Wednesday, 16 October 2024

Grievance debate

Road maintenance

Bridget VALLENCE (Evelyn) (16:01): The topic that I am raising today in the grievance debate is the significant neglect of roads in my community across the Yarra Ranges and right across the state of Victoria. This Allan Labor government has left our roads in a dismal state, and it causes significant grievance for those right across my community. Two weeks ago our community confronted another dreadful day of serious road trauma on local roads, and condolences to the family of the Berwick man who lost his life in Yellingbo. My thoughts are also with the families involved in yet another serious crash on Warburton Highway in Seville East in my community. I thank, and I am always thinking of, our emergency first responders, who attended both accidents. There were two serious and significant accidents on the one day. Our emergency services are already stretched – many are volunteers – and they did an amazing job to attend both of these serious accidents on one day.

Our Yarra Ranges police, our local CFA fire brigades, the Lilydale State Emergency Service, SES, and our ambulance paramedics experience traumatic scenes and traumatic situations at accidents firsthand, but these emergency first responders do everything that they can to help save lives and to console residents at the site of the accidents and stay back to clean up in the aftermath of the serious road trauma. I thank our emergency services for their tireless efforts. They are truly valued in our community. I had the opportunity to attend the Yarra Ranges police road safety forum recently. Also, many of the emergency services band together for the Yarra Valley teenage road information program, TRIP, which provides our community with a stark reminder of the ripple effect of road trauma.

Sadly, severe and traumatic accidents on Yarra Valley roads is not a new phenomenon, and it is not good enough for the Allan Labor government to merely blame driver behaviour. Certainly driver behaviour is a factor, and drivers must be careful; they must be vigilant and they must drive to road rules. But a major factor too, a significant factor, is the inadequate road infrastructure in Victoria, particularly in my community across the Yarra Ranges, and our community in the Yarra Ranges is totally fed up with Yarra Valley roads being neglected. Budget after budget after budget this Allan Labor government has failed to allocate a single cent to significant road safety upgrades across the Yarra Valley. There are so many notorious and known dangerous roads in the Yarra Valley that absolutely require road safety upgrades. It is common sense to make these roads safer for motorists and pedestrians, with the increase in population, the increase in transport – horse floats, earth-moving vehicles, tourist vehicles, all of these – and with the increase in traffic across roads like the Warburton Highway, the Maroondah Highway and the Melba Highway and also some of our smaller roads like Hereford Road, Clegg Road and Monbulk Road. These are all roads that have a significant amount of traffic but there are significant road infrastructure problems and flaws that the Allan Labor government for a decade now have failed to do anything to fix.

As I mentioned, the known dangerous stretch of the Warburton Highway in Seville East is something that together with the community I have been campaigning on for a long time. Our community grieves the fact that this government just turns a blind eye each and every time the community raises this with the Department of Transport and Planning and I raise this matter in Parliament. All we get from the Minister for Roads and Road Safety, who was at the table now, is ‘Thanks for your feedback. We’ll consider it, but we’re not doing anything about that dangerous road.’ That was a significant accident that we had at Warburton Highway in Seville East just two weeks ago, a significant accident in terms of the massive trauma that was caused – those cars were completely crushed – and it is something that we have been telling the government for a very long time. The point of the road has low visibility; it is on a crest. There are bus stops either side. It makes no sense that they are located in that location. In fact in this particular accident two weeks ago one of the community members that I have been campaigning with, who is actually a road safety police sergeant Andrew Sands, was in this accident. He has long been advocating to make road safety changes to fix this dangerous stretch of road, mitigate the safety concerns and reduce the number of serious accidents that occur here. But so far it has fallen on deaf ears in the Allan Labor government.

This is the stretch of Warburton Highway in Seville East between Sunnyside Road and Peters Road. We know there is that double crest, side roads, turning traffic in and out for people who live at Seville East, merging lanes and, as I said, the bus stops. We know that the government did an investigation a couple of years ago, but it has so far kept that investigation and report secret. Our community deserves to know what is in that report. We think that the pure fact that the government has kept this secret is because they know that the recommendations in that report were to invest in upgrading that road and make it safer for residents, motorists and tourists alike. Dangerous intersections, potholes, road camber issues, degradation on the sides of roads and a lack of safe turning lanes really expose the infrastructure that is no longer fit for purpose on roads across the Yarra Ranges. The Labor government will never admit that their harsh budget cuts state budget after state budget are a contributing factor. They have severely stifled the ability to upgrade and fix roads in the Yarra Valley, and the Yarra Valley is continually overlooked.

Two weeks ago we saw an extraordinary revelation resulting from a Victorian Liberal–Nationals freedom-of-information request. I pay tribute to my colleague the member for Gippsland South for his efforts as the Shadow Minister for Roads and Road Safety because with this freedom-of-information request that the Liberals and Nationals in Victoria obtained we found that the Victorian Labor government has been disgracefully siphoning off $1.6 million of federal black spot program funding to pay bureaucrats and protect overruns instead of spending it on roads. The federal funding for black spots is meant to be spent on fixing dangerous black spots on roads, but this government is so strapped for cash that it is siphoning off money from this fund just to pay for back-office costs and project overruns. It is an absolute disgrace.

