Tuesday, 5 May 2026

 Tim McCURDY (Ovens Valley) (14:30): I am delighted to rise and make a contribution, although I am not the shadow minister for this portfolio. He is busy with some budget day issues at the moment but will be in shortly to make sure that he has a say on this bill.

I do want to speak on the Roads, Road Safety and Ports Legislation Amendment Bill 2026, which has many purposes, as we know, one of them being amendments to point-to-point cameras to operate over various speed limit zones. Point-to-point cameras, as we know, are extremely good revenue-raisers for the government. They are sometimes called safety cameras to make sure that people understand that they are involved in safety and trying to slow people down, but at the end of the day they are revenue-raisers. Part of this legislative change helps when point-to-point cameras operate on a stretch of road where there is a change of speed limits. You can still evaluate what time should be taken to travel from one point to the other, and the bill will legislate that. I have no trouble with making sure these safety cameras can still work to the best of their ability, because they are a big investment to put in. We need to make sure that, if people are speeding, we can raise that revenue in due course. I know point-to-point cameras are used throughout New South Wales and Queensland in a lot of areas, and I know they are used in some of the main areas in Victoria. But they are also going to be used on the Goulburn Valley Highway, the Hume Highway, the Princes Highway and other roads throughout regional Victoria. That is part of what this legislation will do.

I also want to say from the outset that the opposition will not be opposing this bill. I think it is important when it comes to roads, and I will talk about some of our roads in a minute, that part of road safety is the condition of our roads. In the Ovens Valley we have got communities like Cobram through to Yarrawonga and Wangaratta and up to Myrtleford and Bright, and we have never seen conditions like we are seeing at the moment in terms of potholes, broken signage and signs falling down. If you are a visitor to the area, you may not even know where to go unless you have got a GPS, because many of the signs have fallen down and have not been replaced or repaired. There was a massive pothole on the west side of Bundalong, and that pothole has been fixed five times in the last three years – a massive pothole that people would talk to me about. I would write to the minister, we would get a response, it would get fixed and then it would just be created again – potholes all over. As I said, this one has been fixed at least five times.

At the Yarrawonga channel, on the west side of Yarrawonga on the Murray Valley Highway, there is a stretch of road that I hit most nights on my way back from Wangaratta, and there is a channel bridge there that is a lip in the road. People have been complaining furiously about this for the last two or three months, and it is important. It is a small change in the bridge. But if you get a 50- or 60-millimetre lip on that bridge and if you do not know to expect it when you are driving there, it will do major damage to some vehicles. Yarrawonga-Wangaratta Road out between Esmond, Killawarra and Peechelba is just a disgrace.

We talk about road safety. We cannot talk about road safety without talking about the condition of our roads and the effects this is having on people. We often say cars have got to be roadworthy, but our roads certainly are not carworthy. I do not think that is any surprise to anybody in this room, even though the government suggested there is going to be another roads blitz this year. I think this is about the sixth or seventh road blitz.

Roma Britnell: Cut and paste the press release from last year.

Tim McCURDY: Yes, cut and paste a billion dollars. This one is a record. I think last year’s was a record, and the one before was some major investment. If the blitzes were so good, our roads would not be in the condition they are now. I cannot say that I believe the government when they say they are doing another road blitz, because that is five or six in a row. I know the shadow minister, the member for Gippsland South, will give more detail on that when he gets his opportunity. Certainly if the blitzes have been working as well as the government suggests they have over the last six, seven, eight years, we would not have the roads in the conditions they are in now. As I say, some of that narrative is laughable – ‘road blitz’,’ massive investment in roads’, ‘record investment’ – every superlative we can think of, and yet the roads remain a mess.

In terms of the budget announcement today, I think it is a record spend. I will believe it when I see it. Some would say the spending on roads is not worth the paper it is written on because it just does not seem to come to fruition. As I say, if the government had spent what they said they were going to spend over the last five, six or seven years, we certainly would have better roads going forward, not what we see now.

This bill imposes requirements on port operators to provide data to the government for various reasons. I am not clear as to what that data will be used for. I assume there is a logical reason for this, but again, at what cost? I always get concerned when you are collecting data or there is another imposition on businesses. Whether they are port operators, trucking companies or whatever, there will be a cost. That cost gets passed on to the port operator and the trucking company, and of course that has to be passed on directly to the consumer. And we wonder why things are going up. We wonder why we have got a cost-of-living crisis. The government talks about the cost-of-living crisis like it is somebody else’s fault – like they have made no contribution whatsoever when it comes to it. It is either Donald Trump or somebody else who is at fault for this cost-of-living crisis. We know the taxes are hurting people, with the cost hurting all of our communities. It is driving up the price of food and all our daily living. If we are going to have a reduction in our rego, that is terrific. Whoop-dee-do – that is great. We will take that. But we need a reduction in our power prices as well. I thought renewable energy was going to make power so much cheaper for us. I do not know anybody who is ringing me to say, ‘Thanks, the power’s just got cheaper.’ That is not the case. That is why I say the cost-of-living crisis is driven largely by the behaviour and as a consequence of the Victorian government.

The bill also provides exemptions for emergency services from certain Heavy Vehicle National Law requirements. Again, it is important we make sure that, if there are any areas we need to streamline, we make it easier for emergency services vehicles to be able to do what they do in their daily use of the roads. I certainly support that idea, and that is important. But again, if it comes at a cost, we all need to share in that cost. It is not just the commercial industries. If there is a cost that has got to be shared because of heavier vehicles, we need to make sure that we are all contributing to paying that cost.

There has been consultation through the RACV. Like us, they are not opposing this bill, but just like us they want to see the roads get fixed. I was travelling around my electorate the other day and there was a sign that said ‘Just fix the bloody roads’, and I thought, ‘Gee, that’s getting a bit out there.’ People are getting very antsy about the state of our roads, as we all know.

The point-to-point cameras – we certainly want to make sure that they are catching those who are doing the wrong thing. I do say they are revenue raisers, and I do not have a problem with raising revenue as long as it is fair and they are in appropriate places and actually designed to be safety cameras rather than just revenue-raising cameras.

The budget handed down today they call a Labor budget. I get that. I see increased debt and reduced spend on important maintenance issues in health, education and emergency services. This is an issue we see time and time again, where the investment that is made does not correlate with the taxes that are generated in that portfolio. For example, I see that the roads blitz that has been announced today is enough to cover 200,000 potholes.

Roma Britnell: That is just in South-West Coast.

Tim McCURDY: I was just going to say that will cover the Ovens Valley electorate. I do not know how they are going to go in the South-West Coast and the other 86 electorates in Victoria, because I reckon there have got to be 200,000 potholes in just my electorate alone. That is just on the VicRoads roads, not the local council roads. We know local councils are getting starved for revenue from the state government as well, and of course their roads are deteriorating at the same time.

Again, there is a lot of work to do in this space, and we need to make sure that this investment gets to where it should be going. The blitz also includes, I see, mowing, slashing and graffiti removal and repair and replacing of signs. I do not have a problem with that, because that is all part of the road system at the end of the day. But again, obviously, when we look at what does get spent, it is interesting to see what gets spent on actually fixing the roads, and that is what we need. We need the roads fixed because that is what is important – to make sure that we get the safety back onto our roads. That is why we would like to see a greater percentage of that investment going into the actual fixing of the roads, but of course, at the end of the day, signage is important as well.

In summarising, we know that the bill updates laws about roads, road safety and the ports in Victoria and covers a mix of changes rather than just the one issue. It talks about the point-to-point cameras, which I have mentioned, expanding the work across different speed zones and even multiple speed zones, and it means drivers can be fined based on their average speed between two points, even if that limit changes along the way. The emergency services, as I mentioned, will be exempt from some heavy vehicle work rules, and that is to make it easier for them to respond quickly when they need to. That is important, and it is not just in metropolitan Melbourne but in regional Victoria that we know we need to be able to respond quickly where possible as well.

The government could also temporarily declare a road as official before it is fully legal and the process is finished. Well, that has definitely got to be in a metropolitan seat, because we do not get any new roads in regional Victoria; we just want the ones we have got fixed. Declaring or naming a road before that – well, I can see that it might be a tunnel; it might be a road in metropolitan Melbourne in a new build. We will not even go down that path of the new builds, with the money that has been wasted there. But at the end of the day it is more about new roads in metropolitan Melbourne. We just want the ones that we have got in regional Victoria fixed. The bill will also ensure that someone is responsible for the maintenance, safety and liability straightaway in terms of emergency services.

