Sam Birrell (Nicholls, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I'm very pleased to rise in support of the excellent motion put forward by the member for Barker. The reality is that the roads are a disgrace. They're getting worse. Despite platitudes from those on that side of the chamber, I don't see any improvement in the roads and I don't see any effort happening on the ground to fix what is a significant problem, particularly for regional areas.

There have been some terrible weather impacts on our infrastructure, particularly in my electorate. Communities were isolated and displaced, sometimes for weeks and months. The national freight supply chains were disrupted. There have been lengthy diversions to deliver essential goods. In my electorate, this was manifested particularly because we don't have a second bridge over the Goulburn River. There's only one, which is called the Peter Ross-Edwards Causeway. When that gets cut, it means that not only are emergency services vehicles cut on both sides of the river but fresh produce, which is a stock-in-trade for my electorate, whether it be fruit or milk, can't get from one side to the other. Also we couldn't get exports to the port. A lot of these exports are perishable.

The coalition government was attempting to work with a recalcitrant Victorian government on the Shepparton bypass, a critical road infrastructure project that would have put that second crossing over the Goulburn River and would have alleviated a lot of the problems that I've just described. Labor's action in office was to rip away $208 million that had been put towards that project by the previous coalition government, devastating those in my community who wanted to see some action on the infrastructure project.

Normal maintenance regimes and funding will not catch up with what is a terrible deterioration of the road conditions around regional Australia. Instead, we've got this game of patching up potholes, reducing speed limits and erecting 'rough surface' warning signs. It can be many months of dodging damaged roads before even temporary repairs happen, and the temporary repairs seem to wash out. I don't know what's happening under the regime of the far too long existing Victorian Labor government and now the federal Labor government, but the roads are deteriorating and the temporary 'improvements' that are being made seem to get washed out with every rain event.

Now, national and state roads are very bad. Local road networks are worse. Locally controlled roads account for approximately 77 per cent of total road length in Australia, and the National Transport Commission estimates that 36 per cent of all kilometres travelled in Australia are on local roads. A third of all heavy vehicles registered in Victoria are in my electorate, and their operations are made more dangerous and more costly because of the state of the roads.

These heavy vehicle operators are putting millions and millions of dollars worth of assets on the roads. They deserve a safe working environment, and a safe road that's in reasonable condition is a safe working environment. They deserve to be able to put their heavy vehicles on the roads, earning export dollars for us, often taking agricultural produce in my electorate or mining goods in other electorates to Australian ports. They deserve to be able to do that without millions and millions of dollars in expensive repairs to their vehicles because of the terrible state of the roads.

I want to finish on this point. Statistics show that 55 per cent of road fatalities occur on rural roads, but only 25 per cent of the Victorian population live in rural Victoria. We need safer drivers. The drivers have a responsibility in this for their own safe behaviour, but we also need safer vehicles and safer roads. That's where government can come in and add to the safety of people on our roads by improving the road network. I note that, in the member for Barker's private member's motion, he requests that the data be more transparent about what causes some of these road accidents and what causes some of these road fatalities. Often, we don't know what it is. We assume that a major contributing factor is the state of the roads, but we can't get that information out, and we need that information to be able to apply for black spot funding and for other approaches to improving road safety by improving road conditions.

I support the member for Barker's private member's bill because the roads are in a terrible state and I don't see the government, either state or federal, doing enough about it.

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