source : the age
Commuters will be able to touch on with smartphones and bankcards on trams from Sunday, in the latest phase of the state government’s long-awaited effort to overhaul the myki ticketing system.
More than 700,000 tap-and-go trips have already been made across Victoria this month after payment readers were upgraded at railway stations.
But contactless tap-and-go payments will not be rolled out on myki-enabled bus journeys until next month, and the digital touch-on technology also remains limited to full-fare passengers.
The state government will spruik the upgrade on Sunday as Opposition Leader Jess Wilson kicks off the winter parliamentary break by pledging to visit every electorate across the state to draw attention to what she argues is a lack of investment in regional Victoria.
Public Transport Minister Gabrielle Williams said Victorians would now be able to use the same bankcard or digital payment method when they “step off a train and straight onto a tram”.
“Four in five tap-and-go trips are already being made with a phone or smartwatch – showing more Victorians are leaving the wallet at home,” she said.
A report by the Victorian Auditor-General’s Office earlier this year found that tap-and-go payments for concession passengers on trains, buses and trams would not happen until mid-2027.
The bank card tap-and-go system only supports myki money, so those who use weekly, monthly or yearly passes still need a physical card.
The cost of a public transport fare has been halved until January 1 next year, with a full daily fare capped at $5.70.
The rollout of tap-and-go technology in Victoria has been subject to repeated delays, trailing other major Australian cities such as Sydney, where passengers have been able to pay public transport fares via bankcard or smartphone since 2019.
In 2023, the Victorian Labor government signed a $1.7 billion contract for Conduent to take over as myki operator for 15 years, finally allowing tap-and-go ticketing on bankcards and smartphones. Ben Carroll, the public transport minister at the time, said the contactless technology would be rolled out across 2025.
Meanwhile, as campaigning for November’s state election ratchets up, Wilson and her team will on Sunday promise to visit all of Victoria’s 88 lower house electorates in the next five weeks.
“Victoria is too big and too diverse to be run from Spring Street alone,” the opposition leader said. “Every community deserves to be heard.”
Wilson’s tour of the state’s lower house seats will begin in Bendigo East – Premier Jacinta Allan’s electorate, where she is facing a stern challenge from the Nationals — as the opposition seizes on new analysis from the Parliamentary Budget Office showing a reduction in spending for regional Victoria.
The review of the 2026-27 Victorian budget found investment in regional areas accounted for 11.9 per cent of the Labor government’s spending, down from 12 per cent in the previous budget.
Almost a quarter of Victoria’s population lives in regional and rural communities.
“That gap was already unfair, and it is now getting worse,” Nationals leader Danny O’Brien said.
The independent budget office’s analysis stated that the government’s per person infrastructure investment in metropolitan areas was 72.5 per cent higher than in regional Victoria.
Following the May budget, Allan said the government had invested more than $50 billion in regional Victoria in the past 12 years, and the regions had the second-lowest unemployment rate of anywhere in Australia.
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