Authorities will be able to pursue fines using overseas addresses. Of course we do not want people who are running up fines here in Victoria ducking overseas and not being caught. We have all got to share that load. If you are breaking the law, if it is a point-to-point camera or whatever it might be, I suspect you need to be chased down. This legislation will support that and closes the loophole where drivers avoid fines because they live overseas. I think, again, that is a positive step forward.

Some minor updates: clearly seatbelt rules and ensuring passengers do not share the same seat – we would all support that in this place. We know how safety belts save lives. I do not know how long safety belts have been compulsory – 25, 30 years; I would not have a clue, but a long, long time. We know the lives that have been saved through safety belt rules and laws, and that is a terrific thing and a good thing. Anything that ensures that passengers do not share the same seatbelt I think is a positive step going forward.

Port operators – I touched on those with shipping companies and the need to provide data about trucks and containers. Again, it will be interesting to hear what port operators say about what that cost is and when that cost then gets forwarded on to somebody else. I know it is aimed at improving freight planning and tracking activities at the port.

Some rail rules are being simplified, including fewer consultation requirements for the small price increases. We will find out what that price is.

As I said, the coalition will not be opposing this bill. The Shadow Minister for Roads and Road Safety will get his opportunity when he finishes his budget commitments, and he will be in to add to this story.

 Anthony CIANFLONE (Pascoe Vale) (14:44): I am pleased to rise to speak on the Roads, Road Safety and Ports Legislation Amendment Bill 2026. In doing so I support the bill as the state member representing Pascoe Vale, Coburg and parts of Brunswick West, but of course I also support the bill as the newly appointed Parliamentary Secretary for Community Safety, because every single person in our community deserves the right to be and feel safe in their homes, in their streets, in their neighbourhoods and in their communities generally, and that includes when it comes to road safety – keeping people safe on our roads, whether as drivers, as commuters, as public transport users, as tram users, as people that are vulnerable road users, walking, pushing a pram, walking to school or cycling on a bike, or as elderly people with walking frames. Every single person has the right to be and feel safe on our roads, just as much as in any other part of our community. In that respect I acknowledge the Minister for Police, who is at the table and who has carriage of a big part of this bill as well with respect to the road safety cameras. This bill is an important element of our ongoing work to keep our community and our roads safe. I welcome and acknowledge that the opposition will not be opposing this bill because, frankly, road safety needs to be above politics and a bipartisan issue.

There are a number of elements in this bill, including expanding and strengthening the role of point-to-point road safety cameras and speed enforcement, making permanent the exemptions for emergency services from the Heavy Vehicle National Law and modernising the way road declarations and temporary road declarations are administered. There are amendments to various toll road management acts as well, including the West Gate Tunnel (Truck Bans and Traffic Management) Act 2019, the North East Link Act 2020, the Melbourne City Link Act 1995, the EastLink Project Act 2004 and other related acts. It progresses actions from the Victorian freight plan, improves management of local ports and improves the Road Safety Act 1986, including when nominating a responsible driver to be held accountable for an offence, along with a number of other miscellaneous-type reforms.

When combined, this is all about making our roads, our streets and our neighbourhoods safer for everybody. In Victoria we have continued to take strong action over many, many years when it comes to making our roads and streets safer, leading the nation and indeed the world in many respects too. Victoria was the first jurisdiction in the world to introduce a range of road safety measures, including mandatory seatbelts way back in 1970, random breath testing in 1976, speed cameras in 1986, mandatory bike helmets in 1990, random roadside drug testing in 2004 and a motorcycle graduated licensing system in 2016. These measures of course have been supported by the incredible work of the Transport Accident Commission’s public education campaigns since 1989 and since then by many other road safety organisations and bodies as well. The state’s road safety policies and behavioural change programs have been credited with the major reduction in the road toll over these years as well against a backdrop of increasing car registrations and population growth.

Just listen to the numbers here. In 1970 around a thousand road fatalities were recorded on average each year. Compare that to the recent five-year average, which sits at about 253. In 2025, sadly, there was an increase of 2.5 per cent on the road toll to 291. Of course every life lost has an impact; it is one life too many. That is why as a government we are progressing this bill, but we have also adopted the Road to Zero road safety strategy, which has, in the short term, a 10-year aim to reduce road deaths by half and progressively reduce serious injuries by 2030.

In this respect, I was very honoured to be part of the parliamentary inquiry into vulnerable road users, which the chair, the member for Bellarine, who is here, did incredible work on as well. It was a bipartisan inquiry, I might add, with no dissenting reports. We all agreed we need to do more in this space. The member for Glen Waverley of course was a key advocate in that inquiry as well. But contrary to some of the misconceptions around the state of the roads and road infrastructure, what it found was that the leading drivers of accidents, deaths, near misses and serious incidents on our roads by far are associated with driver behaviour. Dangerous driving, aggressive driving, impatient driving, risk taking, speeding, distracted driving, inattention, drink driving, drug driving and failure to wear seatbelts, when combined, are the overwhelming contributing factors to and causes of tragic fatalities, accidents and incidents on our roads, as was demonstrated to us by Victoria Police and the many other experts who appeared before the inquiry. That is also why this bill is so important.

We remain committed as a Labor government to improving road safety outcomes across Victoria, because we know that speeding contributes to 30 per cent at least of road fatalities in Victoria and a quarter of serious injuries sustained by occupants of light vehicles. The reforms in this bill seek to improve road safety outcomes by delivering improvements that enable the enforcement of an average speed limit. Currently the enforcement of average speed can only be undertaken where there is only one speed limit between two detection points. The bill will expand the enforcement of average speed by allowing the enforcement of point-to-point average speed across a stretch of road that contains two or more different speed zones. For example, between two detection points a road could contain a stretch of road where the limit is 110 kilometres, a stretch where the limit is 80 kilometres and another stretch where the limit goes back to 110. The bill will introduce a new formula for calculating the average speed limit that applies between those two detection points that span those different speed zones in between. The bill will introduce that new formula for calculating the average speed of travelling between those two points. If the calculated average speed of a vehicle exceeds the calculated average speed limit between the two detection points, then the driver of the vehicle will be subject to graduated penalties equivalent to existing speeding offences. This requires the bill to introduce a new offence in the Road Safety Act. It will be an offence for the driver of a motor vehicle to drive so that the average speed of a vehicle, as calculated, exceeds the average speed limit, as calculated, that applies on the total length of the road between those two detection points.

The bill also makes appropriate provisions for roads with temporary speed limits, road work limits and other factors, accurately accounting for that point-to-point speed. I will just draw the house’s attention to page 95 of the parliamentary inquiry in this respect, because there was a comment or two by the shadow minister that went to the assertion that this is all about potentially revenue raising – it is actually not. The inquiry was very clear on this, and the evidence from independent submitters was very clear. Victoria’s road safety camera commissioner Neville Taylor and the Monash University Accident Research Centre, MUARC, show that – and I quote from the report:

the presence of road safety cameras and the enforcement experience people have does have an impact on reducing the incidence of collisions involving trauma either at intersections or in the kind of haloed proximity of that area, and that is an evidence base that adds to the benefits of road safety cameras as one part of a suite of the road safety sort of enforcement program.

Road safety experts believe that road users are more likely to change their behaviour from a fear of receiving a penalty rather than a fear of a collision. This theory is supported by the 2023 survey conducted for the Office of the Road Safety Camera Commissioner, which found 55% of drivers who had received an infringement notice for speeding ‘now slow down all or most of the time and that they are what they consider to be a more careful driver now.’

And page 99 goes on to say:

Research broadly has shown that road safety cameras, with both general and specific deterrent effects, are one of the most effective ways to save lives and get motorists to slow down.

…

We know that when we have got mobile cameras set up on regional and rural roads there is an improved behaviour and change to behaviour and crash data drops and incident data drops.

Again, page 99:

The distracted driving cameras, which were introduced on 31 March 2023, are estimated to prevent 95 crashes that result in death or serious injury each year. For the first three months, drivers who were detected with distracted driving or seatbelt offences were sent an advisory letter to alert them of the detection. In this period, over 12,000 advisory letters were sent. Of these, 42% (over 5,000) were for portable device offences, 45% (about 5,500) for driver seatbelt non‑compliance and about 1,500 for passenger seatbelt non‑compliance. Early data suggest –

from that original trial –

similar trends have continued following the grace period and an evaluation of the cameras’ operations will be conducted …

I acknowledge the Minister for Police again, in August 2025, who released some further results on the difference these cameras are making. He said:

The latest road safety camera statistics show that more Victorians are getting the message to stay focused on driving, with a 36 per cent decrease in the number of infringements issued by the cameras from January to March this year compared to the same period last year.

