne Airport to the CBD in about 30 minutes, with trains every 10 minutes.
That 2029 opening will not happen.
After further delays, the Victorian government pushed the project back to at least 2033 in 2024 amid a dispute with Melbourne Airport over whether the airport station should be underground or elevated.
Now even that 2033 whole-of-project completion date is no longer being publicly committed to.
The Keilor East section has a 2031 date.
The airport does not.
For passengers, that is the central unanswered question in Wednesday’s announcement.
The Melbourne Airport rail debate predates many of the politicians now promising to deliver it.
The idea was being discussed in the Victorian Parliament as far back as 1964, when plans for a rail connection to the then-new Tullamarine airport were being debated before Australia had even adopted decimal currency.
Different governments have revived, studied, delayed or abandoned versions of the project ever since.
A rail proposal collapsed in the late 1960s.
An “Aerotrain” concept involving the French government disappeared in the 1970s.
The Bracks Labor government promised an airport rail link ahead of the 1999 state election before concluding it would not yet be commercially viable.
Further feasibility studies followed.
In 2018, the then federal Coalition government committed up to $5 billion, matched by Victoria, to revive the project.
By 2022, the business case presented Airport Rail as a project with an estimated cost within the previously identified $8 billion to $13 billion range, and claimed economic benefits of as much as $2.10 for every dollar invested. It forecast up to 8,000 direct and indirect jobs during delivery.
The funding envelope has since changed.
Infrastructure Australia says the Commonwealth has now committed $7 billion, including an additional $2 billion towards the Sunshine Superhub. Victoria has committed $5 billion, taking the governments’ combined commitments associated with Airport Rail to about $12 billion.
Stage 1 is centred on the western rail corridor and Sunshine.
Construction began this year on works including upgrades around Sunshine, additional tracks and bridges, and capacity improvements designed to allow airport services to eventually feed into the Metro Tunnel.
The Sunshine Superhub component is now valued at about $4.1 billion and is expected to be completed in 2030.
The government says the new Keilor East stage will be delivered alongside that work.
The sequencing has some practical logic.
Airport trains cannot simply be inserted into Melbourne’s existing network without sufficient capacity through Sunshine and the western corridor. Infrastructure Australia also says the project has the potential to improve connections not only for Melbourne passengers but for travellers from Ballarat, Bendigo and Geelong.
But the staging also makes it harder for taxpayers to judge what exactly $12 billion will buy, and when.
The 2022 economic case was prepared around the full rail connection to Melbourne Airport, not a permanently incomplete line terminating short of the terminals.
That does not mean the Sunshine or Keilor East works lack value on their own. Both have broader network benefits.
It does mean the strongest benefits promoted in the original business case — including direct airport access, reduced road congestion and a roughly 30-minute CBD-airport journey — depend on the final airport section eventually being delivered.
Until that final stage has a scope, price and timetable, the original promise remains unfinished.
The long delay cannot fairly be attributed to one government or one organisation.
An independent mediation report commissioned by the Commonwealth identified a breakdown in the relationship between the Victorian government and Melbourne Airport, disagreement over the airport station design, COVID-19 disruption and the federal government’s infrastructure review among the factors that stalled the project.
A major dispute centred on whether the terminal station should be elevated, as the state preferred, or underground, as Melbourne Airport wanted.
The airport argued an underground station would better accommodate future development and at one stage said a private consortium had offered billions of dollars towards an underground station and express tracks.
The Victorian government argued the elevated station would be cheaper and quicker.
Federal mediator Neil Scales eventually concluded the project remained “viable and necessary” but recommended governments proceed with the above-ground option unless the airport could make a comprehensive business case for an alternative.
In July 2024, Melbourne Airport backed down and accepted the state’s elevated-station approach, saying Victorians had waited long enough.
The airport, state and Commonwealth subsequently signed an agreement committing them to work together on progressing the project.
But the years lost during that fight cannot now be recovered simply by announcing another stage.
There is also a financial backdrop that cannot be ignored.
Victoria’s 2026-27 budget forecasts net debt at $175.6 billion by June 2027, rising to $199.3 billion by 2029-30.
Interest expenses are forecast at about $8.9 billion in 2026-27, rising to $11.8 billion by 2029-30.
That does not establish that debt caused the Airport Rail delays — the station dispute and other factors are well documented — but it means every additional major infrastructure commitment is now being made against a much tighter state balance sheet.
Government infrastructure investment is forecast to fall from $19.4 billion in 2026-27 to $15.3 billion by 2029-30 as the state attempts to manage its finances.
That makes clarity over the final cost of Airport Rail increasingly important.
The need for better airport transport, meanwhile, is becoming harder to dispute.
Melbourne Airport says passenger numbers are expected to grow from about 36 million in the 2024-25 financial year to around 76 million by 2042.
Infrastructure Australia says a rail connection could reduce pressure on the Tullamarine Freeway, improve travel-time reliability and improve access between regional Victoria and the airport.
The independent mediator reached a similar conclusion in 2024, finding the project remained necessary as airport passenger numbers and pressure on freeway capacity increased.
So the argument is increasingly not over whether Melbourne needs airport rail.
It is over why Australia’s second-largest city has taken so long to build it, what it will ultimately cost and when the final kilometres will actually reach the terminals.
The political timing of Wednesday’s announcement is also difficult to miss.
Victoria goes to the polls on 28 November, meaning the Albanese-Carroll announcement has landed less than two months before the state election.
That does not make the infrastructure announcement illegitimate. Governments routinely announce and progress projects close to elections.
But it increases the importance of separating what is funded and scheduled from what remains an aspiration.
What is now reasonably clear is this:
Stage 1 around Sunshine is under construction and is expected to be completed in 2030.
Stage 2 will extend the railway about 7.4 kilometres towards the airport, deliver Keilor East station and begin major construction in 2028, with completion targeted for 2031.
What remains unclear is the part most travellers will associate with the words “Melbourne Airport Rail” — the station at Melbourne Airport and the final connection into the terminal precinct.
There is still no announced delivery date for that section.
After more than 60 years of plans, studies, promises, disputes and revised deadlines, Wednesday’s announcement is unquestionably another step towards Melbourne finally getting its airport train.
But it is not yet the announcement that generations of Victorians have been waiting for.
That announcement will come when governments can answer a much simpler question: What year will a passenger be able to step off a plane at Melbourne Airport and board a train into the city?
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