Further, the Allan Labor government seeks to blame the condition of our roads on repeated flooding. We know through the Yarra Ranges region we have had significant flooding in recent times. But this is right across Victoria, and every time, in recent times, the government says it is flooding that has exposed potholes and so forth. These roads were in poor condition prior to the significant floods that we have experienced in the last couple of years. The statistics and the numbers are black and white in the budget that today’s road maintenance budget is 16 per cent lower than it was in 2020.

In a time where there is widespread acknowledgement of how poor the condition of our roads and road infrastructure is, this Labor government also plans to sell off its government-owned road repairer and disband Regional Roads Victoria. We all know that this is because state debt under this tired Labor government is soaring to $188 billion and we have had $41 billion of cost blowouts on inner-city Big Build projects. The roads in Yarra Valley and our community are paying the price for Labor’s financial incompetence and Labor’s complete and utter ignorance of addressing road safety upgrades that are absolutely critical to the safety of residents in my community in the Yarra Ranges. No more neglect – it has caused too much grief for our community for too long. It is time that the Allan Labor government properly funded road safety upgrades across the Yarra Valley.

Labor has been in massive spin motion recently when it comes to all of the crumbling roads that we have got not only across the Yarra Ranges in my community but right across Victoria. They made a desperate announcement this week, really just to cover up their failure, about poor road maintenance. They said that there was record funding and a road maintenance blitz. We know this is not a new announcement. The government is trying to make out that this is a new announcement. This is money that was allocated in the budget; it is not anything new. This is money that is allocated in the budget each and every year because, quite frankly, the state government has state roads that are state assets. These are government assets that they should be maintaining, making sure that they are safe and fit for purpose. This is a bucket of money that happens in every state budget, but the difference under this government is that it decreases the amount of money available to maintain roads.

The blitz on road maintenance decreases year on year on year, and now Victorians are paying the price, and we see that. No amount of spin or media grandstanding will cover up the fact that, as Victorians know, our roads are in an absolutely appalling state. Labor just cannot manage money, and our roads and Victorian motorists and pedestrians are paying the price. They are suffering the consequences of this appalling state of the road network across Victoria: the massive amount of potholes, the degradation on the side of the roads – it is quite crazy. The Labor government’s own survey of Victorian roads showed that 91 per cent of roads were in poor or very poor condition. You would think that the Labor government would actually take notice of their own survey data and do something about it, but all they do is cut the budget.

Labor, as I said, has abolished Regional Roads Victoria at the worst possible time, and in recent times has been forced to patch 700 potholes. That is only going to touch the surface. It will be like a drop in the ocean because there are probably 700 potholes just around the few roads where I live in Wandin in the Yarra Valley. We have potholes on Hull Road in Mooroolbark, and Hull Road in Mooroolbark has the double whammy: not only is it riddled with potholes, it also has the significant, serious safety issue of the single-lane bottleneck congestion under the rail bridge there at Mooroolbark Road. We have got potholes on Hull Road in Mooroolbark, potholes on Warburton Highway and potholes on Melba Highway. From Yering in my electorate right through to Yea in the member for Eildon’s electorate the Melba Highway is riddled with potholes. The government will say they are spending some money on the Melba Highway potholes, but as soon as they fill a pothole, guess what, the next week it is there again or another one has popped up. That shows that the infrastructure is no longer fit for purpose and a significant structural change needs to be made. Filling potholes is not fixing the issue. Maroondah Highway has potholes. Hunter Road in Wandin; Clegg Road in Mount Evelyn; Main Street, Lilydale; Maroondah Highway, Lilydale; Healesville-Koo Wee Rup Road; Monbulk-Seville Road from Silvan through to Seville; Monbulk Road from Silvan through to Mount Evelyn – that is just to name a few roads that have significant potholes.

Labor’s complete and utter failure at structurally upgrading roads that are aged and no longer fit for purpose is shown by the fact that they have to fill so many potholes. This Labor government celebrate the fact they are filling potholes. They should be ashamed of the fact that the roads have got into such a poor condition. It is an extraordinary number of potholes that they have had to fill. In the last year they have been forced to fill around 220,000 potholes, an extraordinary number, and what that means is they are only patching them up; they are not actually structurally fixing these roads. That means the potholes being filled equate to more than one pothole for every 100 metres of state government roads. And they are not filled properly, mind you. You just have to come out to my community to see that they are filled one day and, whether it is in a residential area like Hull Road in Mooroolbark or the more country area of Hunter Road in Wandin, the very next day they are massive holes again.

Filling these potholes is not something to be celebrated. Any road engineer will tell you that potholes are a symptom of failure to maintain the roads. It is not a success. The Allan Labor government are pulling the wool over Victorians’ eyes when they are saying, ‘Oh, we’ve got this blitz to fill potholes.’ It is not a measure of success at all. They should actually be fixing the roads structurally, and they should stop blaming other things like floods or probably the war in Ukraine – who knows. They should actually stop the neglect of our roads and upgrade them properly once and for all.