In Quarter 3 2024–25 there were 19,063 infringements issued for not wearing a seatbelt properly or for using a device while driving, while during the same time last year there were 29,832 infringements issued.

So there you go. It goes to show that when people know there are more road safety cameras out there, whether they are based on speed or point-to-point or are distraction cameras, people’s behaviour will change, and people’s behaviour is the leading contributing factor that we have to tackle to reduce the road toll and reduce the number of accidents we have across the community.

Of course I would love to go on for another 10 or 20 minutes or so. I would love to have taken the shadow minister’s time. He left, I think, about 15 minutes on the clock. There is so much to talk about on this bill, but I would like to just draw the attention of the minister and the government to the measures we are taking in my community of Merri-bek as well. We are making our local roads and streets safer. We have removed four level crossings through Coburg. Whether it is Nicholson Street, Bell Street, Coonans Road, Murray Road, Melville Road, Sydney Road or Moreland Road, we are working to make these streets safer. But there is always more to do, and I continue to work with all those stakeholders across the community to make our other roads and streets safer.

 Roma BRITNELL (South-West Coast) (14:54): I rise to speak on the Roads, Road Safety and Ports Legislation Amendment Bill 2026. This is a bill that, whilst largely presented as administrative, reveals a great deal about the Allan Labor government’s approach to roads and regulation and frankly its priority, or lack thereof, for roads. Some elements of this bill are uncontroversial, and there are sensible fixes and minor updates and practical changes that we do not oppose. But buried within this omnibus legislation are measures that deserve far greater scrutiny, because they go to the heart of whether this government is genuinely focused on road safety or increasingly reliant on enforcement as a source of revenue.

The most significant change in this bill is the expansion of point-to-point speed cameras. Under these amendments drivers can now be fined based on their average speed across multiple speed zones, even across different roads. That means a motorist travelling through a 100-kilometre-per-hour zone and then a 110-kilometre-per-hour zone could still be penalised based on calculated average speed. The government’s explanation for this is simple – road safety – and everybody is in favour of road safety; that is not questionable. However, Victorians are not naive, and south-west Victorians certainly are not. They have watched as speed limits have been lowered time and time again, and not because the roads have improved but because the roads have actually deteriorated. Across our communities like Warrnambool, Port Fairy, Portland, Terang, Heywood, Nelson and everywhere in between, the condition of our roads has deteriorated to an unacceptable level. Potholes, crumbling edges and uneven surfaces are no longer occasional issues; they are daily realities for our drivers, freight operators and families just trying to get from A to B safely. It is a serious safety hazard that damages vehicles, increases the risk of accidents and places enormous strain on regional communities that rely on reliable road networks.

This situation is not inevitable. It is a direct result of the government’s neglect in maintaining and properly investing in our roads over many, many years. We just saw an announcement by this government released before the budget of record spending. No-one in my electorate was fooled by that announcement. We saw that it is like a cut and paste from last year and a cut and paste from the year before. When you see the government boasting about how much they are doing to fix our roads yet when you drive on the roads you see them deteriorate at a rapid rate, you know that one does not equal the other. The government is not telling us the truth. They are not fixing the roads. Instead of proactive long-term maintenance, we have seen a very reactive approach that allows roads to fall into disrepair before patch-up jobs are rushed in.

They have actually decided that fixing potholes is a celebration. Well, let me tell you, as someone who has built roads – and dairy farmers are very focused on making sure they have got good roads for cattle to walk on – you cannot successfully fix a pothole. The road is damaged and the water has got into the substrate, and you cannot fix it. You have to fix the section of the road. I have tried to fix potholes with every possible material I could find, but you cannot successfully do that. We deserve better than this cycle of neglect and just patching potholes; we need the roads fixed. I stand today in this chamber having read this bill, which claims to be all about road safety. Not once does this bill address the reality that people in the communities that I live in are facing every single day: that the roads are crumbling beneath them. The maintenance backlog that is putting their lives at risk is what these communities want addressed.

Just this morning I had a woman from my electorate reach out to me. She told me about a drive that she took that should have been routine: a simple trip along the Hawkesdale Woolsthorpe Road, one I have travelled hundreds and hundreds of times. But it turned into something that was far more frightening for her. As she drove, she was confronted by a stretch of road riddled with deep, unavoidable potholes, and at the exact moment another car appeared coming towards her she had a split second to decide to drive straight through the pothole or risk a head-on collision. That is not a safe choice, but that was the least dangerous one she could make. The impact was immediate and violent. The jolt ripped through her car, destroying a near-new tyre and sending a shock right up through her spine. But the damage did not end there. Since that day she has been living with constant neck pain and persistent headaches, the kind that linger and that wear you down day after day. What began as an everyday drive turned into ongoing medical appointments, allied health treatments and a daily reminder that a system that we have in place that should be safe has failed her. This Allan Labor government has absolutely failed her. This is not just about potholes; it is about a government that has allowed our roads to deteriorate to the point where people are forced to make impossible, dangerous decisions, where getting home safely is no longer guaranteed but a matter of luck. That is genuinely how bad it has got. It is dangerous and it is frightening, and it should not be down to luck.

We continue to see the Allan Labor government fail to properly maintain road infrastructure and now turn to stricter enforcement to compensate. We are asked to accept that expanding the scope of speed cameras, making them more flexible and more complex and more difficult for drivers to interpret, is purely about safety. There is a real risk here that this becomes less about saving lives and more about raising revenue.

When you combine the declining road conditions, inconsistent speed limits and expanding enforcement powers, this government has created a system that feels less fair and far more punitive. That is not how you build public trust in road safety measures. If this government is serious about road safety, it should start with the fundamentals: fixing our pothole-ridden roads properly; investing in maintenance, not spin; and ensuring speed limits are logical, consistent and evidence based. It is impossible as you drive through country roads now. You go from 40 to 60 to 80 to 60 to 40. It is absolutely impossible to be able to work out what actual speed limit you are in. Sometimes they do not even end – miles go on and there is not an ending, and it is probably 100 again. Instead we see a government reaching for an easier lever than fixing the roads, and that is fines.

This bill also imposes additional data collecting requirements on port operators and shipping companies. Let us hope that is not just more regulation which adds more costs, which, I am sorry, I am suspicious it probably is.

There are also provisions in this bill that we do welcome, particularly the exemptions to the emergency services from heavy vehicle work diary requirements. This is an opportunity for the government to recognise the important work that our emergency services do, and that was a sensible change. While we do not oppose the legislation, I do oppose the spin. In the budget released today was the announcement that this government is going to fix 200,000 potholes. I reckon that is just the amount of potholes we would have in South-West Coast. I do not know where the rest of my colleagues’ electorates are going to get the funding for their potholes, because I am pretty sure we could swallow all that up with just the 200,000. Potholes being filled in – I will say it again – is not a fix.

This is a government that has lost the faith of our community. No-one believes these record spends, because they are seeing what they are driving on. Let us remember what the Victorian Auditor-General’s Office report said back in 2017. If we just spent 30 cents per square metre fixing the roads proactively, we would not have to spend $175 per square metre on rebuilding the roads. We could spend 30 cents per square metre and then not have to spend $175 per square metre on rebuilding the roads. That is an extraordinary difference, but has this government listened? They were told back in 2017 that if they do not fix the roads properly, we will end up with 90 per cent of the roads in poor condition, and that is exactly where we are. We have got a government who would rather have spent $15 billion supporting the CFMEU and bikie gangs and putting strippers on worksites. That is not for the workers, that is for the big boys at the top, and they would rather spend money on that. Imagine what that could have built in the way of safer roads in south-west Victoria alone.

This is a government that is reactive and not proactive, a government that is more focused on enforcement than investment, a government that is quicker to issue fines than fix roads. Victorians deserve better than that. They deserve a road network that is safe, that is well built and well maintained, not one that relies on increasingly complex enforcement mechanisms to compensate for the neglect of this government. We deserve transparency, fairness and common sense in how road safety is delivered. It is not hard to supervise a road, it is not hard to make sure it is built according to specifications and it is not hard to put clauses in contracts that make sure the workmanship is held to account, but this is a government that has no understanding of how to run a contract, a program or a project and get a return on investment that gets a road that is safe and gets a fair deal for Victorians here.

 Danny PEARSON (Essendon) (15:04): I am delighted to make a contribution on this omnibus bill, but calling it an omnibus bill I do not think does justice to the quality of the statute books that will ultimately house this magnificent piece of legislation, because at the core of this bill is that glorious and most noble of principles, kaizen, which is a Japanese word for ‘continuous and constant improvement’. Indeed we must always aspire to constantly be pushing ourselves to do better, to reform and to improve. This bill covers a wide range of areas in the transport portfolio. I am going to spend a bit of time in my contribution talking a bit about that.

