Latest news with #Baillieu
Herald Sun
21-07-2025
- Business
- Herald Sun
V/Line commuters left behind in myki smartphone, credit card upgrade
Regional transport hubs at Shepparton, Warrnambool and Swan Hill are among the 37 stations excluded from the first stage of the rollout of new myki readers for tap-and-go travel. While metro commuters will finally be able to touch on with their smartphones and credit cards next year, travellers across the regional network will still be waiting for access to myki itself, two decades after contracts were signed for the problem-plagued plastic card. The Herald Sun can reveal the Allan government is refusing to say when enhanced readers will be installed at long-distance V/Line railway stations as part of a long-awaited $1.7bn upgrade to the touch-on technology. It means thousands of regional commuters travelling from these stations will be stuck with outdated paper tickets or eTickets sent to their phones that are not compatible with myki readers. The stations excluded from the initial rollout of the myki upgrade include those from Dingee to Swan Hill, Elmore to Echuca, Beaufort to Ararat, Crewick to Maryborough, Winchelsea to Warrnambool, Nagambie to Shepparton, Avenel to Albury and Rosedale to Bairnsdale. These stations were all meant to be serviced by myki when the ticketing system was first announced in 2005 as a replacement to Metcard. But after huge cost blowouts, delays and significant user issues with the system, the Baillieu government called for a review of myki and ultimately decided to cut long-distance V/Line services from the rollout in 2011. Metal stands and supporting infrastructure for myki readers had already been installed at the regional stations before the project scope was changed — and fourteen years later are still not able to be used by commuters. While commuters continued to wait for myki, the Allan government last year opted to launch a completely separate $1.94m eTicketing system to send regional commuters their tickets to their phone. That multimillion-dollar contract is due to expire in May, 2026. While it's a step forward from the 90s-era paper tickets, Nationals MP for Murray Plains Peter Walsh couldn't believe his residents still couldn't use myki cards. 'I just don't understand why, after all these years, we are still waiting for the same services supplied to people in Melbourne. It's just plain wrong and unfair,' he said. 'We had been promised Myki early on and have been repeatedly told it is coming. Well, we are years down the track now and the best the Allan Labor government can come up with is yet another assurance it will happen — but with no fixed date. 'In other words, nothing to see here, move on. Another empty promise to make us think something will happen, and we all know how much that promise is worth.' Meanwhile, member for Shepparton Kim O'Keefe said the myki rollout was just another example of the Allan government ignoring the region's pressing transport needs. 'With no timeline in sight for passengers to be able to use their Myki cards on long-haul distances on the V/Line network, this is just another example of the Allan Labor Government can't manage projects and Victorians are paying the price,' she said. 'Quite frankly it's embarrassing that paper tickets are still being used on regional lines such as the Shepparton line in 2025.' Shadow minister for public transport Matthew Guy called public transport ticketing 'a continuing giant balls up by the state government'. 'If the state government can't coordinate the basics, such as train tickets, no wonder they can't manage billion dollar transport budgets either,' he said. The Department of Transport (DTP) is currently installing more than 20,000 new myki readers at myki-serviced train stations across the state as part of the $1.7bn project being rolled out by ticketing-operator Conduent. These will be switched on for contactless payment early next year. The Department said it would after that install new readers at V/Line stations that are currently serviced by paper tickets and eTickets. 'We're currently installing new myki readers across the myki rail network and the rollout is progressing well, with all readers expected to be installed before the end of the year,' a DTP spokesperson said. 'We've introduced e-Ticketing for V/Line long distance services with passengers now able to choose to display their ticket on their smartphone or print them at home.'
The Age
19-05-2025
- Politics
- The Age
He detests the party, but Holmes à Court has donated to help rescue a Liberal MP
The fundraiser has collected $124,000 from more than 300 donors, including two donations (anonymous) of $10,000 each. But also, someone has set up a fake GoFundMe page to mock the crowdfunding appeal to raise money to pay the costs, which are on top of the $300,000 in damages Pesutto was also ordered to pay. Pesutto has had to put out a statement decrying the fake fundraising page as he tries to raise the costs cash, which he must pay in a lump sum or face bankruptcy, which would force him out of parliament. 'Why anyone would try and sabotage these efforts defies comprehension … ' he lamented, directing people to the genuine page. Others come forward Also a genuine donor: long-standing pre-teal Frydenberg tormentor Oliver Yates, the former Clean Energy Finance Corporation chief executive who previously tried to unseat the former treasurer in Kooyong before the teal movement got going. He donated $500, he told us, before begging off the phone to attend to his dog, which upon hearing that CBD was calling was immediately violently sick. And Rob Baillieu has genuinely chipped in $500. Baillieu is son of Liberal ex-premier Ted Baillieu, who along with fellow ex-premier Jeff Kennett has been trying (and failing) to get the Liberal Party to stump up cash for Pesutto. Young Baillieu, a councillor for the City of Boroondara, is tipped by local political experts as a potential winning candidate for Pesutto's state seat of Hawthorn, if the MP is forced into bankruptcy and needs to quit parliament. Baillieu would not be standing for the Liberal Party, which he despises, but as a teal independent. He wrote in an Age opinion column that a job interview with a Liberal MP was 'was one of the most homophobic experiences of my life'. 'It'll be up to the community to decide if an independent should run and who that person should be,' he told CBD. 'It's appalling that the Liberal Party has so far chosen to abandon their former leader and put him at risk of bankruptcy. There are no independents in the Victorian parliament and this lack of independent representation is a clear disservice to the community. 