Wednesday, 16 October 2024

Regional and rural roads

Joe McCRACKEN (Western Victoria) (19:19): (1195) My matter is for the Minister for Roads and Road Safety, and it relates to the much-touted blitz which the minister has engaged in over the weekend. I am not talking about a roads blitz; it is more akin to a media blitz. $675 million is not a blitz, especially when it is money that has already been budgeted in the 2024–25 budget and also confined with some flood recovery money. It is not new money. It is not any new program the government has undertaken to ensure our roads are better. This is literally just maintenance money. That is what we are dealing with here. We have got to be clear: it is money designed to maintain roads, not upgrade roads and not for new roads. It is not to improve them, it is just to maintain what we already have. So a media blitz, yes. A roads blitz – it is barely scratching the surface.

The action that I seek is for the minister to actually fight for regional communities to get more roads funding. I am not just talking about maintenance funding, I am talking about upgrades, extensions and of course appropriate maintenance. Every time a person comes to Victoria the first thing that they say is, ‘Why are your roads so bad compared to other states like South Australia and New South Wales?’ I will tell you why. It is because for the last 10 years they have been neglected by those opposite. I drive the Western Highway regularly. I know that this blitz is not going to make a fundamental difference to the surface of the road. It might end up fixing some potholes somewhere in some trouble spots. But quite often it is the case that more potholes just appear in other neglected parts of the highway, and usually intervention levels are quite simply set on the lack of government money rather than an actual need to improve the road surface.

Nowhere in the government’s press release was there a mention of the Bungaree-Creswick Road or the Ballarat-Carngham Road or the Ballarat-Maryborough Road or the Colac-Ballarat Road or the Beaufort-Lexton Road or the Ararat-St Arnaud Road or the many other arterial roads that the state government is responsible for but has continued to neglect. They all deserve attention. I do not raise this just to say the roads are bad, I raise it because it is people whose lives are impacted. Whether it is their vehicles, cars, trucks, utes – all continually damaged – road safety is an issue that can sometimes be caused by a bad road surface. All these issues impact people, and if you really put people first, you would make sure that roads are a top priority, particularly for country Victorians, who face the challenge every day of dodgy roads.