One of the great initiatives of a former Labor government was the first TAC commercial, which was broadcast in 1989. Many of us would have seen that ad, and Steve Crabb deserves a lot of the credit, as transport minister, for coming up with that idea. As I understand it, the way that ad was filmed was that they had a patient who had not been injured in a road accident, but the cameras were rolling and they put the actor into the emergency room to create that sense of trauma and of fear in order to try to capture the community’s imagination about why this was so important. I spoke with Steve Crabb many years afterwards, and do you know who the audience of that ad was? It was not the ordinary rank-and-file members of the community – that was a second order. It was Victoria Police, because they wanted to say to Victoria Police, ‘If you pull someone up for speeding, if you pull someone up for drink driving, you are doing an important community service, because this is what happens when these things go wrong.’ If you look at the way in which that ad completely changed the way people behaved, it was extraordinary. And if you look at the trajectory that the road toll has gone on, particularly over those years, we saw a significant reduction. Certainly I think when I got my licence in the early 1990s we probably had about 400 Victorian lives lost a year, and now obviously it is considerably less. Steve gets a lot of credit for that.

I think when you look at the way technology is being harnessed and utilised, the point-to-point system for speed cameras will play a really important role in, again, trying to make sure that we capture efficient, correct and accurate data in relation to the way in which people are travelling in order to try to ensure that people behave properly and responsibly, because we know that when you have an increase in speed, not only do you have an increase in relation to the aggregate level of trauma but you start to see the broader implications of the severity of that trauma.

I had the great privilege of being the minister responsible for the TAC. I remember meeting a woman who was living with her mum. She might have actually been a constituent of the member for Macedon. This woman had gone out with friends after working in Ballarat. She was a passenger of a vehicle, and she received a significant brain injury. She was trying to get around living her life as best as she could. She was by that stage a woman in her 40s, but her life had been completely changed and had been destroyed as a consequence of road trauma. I think that when you look at these sorts of initiatives, it is really important that we start to make these sorts of improvements. Part of that is making sure, too, that we recognise that we are a global city. We get amongst our ranks every year tens of thousands of international students. We are a global city; we have people from around the world wanting to come to Melbourne or come to this state. It is proper, right and appropriate that we amend the legislation to make sure that where an infringement occurs as a result of a driver who does not live here, there is the capacity to ensure that infringement is enforced and that penalties are imposed. Again, making sure that we have got the ability to tackle this I think is incredibly important as well.

The reality is that data is key in all of these things. The reforms of the bill make sure that we have more information collected by private providers in the transport portfolio and provided back to the state. Those of us who recall the GFC might recall the Baltic dry index. I have got to say I was a devotee of the Baltic dry index, because what it represented was the passage of freight volumes in relation to shipping. You were trying to understand, when you saw the sledgehammer impact of the global financial crisis, ‘We know that the economy is going to contract, but when will the economy start to expand?’ I think that requiring, in this instance, those shipping owners to share information in relation to those ships which are in commercial ports in Victoria will be really important in trying to get more of that information.

If you ever get the opportunity, download MarineTraffic. It is an absolute cracker of an app. It is a really good way to understand what is happening, for example, in the Strait of Hormuz in relation to traffic volumes, but also in Port Phillip Bay. I had the great privilege of being up at 1 Spring Street, and it was quite glorious to ponder over the lustre of Port Phillip Bay and watch ships coming in and out. I was always a fan of the Goliath. Goliath was quite a small vessel. It was shipping cement from Melbourne to Devonport primarily, which was its main route. Again, you can get on MarineTraffic, and you can get a sense in terms of where these ships are coming from.

But that is information that is collected in an app. There may well be questions about the accuracy and the veracity of some of that information. We are in a digital age when we want to collect more data to make better decisions and to inform the choices that we make, and again, making sure that the Department of Transport and Planning has the ability to access timely and accurate data in relation to those ships which are berthed on our commercial ports I think will be very important.

The same of course extends to our tolling road operators. Transurban runs the majority of our toll roads but also EastLink, although the equity participants are probably a bit more passive when it comes to the operation of that asset. But providing that level of timely and accurate information is very important. The reality is of course that, when we make these sorts of investments in roads, they are for the future. I was stunned that between 50 and 60 per cent of the roads in the United Kingdom were actually created by the Romans. That is extraordinary. Obviously not the small roads, but the major transport routes that are in operation in the United Kingdom today were built in fact by the Romans. If you are ever asked the question ‘What did the Romans do for us’, they delivered 50 to 60 per cent of the United Kingdom’s roads. I think that is important because of course, when you make these sorts of investments in these assets –

Bridget Vallence interjected.

Danny PEARSON: Happy to come back by popular demand, member for Evelyn. I think in terms of these questions, when we make these sorts of assets and these sorts of investments, we are investing for the future, and the reality is that these roads, these assets, will be here for a significant period of time.

The bill also makes changes in relation to the access regime for rail and makes sure that any increases relate to CPI. From an economics perspective, rail access regimes and pricing are really interesting. It is quite interesting, because if you think about this, the capital expenditure required to build rail infrastructure is quite expensive. At one level you would say, ‘Well, if I build it, I should be able to charge what I think is a fair price in order to recoup the investment I’ve made.’ You would say that if you were the person who invested in the infrastructure to begin with. But of course you have got to think about how, if that effectively is the action of a robber baron that would have been more at home in the gilded age of laissez-faire capitalism which dominated 19th century America, that is less than ideal and will lead to suboptimal economic outcomes. Instead you want to try and find ways in which that asset can be appropriately harnessed and utilised by a number of different operators in order to realise the underlying productive capacity of that asset. That is why I think making sure that you have got some checks and balances in relation to those access regimes is really important. So the bill will make those changes in relation to rail access pricing and make sure that that is at a maximum level. It is not clear to me whether it will have the Essential Services Commission involved, but the ESC certainly plays a really important role in relation to managing these sorts of infrastructure monopolies, or these significant providers of essential services, as the name would suggest.

This bill is an important bill. People will say it is an omnibus bill, but I think that in its breadth, its depth and its complexity there is an inherent beauty in legislation like this, because frankly it is like opening up a box of Favourites chocolates. Honestly, there is something for everybody in a bill like this. It really makes sure that we continue to strive and improve the quality and the performance of the legislation that is brought into this place and we continue to modernise our statute book so that it is fit for purpose for the modern, vibrant globalised economy that is Victoria.

 Cindy McLEISH (Eildon) (15:14): I always take great pleasure in being able to speak about roads, in this instance through the Roads, Road Safety and Ports Legislation Amendment Bill 2026. It does allow an opportunity for us to talk about the importance of road safety. The bill has been described as an omnibus bill, but it is a pretty skinny omnibus bill, so I am not quite sure I would go that far. What it does do is make amendments to allow point-to-point speed cameras to operate over multiple speed zones, and I will come back to that, because that is quite important. It allows the use of overseas addresses for the pursuit of fines under the operator onus scheme, it allows the government to temporarily declare a new road, it imposes requirements on shipping companies and port operators to provide certain data on containers and trucks that we need and it provides exemptions for emergency services from certain heavy vehicle national road law requirements.

I could probably talk about the Heavy Vehicle National Law as well, because it gives me no end of grief, but I am going to start with the point-to-point systems. What the bill does is introduce amendments and a formula to enable point-to-point average speed camera enforcement across multiple speed limit zones and across more than one road or road network. This is the next step in what we have had with the point-to-point cameras in operation. I was previously the member for Seymour when the Hume Highway had point-to-point cameras that were not always working perfectly. There were some issues, but they seem to have been sorted out.

The cameras on the Hume Highway have been in operation since 2007 but were activated for instantaneous detection in August 2012. At the moment there are 28 cameras at 14 separate locations along the Hume, and that is northbound and southbound, seven of each. They capture travelling traffic moving in both directions, with the active point-to-point cameras effectively creating these different zones. It is the intention to roll these out a little bit further – they are already on Peninsula Link and the Hume – perhaps to the Goulburn Valley and Princes highways as well, and I think that is not a bad thing. But one of the things I do want to talk about is having multiple speed limit zones with these point-to-points and the fact that the government are taking these into account.

