Wednesday, 29 November 2023

Road maintenance

Bev McARTHUR (Western Victoria) (18:25): (645) My adjournment matter is for the Minister for Roads and Road Safety, and it concerns the government’s recent bizarre boast to have fixed a mere 5000 potholes when there are hundreds of thousands more to be fixed. The Department of Transport and Planning responded to a parliamentary question I asked on behalf of a local constituent and crowed about fixing a total of 5072 potholes in the Western Victoria Region. For me, there were two big problems with this response: firstly, fixing 5000 potholes is a drop in the ocean, and anyone who actually drives on our regional roads will hardly be impressed by the use of numbers like this. What matters is the experience of driving on the roads. We see that in front of our eyes and believe what we see a lot more than the numbers which emanate from Spring Street. The experience is what matters, and the experience is unpleasant, expensively damaging and, in places, indisputably unsafe. The fact is the department has no strategy to fix regional and rural potholes at the rate they are being created.

This response raised for me the bigger problem with government action like this: these repairs are simply bandaid fixes that do not last long and wash away after the first shower of rain. Although the government might be proud of their media releases, there is no significant investment in finding a long-term solution to our roads. The government instead resort to pothole filling and minor patching, this never-ending cycle of improvement and degradation each wet season. Isn’t it crazy that the government boasts about how many thousand potholes it fills? To anyone with sense, that is not a boast of success, it is a straightforward admission that the roads are falling to bits at an alarming rate. It is like getting excited because you have bailed out thousands of gallons of water from your boat. That is not an achievement; it is a serious indication that there is a big hole somewhere and you should be fixing the hole, not bailing out the water.

The action I seek from the minister is a rethink. Rather than totting up running repairs, which in fact simply concedes the scale of failure, he should concentrate the government’s effort on fixing roads properly in the first place. So I request a considered, detailed report, detailing how alternative road design, construction and maintenance techniques could be employed to improve Western Victoria’s road network and make temporary repairs on tens of thousands of potholes a thing of the past.