Wednesday, 19 February 2025

Department of Transport and Planning

Report 2023–24

Wendy LOVELL (Northern Victoria) (17:10): I rise to speak on the Department of Transport and Planning’s annual report for 2023–24. The details of the report show just how poorly this government is doing in maintaining roads in this state. The government has actually slashed the rehabilitation and resurfacing work that has been done on country roads by a staggering 95 per cent. In 2022–23 the road area treated was close to 9 million square metres. In 2023–24 it was just 422,000 square metres. Labor has also slashed spending on resurfacing from $201 million to $37 million in that period. There were also frequent delays in rolling out projects in the 2023–24 year. Only 69 per cent of programmed regional projects finished on time. We recently saw the government trying to resell old promises by packaging together a long list of little projects and saying they were going to spend $964 million on resurfacing roads, but it was too little and it was too late. How many cars have been damaged when hitting massive potholes that have degraded for years? Even worse, drivers who report damage to their cars are rarely compensated for it by this government.

Every week my colleagues and I stand up in Parliament and tell the government which roads are in disgraceful condition and desperately need work, and every week we are ignored. Nothing is done for regional roads while billions of dollars is spent on metropolitan projects. In fact today we have seen even further blowouts on those projects. Labor could not be clearer that they do not care about regional Victoria and are happy to let the regional road network fall into disgraceful disrepair. From the $964 million that Labor scraped together and announced, four of the 11 districts within my region did not get one single project. They were in the Murray Plains electorate and the Eildon electorate but they were also in the Bendigo East and Bendigo West electorates – the Premier’s own electorate and the Speaker’s electorate. No roads are to be repaired in those four electorates. In those districts lucky enough to have some roads on the list for repair, constituents have been left completely in the dark about when these projects will actually be done. The minister replied to my question on notice asking for a schedule of road repairs by saying that they would be progressively rolled out over the maintenance season. That is not good enough. We know the maintenance season is usually the summer. We are now getting to the end of the summer and we have not seen the work being done.

I was recently contacted by a constituent from Macedon Ranges asking about repairs to the Tylden-Woodend Road. She asked when the repairs would be done, because we had advised her and we had advised the media that that road was on the list for repair. The RACV My Country Road survey said that that Tylden-Woodend Road was actually the second-worst road in Victoria, yet no repairs on that road have started. Here we are within two weeks of the end of the summer. No repairs have started on that road, yet it is supposed to be the maintenance season. My constituent tells me that she travels this road often and that the damage to the road surface is so bad that it is just a matter of time before there is an accident. It is listed for repair, but no-one knows when that work will start or when it will be finished.

I had a similar email from a different constituent telling me about a short drive he took with his 17-year-old son, who is learning to drive. He was learning to drive around potholes. They started in Gisborne, went through Riddells Creek and headed towards Romsey. My constituent tells the story of this road journey and how he passed by several memorials to those who had sadly died on those same roads – five people dead in just a 10-kilometre stretch of road. This troubling number is deeply worrying. All along this journey there are potholes, cracks and ripples, and long stretches where instead of fixing the road the government has simply put up signs to reduce the speed limit down to 60 kilometres. That seems to be Labor’s solution all over regional Victoria – to put up signs reducing the speed instead of actually fixing the roads so that people can drive comfortably and safely in country Victoria. More needs to be done. I could go on and on about roads in regional Victoria.