They have said to us that this is because of road safety requirements, but I look at the reality. With a lot of the roads that I travel on, there might be point-to-point cameras installed at some points, but the roads are in such shoddy condition that it is 60 kilometres an hour for a kilometre and then it is 80 kilometres for 2 kilometres. Sometimes it is one lane in different sections. There are so many variations. I am not sure whether the government are just doing this for safety, nor how they are actually going to do it. Yes, safety is important, but the state of the roads is so ordinary that the variations in the road limits are constant. I could look at the Melba Highway and the drive from Yarra Glen to Yea, and at some points the number of different speed zones is quite extraordinary. On the Warburton Highway we have everything from 40 during school times to 50, 60, 70 or 80 kilometres an hour, and it is really frustrating for traffic. It is really frustrating for drivers having to watch out the whole time. I think if you have got point-to-point cameras operating, it is very reasonable that they have to be altered and amended in a way that allows for all of these different anomalies that happen, not just from time to time but often.

The road toll is too high, and I think we know that. It has been hovering around 290 deaths a year for the last few years. If you go to a few years prior to that, it was around 240 deaths a year. There is a lot more that can be done by the government, but the government is hell-bent and intent on starving the TAC of funds when it could implement a greater number of safe road initiatives. Again today in the budget what I think is most interesting is they are pulling out $1.1 billion for the next financial year. Previously we have seen $1.3 billion over a number of years, but it looks like this is being pulled out in the one year, with little sums after that to prop up this surplus that the government is intent on carrying on about when they have got a debt that is basically $200 billion. It is really quite extraordinary. There are many dangerous intersections out there, there are many dangerous roads, and I will certainly agree that a lot of driver error does lead to accidents and deaths. I have seen plenty of bad drivers on the road doing extraordinarily dangerous things.

Most recently I asked the Minister for Roads and Road Safety to ensure works as a matter of priority to improve line markings on the Whittlesea-Kinglake Road across the ranges before winter sets in, because the line markings are almost invisible and the cat’s eyes in many places are worn out and damaged, reducing visibility even more. Now, this is a road safety initiative. Line markings and cat’s eyes are not billions of dollars. These are simple treatments that can be done as a matter of priority. I got such an embarrassing response yesterday from the minister to say:

DTP crews inspect Whittlesea-Kinglake Road once a fortnight and plan and prioritise routine maintenance activities …

I am telling you they have looked at it once a fortnight and they are not planning on doing any maintenance activities. These issues are raised with me by constituents who find the conditions dangerous. Driving at night and driving in intense fog, which Kinglake is known for, are problematic. These are things that can be avoided.

Equally, on that same road is the Kinglake football ground, and on that football ground the fences are low and the footballs often end up on the road. It would be a terrific road safety initiative for TAC to support putting up higher nets so that kids are not chasing the balls onto the road, parents are not chasing balls onto the road and the cars that come along are not having to dodge balls. The response I got there was to tell them to look on the website at how to apply for a grant. Seriously, these are simple road safety initiatives that could be undertaken, and it has been really disappointing that some of the simple stuff is not being done.

I am disappointed to hear with drug testing that cocaine is not tested for in roadside drug testing and that in fact the amount of funds that have been dedicated to doing some of these sorts of things has been much less. Not only that, we know the huge shortage of police on the beat out there on the highways has meant that a lot of these initiatives are not being done to the extent that they could be. We have had a change of Chief Commissioner of Police, and I have noticed a little bit more, certainly in the last couple of weeks, the highway patrols that are out there. It does make a difference when people see highway patrols. Acting Speaker, I am sure I have your attention. Good. It does make a difference. People slow down, people see them and people warn other drivers, and it does slow the traffic down. We need to have people concentrating all the time. We need to have a visible police presence on the roads and on the highways. Where you can have something that is automated, like the point-to-point system, that does reduce the burden on the police somewhat because it can be done automatically. I think that is not a bad thing, because people do slow down. I remember in 2012 when the point-to-point system was activated, which was quite a while ago, that what happened was the number of fines for speeding reduced. It was directly related to the fact that people knew these point-to-point systems were operating. It was not catching you at a particular point in time; it was catching you on that average speed over 10 or 15 kilometres, where it does make such a difference.

Using overseas addresses for the pursuit of fines under the operator onus scheme I think is a good thing because too often people are able to hide and get away with fines that they have incurred. I appreciate seeing that that is going to be done, and that may be increasing the coffers a little bit by the government, but it is probably going to cost more money to pursue some of these fines. The opposition is not opposing this bill and in fact appreciates some of those efforts that are being done.

 Nina TAYLOR (Albert Park) (15:24): I am very pleased to speak on the Roads, Road Safety and Ports Legislation Amendment Bill 2026. The bill delivers a broad package of reforms to improve road safety outcomes, strengthen the management of our transport network and support the efficient movement of freight across Victoria.

I was almost taken aback by some of the commentary from the opposition with regard to revenue raising, because let me tell you, in my electorate people absolutely want people to adhere to the speed limits and would happily have fixed cameras on every street if they could. We certainly have a significant number of fixed cameras. We have got mobile cameras. These controls are greatly appreciated in my electorate. I would say it is rare, if ever, that I have anyone wanting to speed. It is the other way. I have residents in my community that really respect safety and want to make sure that we have the best possible outcomes for the community as a whole, because if we all act safely together, we are all better off. Moreover, we know that speeding contributes to at least 30 per cent of road fatalities. Curbing that, with government taking appropriate actions to ensure that we are doing everything we can to deter speeding, is a really good thing. I think instead of bemoaning revenue raising we should look at the fundamental purpose that underpins this. This is to keep Victorians safe. I think that, when you put safety over the irritation of a fine, safety should always win.

I also want to comment on the issue of driver fatigue. While not always deliberate behaviour, driving when tired is a contributing factor in 25 per cent of all road crashes in Victoria. Again, when we are thinking about encouraging the best and the safest behaviours for all users of the road, I think it is in all Victorians’ interests. I am just not sure it sends the best message when you are bemoaning revenue raising, when really the focus is on safety and encouraging people to adhere to the speed limits, because there is absolutely nothing to be gained from speeding whatsoever. I will put the caveat for our frontline services – our emergency services when they are delivering people to hospital or our police, fire engines, fire services, CFA et cetera – because they have a particular reason, a paramount reason and an urgent reason to be supporting community in various ways.

One of the key changes in the bill is seeking to improve road safety outcomes by delivering improvements to enable the enforcement of an average speed limit. We are getting down to quite a technicality, but technicality absolutely matters when we are talking about how people use roads and whether we are adhering to safe limits. Currently the enforcement of average speed can only be undertaken where there is one speed limit between two detection points. This bill will expand the enforcement of average speed by allowing the enforcement of point-to-point average speed across a stretch of road that contains two or more different speed zones. As an example, a series of roads between the two detection points could contain a stretch of road where the speed limit is 110 kilometres per hour, a stretch of road with a limit of 80 kilometres per hour and another stretch where the limit goes back to 110. I have to say that is less common in the seat of Albert Park. We do not have 110 around the seat of Albert Park. But this bill has to cover the whole state and all the different contingencies, so it is fair enough to use that example. In my seat it might be 40 to 60. The bill will introduce a new formula for calculating the average speed limit that applies between two detection points that span different speed zones, and the bill will also introduce a new formula for calculating the average speed of a vehicle that has travelled between these two points. Whilst this sounds quite convoluted in a sense, when we are talking about the bill and coming down to this granular detail, the granular detail actually matters for all road users when it comes to how we are calculating speeds and whether people are actually doing the right thing for the benefit of all Victorians. The bill introduces a new offence to the Road Safety Act 1986. It will be an offence for the driver of a motor vehicle to drive so that the average speed of the vehicle as calculated exceeds the average speed as calculated that applies on the total length of road between the two specific detection points. That is really to clarify overall the point I have been making all along with regard to those specific calculations.

Another element is with regard to emergency services exemptions from Heavy Vehicle National Law. The Heavy Vehicle National Law places a range of obligations on the drivers of heavy vehicles and other responsible parties. This includes a series of obligations to prevent drivers of certain heavy vehicles from driving while fatigued – fair enough. As we have stated from the outset, it cannot be underestimated, and the mind can play tricks. You can think, ‘I’m fine,’ and then suddenly you are not fine; you are slipping into sleep and not even recognising it. So it is not here to in any way attack a person because they are slipping into sleep when they are driving and it is unintentional but more to recognise that as human beings we do have this vulnerability and so we do have to have appropriate measures in place to mitigate, or I would say curb entirely or as much as we can, the risk of people being drowsy or falling asleep while driving and having terrible accidents. This includes a series of obligations to prevent drivers of certain heavy vehicles from driving while fatigued. As part of these obligations, drivers of fatigue-regulated heavy vehicles and their record keepers are required to complete and maintain certain records, including work diaries.