'We would be well served by an independent in Hawthorn, as the community is by our federal member, Dr Monique Ryan.' Watch this space. Technical hitch Rough Friday for e-conveyancing platform PEXA, which suffered a technical outage, leaving its mum and dad customers unable to settle on their family home transactions for hours. The company has an effective monopoly on the Australian e-conveyancing space, and Friday's brief outage excited rival platforms like Sympli, which have so far been unable to dent PEXA's market dominance despite spending big and talking up federal and state reform to the sector. Loading A PEXA spokesman was quick to assure us that no Great Australian Dreams were crushed, telling us the exchange 'experienced a technical issue affecting mobile signing capability' that was resolved within three hours. 'We estimate that the disruption impacted less than 10 per cent of settlements during that period, which then went on later to settle or reschedule,' they said. Still, it was enough to trigger whispers that the NSW Liberals would push for a parliamentary inquiry into the glitch. The outage came after a few big changes at PEXA, which just brought in a new chief executive in Russell Cohen from a job with rideshare-cum-delivery platform Grab in Singapore and poached Seven's old chief regulatory and sustainability officer Clare Gill to run corporate affairs. Meanwhile, the broadcaster has just hired former NSW Liberal staffer Kaycie Bradford as communications director, corporate. Her predecessor Robert Sharpe departed some time ago to head up corporate comms at LinkedIn, where he no doubt spends his days fielding complaints that its online games offerings such as Queens and Zip are getting too easy. Despite talk that Seven West Media would move everything in house, rest assured it can still call on the external services of legendary silver-tongued spinner Neil Shoebridge, via Shoebridge Knowles Media Group, which spruiks on its website that it is in the business of 'sparking smarter conversations for exceptional results' and that 'SKMG placed 689 pieces of proactive media coverage for Seven West Media in a single year'.
The Age
29-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Age
‘Sorrento is not your town': Writers festival fallout deepens
This was a further contrast with the SWF, which had Lionel Lauch of Indigenous organisation Living Culture perform a Welcome to Country on behalf of the Bunurong community, while moderators gave an Acknowledgement of Country at the start of other sessions. The festival has several First Nations writers and publishers who are part of its program. But during an impromptu speech at the garden literary gabfest, local Liberal MP Zoe McKenzie, a supporter of SWF, made a light-hearted joke comparing Advance Australia Fair to a Welcome to Country. This further upset some in Sorrento. Now, it emerges there is yet more beef. Turns out Baillieu couldn't attend several SWF events because either the time or venue had changed since his tickets were issued. SWF said it had updated ticket holders via email. Baillieu said that was news to him, and he was seeking either an apology or explanation from Perkin, plus $60 for his unusable tickets. Changing allegiances Congratulations to Paul Guerra, the new chief executive of the Melbourne Football Club, replacing Gary Pert. Guerra, one of the few people in Melbourne to attend more events than CBD, has been chief executive of the Victorian Chamber of Commerce and Industry for five years. He's also a director at Racing Victoria and previously was the boss at the Royal Agricultural Society of Victoria, which runs the Melbourne Royal Show. The Age quoted competition sources saying the exec was a strong strategic thinker with good people skills, and the Demons believed it could 'bring him up to speed on football'. It will also have to bring him up to speed on being a Dees supporter, given Guerra is a lifelong Bombers tragic. We guess his re-education started yesterday. 'I'm moving from the business with politics to the business with sport, and with that, I'm trading the black and red of the Bombers to the red and blue of the Demons,' he told CBD. And as for the soon-to-be vacant VECCI post, CBD is sure that chief of staff Chanelle Pearson would love the job. Other contenders might include failed Melbourne lord mayoral candidate Arron Wood, or Victorian executive director of the Property Council of Australia, Cath Evans. No doubt it will be the hot topic at the chamber's inaugural Melbourne Winter Ball, to be held in Southbank on May 29. Bennelong matters For the Liberals to have a hope on Saturday, they need to reclaim John Howard 's old stomping ground now held by Labor on a wafer-thin margin, the Sydney seat of Bennelong. The party's candidate, Scott Yung, has spent much of the campaign firmly in the 'embattled' camp due to reports outlining his ties to a Chinese Communist Party-linked casino high roller. He also copped heat for handing out Easter eggs to primary school students, an election sweetener gone awry. Yung was evasive when confronted with media questions, even fleeing his own campaign launch, but he found a softer landing on the podcast of his former boss, Mark Bouris, founder of mortgage-lender Yellow Brick Road. 'I just want to clarify for the sake of this conversation: you're not a communist are you?' Bouris asked. Loading 'I think it's borderline racism. Just because I've got an Asian face, my parents have come from China and Hong Kong, they call me a communist,' Yung responded. The fine-print on the podcast disclosed that it was authorised by Yung's campaign – often a tell-tale sign of a paid post. Nothing fishy, we hear. Due to an Australian Electoral Commission crackdown on influencer content, the authorisation was added to avoid any further damaging headlines. Winning ways The scion of one of Australia's grandest, faded media dynasties has got the green light for a renovation at his $22 million mansion to build a new, er, wall. Charles Fairfax, son of the late Lady (Mary) Fairfax, AC, OBE, and heir to the family that once published this masthead, lodged a development application with local Sydney Woollahra Council last year, but it was rejected. The resort-style property, which Charles and wife Kate picked up in 2022, is just 10 minutes down the road from his fabled childhood home, Fairwater, in Double Bay, now owned by billionaire tech baron Mike Cannon-Brookes. Fairfax appealed against the council's rejection to the Land and Environment Court. After a conciliation conference, a revised plan kept everyone happy … and out of court.
