Toll cuts ‘will hit grants’

By Shaun Inguanzo
DISABILITY services and local sporting facilities could suffer if the Opposition halves Eastlink’s tolls, a local MP said this week.
Victorian Opposition leader Robert Doyle last week produced an aboutface on his commitment to abolish the Bracks Government tolls on the Scoresby Freeway, also known as Eastlink, and will now only halve the cost.
In a meeting in Gembrook in May (The Mail, 3 May), Mr Doyle told a crowd of Liberal Party supporters that abolishing the tolls was the party’s ‘bullet’ in the leadup to the State Election in November 2006, and the Bracks Government’s backflip made it a ‘genuinely bad Government’.
Eastlink will connect Frankston to Mitcham, and offer a north to south traffic thoroughfare to Knox, Ferntree Gully and a variety of other suburbs east of Melbourne.
But Ferntree Gully MP Anne Eckstein claimed the proposed tollcut would eat away at community grants.
“We waited 336 days for Doyle to come out with his proposal, he promised he would take tolls off, we (the government) always said he couldn’t deliver it, and he couldn’t.”
Ms Eckstein said Mr Doyle planned to abolish the Department of Victorian Communities, established by the Bracks Government to provide grants to sporting clubs and community services throughout Victoria, including the City of Knox.
She said Outer East Interchange and Eastern Palliative Care were among the places in the Ferntree Gully electorate to have benefited from the grants.
However, Mr Doyle said he was cutting back on the number of public servants required to issue grants, rather than the grants themselves.
He defended the toll cut by saying local families would end up with savings in their pockets, compared with the fullfee tolls offered by the government.
“Bracks created the problem and he just walked away,” Mr Doyle said in an interview with the Mail.
“We are trying to offer the average family a saving of $715, and up to $1200 if they use the entire freeway for the year.”
The Mail asked Mr Doyle how he aimed to improve public transport services in the Shire of Yarra Ranges and City of Knox, but he declined to comment on details of his undisclosed policy.