Emergency services are currently exempt from some fatigue management record-keeping requirements under the Heavy Vehicle National Law. These exemptions are currently provided by a time-limited notice issued by the National Heavy Vehicle Regulator. The bill will provide ongoing certainty – I think this is the crux of the matter, particularly when we are looking at our emergency services – by amending the Heavy Vehicle National Law Application Act 2013 to make these exemptions permanently available for Victorian emergency services. It is really about certainty, and when we are thinking of the important services that emergency services deliver for our community, we can see why these are good changes to make. I note the subset in terms of protocols of the CFA and others, and I understand that CFA members in particular have been strong advocates for these changes. They would have their own protocols as well in terms of mitigating fatigue and the risks that that can pose when you are driving heavy vehicles.

I will say also that as part of the 2026–27 budget we are investing a record $1.04 billion to rebuild, repair and resurface roads across the state – the largest roads maintenance blitz in Victoria’s history – and we are also investing $102.6 million in vital road projects to improve safety, reduce congestion and get Victorians home sooner. At a time when cost of living matters, we are making it cheaper to get around with 20 per cent off vehicle registration for Victorians. I know already when I have been doorknocking in my local area that this certainly has been well received. When you are looking at circa $186 per vehicle, that is a real saving for households, and if you have got a couple of vehicles in the household this can make a real difference, because all those kinds of costs really do add up. Certainly I can say personally, just from the engagement I have had in my local community – and I am sure this is being experienced in other parts of the state – that the feedback has been really positive on these changes.

The bill is really sitting alongside those investments, because when we are looking at the whole framework under which we all have to exist and function in a safe and supported way on our roads, costs are part of this issue naturally, but also maintaining the roads and being able to afford to run your car. Also, we have got the Servo Saver app. I know that is not strictly within this legislation, but it is also relevant when it comes to being able to afford your petrol or your diesel for your car, and it may be with business or it may be on a personal level. I will reiterate, as I said from the outset, that I think certainly as an MP, that rather than saying, ‘Oh, revenue raising,’ – and I know I am being a little repetitious on this point – what is the fundamental purpose when we are looking at the speed control cameras? It is about keeping Victorians safe, and maybe erring towards that and backing in that fundamental principle is really in the best interests of everyone.

 Jade BENHAM (Mildura) (15:34): I am more than happy to speak to the Roads, Road Safety and Ports Legislation Amendment Bill 2026 this afternoon. Roads are things that I use plenty of each and every day, as I am sure most of us in here do, and making them safer should be a top priority for everyone in this place. I have been given 10 minutes only, sadly. I could speak for hours on the state of our roads in the Mildura electorate, which is about 16 to 18 per cent of the state’s total geography, so it is a fair-size electorate that I drive around every day. So I get to experience those roads intimately every day, and I can tell you that there has been little improvement to potholes. The Leader of the Nationals asked in question time today, ‘How many potholes are there?’ and the minister responded, ‘Too many.’ Yes, that is correct.

I have got a story about potholes and not even cars, but very important people in our small communities having altercations with potholes in town centres, on state roads. I will get to that shortly. One of the roads that I am talking about is the Murray Valley Highway between, say, Piangil or even Wood Wood and Robinvale, where it ends. It is in a horrific condition. That road does run alongside the Murray River and in 2022 we had those floods, so it was affected. That means that road needs to be reconstructed. When I have my little Garmin device on my wrist, it measures how many floors I am walking up, and travelling along that road, which is about 45 minutes, I walk apparently 15 flights of stairs by the watch, so it is in horrific condition.

Birchip-Rainbow Road is one I have spoken about in here often. I have community members who drive it telling me that their cars – most of them drive Land Cruisers or at least some sort of SUV – could easily become airborne on that road. The Sunraysia Highway has had patches of work done to it, as has Robinvale-Sea Lake Road, but again there needs to be extensive work because bandaging up potholes does not mean they are fixed. It means that they are flat for a little while, but once you get heavy vehicles on them, or any vehicles really, particularly if there has been some rain, they are damaged again really quickly. We need to make sure we are getting the specs right if we are repairing or reconstructing roads. The Calder Highway, which I drove down yesterday from Mildura to attend Parliament today, is in horrific condition. You have got people now unavoidably swerving into the centre of the road to avoid the huge potholes or huge crevices and mounds that have accumulated on the side of the road. It is horrific.

Then we get to the speed limits which have been altered, because fixing the roads costs too much so they just drop the speed limit. This has proven in regional areas to be sometimes even more dangerous, particularly when you have B-quads on the road and there is no step-down from a 100-kilometre-an-hour speed limit to 60. It takes a long time for a B-quad pulling that much weight to slow down to that speed. It is incredibly dangerous. The other day, full disclosure, the lovely highway patrol officers out of Swan Hill pulled me over on a section of road that has recently been dropped from 80 kilometres an hour to 60. It has been 80 forever, so everyone is in that habit. It is just on the periphery of town. The highway patrol officers pulled me over to say hello – the magnet was on the side of the car – and he said, ‘Can you answer me a question? I think this is 60, but I don’t know, because there’s no sign.’ Highway patrol did not know the recently dropped speed limit, because on Google Maps, and I do not know how that works, it says 80 still. There is one sign beyond the intersection of the Murray Valley Highway and Robinvale-Sea Lake Road that says 60 where it used to say 80, but as you turn right on to Robinvale-Sea Lake Road from the Murray Valley Highway there is no sign there to tell you that that is a different speed limit now – nothing. The highway patrol had no idea what the speed limit was. Everyone was doing different speeds. That is a direct result of inadequate signage. That is an issue.

Getting back to potholes, though, there has been for some time a huge pothole in Best Street in Sea Lake. That is the main road. It is a state road. It is in front of the playground, across the road from the pub and right in front of the Juke cafe. Cafe does not seem appropriate for the Juke; it is more like a provedore. It is amazing; best bacon and egg rolls in Australia, bar none. It is run by Ezra and Dylan ‍– beautiful people. Ezra was walking across the road. Let me take a step back. That happened in February.

In September Dylan reported this pothole to VicRoads, as well as many other concerned community members. As you can imagine, there are lots of people of all ages that have to cross the road to get to the pharmacy, to the playground and to whatever. That was reported in September of last year. In February this year Ezra had a fall. I do not know at what age it goes from falling over to having a fall. He is not that old – 28 maybe. This resulted in Ezra fracturing his ribs in 17 places – 17 fractures of his ribs. He also cracked his engagement ring that Dylan had bought him – a beautiful emerald engagement ring, cracked. That was in February of this year. Of course they reported it then to VicRoads once again with the injuries that were sustained with that fall, and a claim was lodged for compensation, particularly for that beautiful emerald ring that was cracked as a direct result of this fall. You would think that would be pretty straightforward, given that there were plenty of complaints months earlier about this pothole in Best Street, Sea Lake – claim denied. However, last month, finally, once the claim had been lodged, magically the pothole was fixed. It takes someone to fall over a pothole, crack their ribs, damage their shoulder – and he told me yesterday that his shoulder is still damaged – for all of a sudden the pothole to be fixed. Is this what it takes for this government to actually fix potholes – personal injuries, not even in a car now? We literally have people with one foot in front of the other walking across the road and falling over potholes. It is beyond a state of disaster. It is just mind blowing. And then for the government to not take responsibility or admit there is a problem is again mind blowing. I can only hope that that will be rectified very, very soon, because it is just beyond belief that that should be something that any Victorian is subject to.

Of course regional Victorians feel like they are being forgotten about anyway, because apparently the government does not understand the weight of trucks that are on our roads and the volume of trucks. This is why I bang on all the time about the importance of rail freight and a rail freight strategy connecting particularly Mildura to the national rail grid so we can actually get those trucks off the roads, which will help that roads maintenance budget, because you will not have to do it so much if you can remove heavy vehicles. It is not that hard.

Any moves that we can make to improve road safety in cars, in trucks, on foot, on bikes and on motorbikes – I am not even sure I could get started on the motorbike issue. I, along with many of my friends, obviously ride motorbikes. I actually went on a group ride between Mildura and Robinvale recently raising money for the Lifeline call centre. The care that is taken by these riders is exceptional, I will say that, because they understand if they ride right over to the shoulder of the road there are drop-offs that are huge and those potholes can be lethal. So when we talk about potholes and the lack of road maintenance, shoulder drop-offs and just the dangerous state of Victoria’s roads, it impacts more than just drivers. It impacts every Victorian on the roads.

 Katie HALL (Footscray) (15:44): To the member for Mildura, I have got some good news for you. Here is one the government prepared earlier. The Minister for Ports and Freight, who is at the table, recently announced that we are transforming the former Melbourne market site into a place where the fruit and vegetables and beautiful produce from your electorate can travel by freight down to Melbourne to be sold here. That work is underway. It has just started at the former Melbourne market site. So that is good news for your community, and it is great news for my community because it will be taking trucks off local roads as well.

