Tuesday, 30 August 2022

Adjournment

Ripon electorate roads

Ms STALEY (Ripon) (19:00): (6506) My adjournment tonight is to the Minister for Roads and Road Safety, and the action I seek is the widening and resealing of three VicRoads C-class roads in my electorate of Ripon. The three roads that I am particularly talking about tonight are St Arnaud-Wycheproof Road, Donald-Stawell Road and Stawell-Avoca Road.

Mr Carbines interjected.

Ms STALEY: It is one project, thank you, minister at the table, the Minister for Police, who wants to once again downplay the needs of my electorate. The Wimmera Southern Mallee Regional Transport Group has identified these and many others as priority projects, and the specific thing that I am asking tonight is this: these are C-class roads, they are VicRoads roads and in some parts they are only one lane wide on the bitumen; what they need to be is two lanes wide, and they need to have a proper shoulder on them, also bitumen. These are roads that carry a lot of B-double traffic and, increasingly, A-double traffic. They are in the middle of the grain belt in most cases, and so they really are carrying some big trucks now—more so, could I say, because the government has failed to complete the Murray Basin rail project. As a result, all of the benefits that would have come from that project—which is to take trucks off the road—being done properly have not eventuated. Therefore we have got these three roads—and like I said, there are many others in the Wimmera Southern Mallee Regional Transport Group’s priority projects, but these are the three that are mainly in my electorate of Ripon—and they just need to be fixed.

There is a really deep need to improve safety in my electorate for all drivers, but also it increases productivity. If the government will not fix the rail system and will not take the grain off the roads, then they have to fix the roads and make them fit for purpose. These roads are not fit for purpose. In many places they are not much more than one lane wide. They are the kind of country roads that you sort of expect that you all go out to the side on—and we do that on a lot of council roads, and we sort of put up with it. But these are VicRoads roads, carrying large amounts of freight, freight that this government is very quick to talk about with its export performance. Well, it is my electorate and the member for South-West Coast’s electorate that are delivering that export performance, but they are being stymied at every point because the roads are so atrocious—utterly atrocious. So the action I seek is simply that the government gets out and turns these three roads into roads that are fit for purpose.