Tuesday, 31 October 2023

Hattah-Robinvale Road roadside vegetation

Jade BENHAM (Mildura) (19:14): (407) My adjournment matter is for the Minister for Roads and Road Safety, and the action I seek is urgent hedging and maintenance of the trees and roadside vegetation on the Hattah-Robinvale Road. The Hattah-Robinvale Road is a road where some massive processing plants and farms operate. Select Harvests have several orchards, their H2E plant and their main processing operation there, which span 100 hectares. For those that cannot visualise hectares, it is about 100 soccer pitches. It is a $40 million operation set up in 2008, and it is huge. Rocky Lamattina & Sons is responsible for a third of the carrots right across Australia on supermarket shelves – huge, and they run a fleet of B-quad trucks. Olam, or OFI, have several orchards. Boundary Bend Olives or Cobram Estate olive oil, Redgold and now Bright Light, another almond processor, are also on this road, as well as several broadacre farms. Added to this are popular camping spots in Wemen and the Hattah-Kulkyne National Park.

So what we have is a really windy road – yes, full of potholes, but it is carrying huge trucks. It is carrying road trains – A-doubles, B-doubles, B-quads – harvest machinery, school buses, tourists and family vehicles. This road is also the main arterial road between the Robinvale-Sea Lake Road and the Calder Highway. Like I said, it is incredibly windy. It is a fatality waiting to happen. Not only have the grass and weeds on the road reserves got out of control but because of the weather and the conditions over the last couple of years, the shrubbery, native vegetation and trees on the road reserves have really flourished. Normally we would say ‘Great, it’s fantastic’, but now truck drivers in prime movers cannot see oncoming traffic. Because of the windy roads they cannot see left and right, they cannot see oncoming trucks and they cannot see oncoming cars. I spoke to Phil Lamattina earlier about this. He said after 30 years they have never seen it as bad but they are kind of used to getting no reaction, and his drivers actually use the trucking channel – channel 40, which I had no idea existed, but the trucking channel is channel 40 – and they make a call when they are exiting the farm.

Select Harvests, I have been out there a few times. Their farm at Carina, where I used to live, so I have intimate knowledge of this road, is a fatality waiting to happen, because if you have got tourists coming down that road that are unaware of the huge operations in this area – and it is 100 kilometres an hour, except for the bits that have potholes and circles around them; they are 40 obviously, because that is what happens – and if they hit a truck exiting at 100 kilometres an hour, that is a disaster waiting to happen. Carrots are harvesting now and dryland farmers are harvesting now – we need urgent action.