I am very pleased to make a contribution on the Roads, Road Safety and Ports Legislation Amendment Bill 2026. This bill delivers several reforms to improve road safety outcomes across Victoria’s transport network as well as to support the efficient movement of freight across Victoria. Through the Victorian budget, which has just been introduced by the Treasurer, this government is investing a record $1.04 billion into road maintenance to undertake the largest road maintenance blitz in Victoria’s history. We are also investing $102.6 million in vital road projects to improve safety, reduce congestion and get Victorians home sooner. And at a time when cost of living matters, we are making it cheaper to get around, with 20 per cent off vehicle rego for Victorians and of course free PT, which is enormously popular in my electorate of Footscray with the busiest station outside the city loop. But this bill sits alongside those investments and ensures that the legislative framework underpinning the transport system is just as strong as the investments we are making into it. The investments made into road safety are felt keenly in my electorate of Footscray, where the West Gate Tunnel Project has transformed the lives of local residents, and I know that the changes have also had an enormous impact on the neighbouring electorate of Williamstown.

This bill includes amendments to transfer functions relating to the management of the West Gate Tunnel tollway from the Secretary of the Department of Transport and Planning to the head of Transport for Victoria, and this will ensure the most appropriate body is responsible for decisions that are operational in nature. This bill, in recognising the successful completion of the project, transfers management from the Victorian Infrastructure Delivery Authority to the relevant statutory authority. The completion of the West Gate Tunnel Project and the subsequent ban on trucks on roads in the inner west have been absolutely transformative. Every day I hear from residents that live on or adjacent to streets that have a truck ban enforced. From day one this project has achieved what it set out to do, and I would like to thank the former minister for roads Melissa Horne for her tireless work to bring about the truck ban and the state-of-the-art enforcement system, which we secured funding for in last year’s budget – a $10 million national first into monitoring the no-truck zones in the inner west. I have had residents say to me that now for the first time they can hear the birds in the morning. They are not hearing trucks coming past their house; they are hearing the birds. That is a really valuable investment into the quality of life of residents in my community.

Because of our investment into vital infrastructure in the inner west, getting the kids to school, at Kingsville Primary School, coming home from work and walking down the street have become safer and have become easier. The West Gate Tunnel Project has made our streets safer. It has made our air cleaner too, and it has made our roads less congested. These issues were raised almost daily by my constituents to my office, and I am so proud to be part of a government that after decades of advocacy has finally landed the solution to get trucks off inner-west streets and have direct access to the port – the most appropriate way to get to the largest container port in the country and growing. This has been a very challenging legislative change for our community. It has been complex reform work, complex policy work. Alongside the member for Williamstown, I am very proud that we have landed it, because we know that the impact on air quality is also going to be transformative.

This bill also includes measures to improve the efficiency of container movements through the ports and adjacent areas by requiring prescribed information to be recorded by relevant commercial operators. Enhanced information collection on shipping container movements and heavy vehicles will ensure consistency of information across the supply chain and provide greater certainty to the sector. One of the benefits of an enhanced container and heavy vehicle tracking system is the reduction of unnecessary container movement from the port to container parks. That is another issue in the inner west that, alongside my colleague the member for Williamstown, we are determined to tackle – unnecessary empty container movements from the port to container parks on industrial land on the city’s fringe. There is a better location for them, and the Melbourne market site that I mentioned before is one of those locations where the container parks should be going.

We have done the complex policy work on getting trucks off our local roads. We are continuing the work to make sure that container logistics is better located opposite the port. We are making sure that there is more freight on rail. These movements have been a significant contributor to the number of trucks historically on local roads in Footscray, Yarraville, Braybrook and surrounding areas. The Allan Labor government recognises the need for trucks and especially the thankless work often undertaken by some of the state’s truckies. While truck bans are great for the community, it is not feasible to ban all trucks from our roads, but we can of course reduce the number of trucks on the road by working with industries to improve efficiency where possible. Obviously less trucks on the roads in the inner west means less pollution, less traffic and safer streets. The Allan Labor government is working tirelessly to make the inner west safer and healthier, and this bill is a reminder of that work. From the brand new state-of-the-art Footscray Hospital, which delivers world-class medical care, to the West Gate Tunnel getting thousands of trucks off local roads or to the Metro Tunnel providing turn-up-and-go services to the Sunbury line, the Allan Labor government has backed in the inner west with the infrastructure and services it needs time and time again. This bill is part of our broader reform through the Victorian freight plan, and the Victorian freight plan – perhaps some heavy reading for people – is actually part of that really important work that is changing the inner west forever.

 Danny O’BRIEN (Gippsland South) (15:54): I am pleased to belatedly rise to speak on this bill, which comes under my portfolio of roads and road safety. I thank the member for Ovens Valley for stepping in to cover me as the lead speaker as I was –

Tim Richardson interjected.

Danny O’BRIEN: I was having a crack at the government, member for Mordialloc – what a big shock. Budget day – yes, I was unavoidably detained by having a crack at the government. Members opposite will be pleased to know that I am not particularly going to have a crack at the government on this legislation – or at least not the legislation itself. Like the member for Mildura, there is plenty I can say about roads. I will acknowledge the former Minister for Roads and Road Safety at the desk. We were just having a bit of a chat about a couple of things in the budget that finally have actually been delivered for Gippsland South, in particular the planning money for what is known as kamikaze corner in Leongatha, the intersection of the Strzelecki and South Gippsland highways, which is just a basket case of an intersection.

The Nationals committed to this money in 2022 to actually begin the process. So, four years later, it is very much belated but also very much welcome – finally something is going to be considered. One of my other disappointments about the budget today is the Sale College – a separate issue altogether from this bill but also one where planning money was committed, where land has been acquired but where nothing has happened. I hope the same does not happen with kamikaze corner, because we do need that intersection fixed, and likewise some planning money for the Mirboo North to Leongatha stretch of the Strzelecki Highway, which the minister and I were just discussing. It is unclear to me exactly what that is going to do, although it is a relatively windy stretch of road, where some straightening where possible and some additional road shoulder construction would certainly be helpful on what is a pretty busy stretch of road. So that is good.

This legislation is largely an omnibus bill. It has a number of different aspects to it; some are road safety and roads and some are in fact the ports and freight portfolio. I did thank the minister, actually, at the time this was introduced for doing so when there was a four-week gap, which gave me plenty of time to do the research and prepare the bill report. I would like to unthank whoever it was that decided it would be debated on budget day, because that has caused a few dramas. Nonetheless, we are here now. This legislation makes amendments to allow point-to-point speed cameras to cover areas where there are multiple speed zones. When we asked in the bill briefing what the genesis of this was, what the government is actually trying to achieve with this, we were told simply that it is about reducing the road toll. Whilst that is noble and we have no issue with that and certainly support it – that is good – there are two alternative notions that we would wonder about. One is whether this is about giving more opportunity for the government to raise revenue on fixed point-to-point speed cameras on some of our freeways. Secondly, the fact is that we are now amending this legislation to allow these cameras to cover multiple stretches of road but also stretches of different speed zones, so it might be a 4-kilometre stretch of road where there is both a 100 zone and a 110 zone or a 100 zone and an 80 zone.

We have seen an explosion in the number of speed limit reductions over the last 10 years under this government, sometimes for genuine safety reasons but generally speaking because the roads are in such appalling condition that the only way the government can do anything about them is to actually reduce the speed limit. I do have a bit of a question mark as to whether that is one of the reasons this legislation is being introduced, because we now have so many stretches of roads where there is not a consistent speed limit, and I think it is actually a road safety issue in itself. There are so many places now where there are greater speed reductions coming into or out of a town, sometimes now stretching for kilometres outside of towns in regional Victoria. I would be interested in what MUARC, the Monash University Accident Research Centre, might think about it, because I think there is a safety issue in that in itself, in that people get frustrated and people get confused because there are so many changes of speed limit. This is something that I think we need to do more work on, because that level of frustration is genuine from motorists on these issues.

There are a couple of other issues in this legislation. It changes some acts to allow the use of overseas addresses for the purposes, effectively, of fines. When a council issues a parking fine or a speeding fine is issued to someone with a hire car, at the moment it simply says ‘Residential address’, and that has been interpreted to be an Australian residential address, which has made it difficult for companies such as hire car companies to actually track down particularly overseas drivers and ensure that they are responsible for paying their fines. I think this is an issue that we certainly support being addressed. This small amendment will allow the use of overseas addresses when chasing fines under the operator onus scheme.

The bill also gives the head of Transport for Victoria powers to make a temporary declaration of a road. That is just to address the fact that once a road is finished, for all intents and purposes, there is always pressure for it to be opened, and as I understand, it can take some time for the full surveying and those sorts of activities to occur because they need to wait till literally everything is finished on a road. This gives a temporary declaration opportunity for the government for 12 months. It can be extended by the minister for a further 12 months. Again, we have no particular issue with this.

I am very pleased that there is a clause in this legislation to provide an exemption for emergency services drivers for certain Heavy Vehicle National Law requirements, particularly with respect to filling in driving logs. That is a sensible exemption that ensures that if you are on a fire truck for a period of time, you do not have to be doing what someone who is doing an interstate freight run, for example, is doing, and that makes sense. We certainly support that.

Finally, on the freight aspect to this legislation, which the member for Footscray talked about in particular, the bill imposes new requirements on both shipping companies and port operators with respect to providing data to the government both on containers – what is in containers, what they are doing, where they are going and where they are coming from – and on trucks and truck movements within ports. That seems to me a little bit surprising. I am told by the government that information is already provided but is done in an inconsistent manner, so this is about ensuring that it is consistent. There would potentially be a concern – certainly I had a concern – about whether this was additional red tape and requirements that were not necessary, but I have heard back from the Container Transport Alliance Australia, for example, who have indicated that they fully support this because they do need that data to understand things like truck movements in ports and things like the quality of trucks and what they are doing in and out of ports as well as containers, as I mentioned. That is the bulk of it.

There are a number of other miscellaneous amendments, which I will not go into, but I will highlight that our roads continue to be in an appalling state. We have seen announcements in the budget today and indeed an announcement a week or so ago that supposedly there is a record investment. What is not explained are the performance measures in the budget, which highlight that in fact for every single performance measure, regional, metro and inner metro, the performance measures are actually going backwards. If we are spending more money, we are actually seeing less output. Whether it is the road area majorly patched or whether it is the road area resurfaced, in all those areas they are actually going backwards on what they were two years ago – going backwards on the road area surfaced by an enormous amount compared to recent years. That highlights the spin that there is in this particular budget. We are being told one thing, but the reality of what is happening or what is going to happen on the ground is different. This legislation, though, we have no issue with, and I look forward to it progressing through the chamber.

 Tim RICHARDSON (Mordialloc) (16:04): The Leader of the Nationals is a fortune teller. He has come out on the budget in his closing statements saying the reality on the ground, before the investments are in, is not going to meet the needs. Well, at least give us a chance. $1.04 billion – it is not always negative, it is not always talking the place down. That is all we ever hear from those opposite. They are the greatest commentators and cynics we have ever seen in Victoria on that side – that is what we see all the time. They cannot even acknowledge a good news story when it hits them right in the sternum. That is right, today we have got $1.04 billion being invested, and here today we have still got negativity.

But at least the Leader of the Nationals has acknowledged that for this bill there is broad support. That is important for road safety, something that we care about and are passionate about. Obviously the size of his electorate is very different to Mordialloc’s 56 square kilometres. It is a bit bigger out there towards Gippsland South, and there is diversity all across the state and in many of our areas.

Danny O’Brien: Eight thousand, for the record.

Tim RICHARDSON: That is a fair size. One of the important points to note is that in some of that $1.04 billion is the investment in regional and rural roads that is coming to Victorians very soon. This is an important juncture in a week when we are talking about the Treasurer’s speech on the appropriations, the investment in roads and road safety and this bill coming forward, the Roads, Road Safety and Ports Legislation Amendment Bill 2026. It is all about making our roads safer and ensuring that our transport system is at pace with our growing state, something that is of importance to this government when you look at the amount of road upgrades and investments that we have seen. If I just think of my local community and the upgrades to the Mordialloc Freeway that were talked about for over 50 years – I remember when the coalition said that they would think about it. It was a line on a map that ended in the Woodlands industrial estate and went no further. When we came to government we invested in roads, and it is a safer outcome with the Mordialloc Freeway. It is a wonderful connection that takes pressure off our local roads and makes it safer, because we had so much truck traffic running down White Street and Wells Road and the impact that that had on our communities.

The substantial investment that we have seen in level crossing removals has been a huge upgrade and investment in our community. When we first came to government this was one of the biggest safety challenges that we were facing. People were getting stuck at level crossings, being hit. There were the stress and impact of pedestrian movements at crossings as well. We had 30 on the Frankston line, and over 22 now I think have been removed on that Frankston train line. It means a safer and greater connection for our residents. It means the uplift in communities, but importantly, it means safer outcomes more broadly and locally. These are all the elements and values of this government, which invests in roads and road safety and provides the infrastructure for tomorrow, whether they are big, major road upgrades like we are seeing with the North East Link, which was opposed by those opposite ‍– they were not fans of it and criticised it in every single frame, particularly the member for Bulleen, who talks it down all the time; this is a massive jobs-creating investment for the future – or the West Gate Tunnel. Do you remember the commentary, Acting Speaker Kathage? You might have been tuning in to the negativity around the West Gate Tunnel and delivering for the west. Well, look at it now. Look at that project now taking pressure off the West Gate and getting people to where they need to be, safer and sooner. These are some of the big road upgrades and investments that need to happen to keep our communities connected.

There is also the enforcement frame to this and safety into the future. Members of Parliament would interact on a range of different occasions with the Victoria Police members who service our community each and every day. I am particularly struck when we engage with road safety and community safety forums around the work that they do. I give a shout-out to Victoria Police members. The member for Bayswater served his community for a number of years. Was it five years that the member for Bayswater was a member of Victoria Police? He would know, undoubtedly, like other members of Parliament do and like the member for Berwick does, having been a serving Victoria Police member, how critical road safety and support for Victorians are. Everyone has someone they know that has been touched by the impacts of road trauma. It is so jarring to think of just the impact and the ripple effect that this has on people when they lose a loved one or someone is seriously injured. There are the more than 200 Victorians that we lose each year, but there are also the tens of thousands of people impacted by road trauma that are supported by the Transport Accident Commission each and every year. All of those Victorians have a story, whether it is those trying to compartmentalise and process the trauma of road deaths and how we lower them over time and make it safer for the future or whether it is those that are living with injuries and need to be supported into the future – life-changing on many occasions. This is at the heart of what this bill looks to do: to improve the road safety outcomes. That point-to-point enforcement is in the arsenal of what Victoria Police and what road traffic authorities do each and every day. Providing this greater formula, this greater investment and this greater contribution will change lives and outcomes.

We know that 30 per cent of road trauma has a contributing factor of speed. We know we have so much more to do. There have been decades of work that has been led from this Parliament, and mentioned each and every time you do a tour with school students is seatbelts being mandated in Victoria under legislation through this Parliament. Victoria is always at the forefront of innovation here. We think of the landmark nature of the Transport Accident Commission and what that has meant for Victorians: a no-fault scheme, which means that you get the support and the comfort and care that you need if you are impacted by road trauma. That is truly Victorian values lived right there in the way that we support our fellow citizens in times of road trauma and impact. But we will be tireless in our efforts to try to lower the road toll over time, and I am really pleased to see some of that work. The point-to-point is really interesting, because with our navigation systems these days, the bell goes off in the car and everyone drops down to 5 or 10 k’s under as they go past the speed camera. But is that a behaviour change or is that the avoidance of an infringement, as opposed to ‘I’m on the Frankston Freeway’, ‘I’m on the Peninsula Link’ or ‘I’m on the highway down to Geelong and down to Torquay’ where there are point-to-point speed variables? Is that better? Over the course of the journey people are going to be regulating their behaviour rather than getting the notification on their navigation system or through Google Maps, slowing down for a particular impact and then taking off again. I think the point-to-point system, particularly on major roads, is a really critical element, and putting more technology and investment in that space is really important to increase safety into the future.

I am also really struck by the changes to the emergency services exemptions to the Heavy Vehicle National Law. Maybe the member for Hawthorn is tuning in. He might have a contribution on this one as well if he rolls the arm over. But this one is really interesting, because it acknowledges the unique circumstances of our emergency services workers, who each and every day have challenges in their work and the complexities of supporting their fellow citizens. Police, paramedics and our firefighters carry a level of fatigue and impact each and every day, and it is acknowledged in the exemptions that will be permanently provided or available for Victorian emergency services around the Heavy Vehicle National Law Application Act 2013. This is really interesting because I think it calls out particularly just the overall impact on our emergency services and the level of impact, particularly when we think about our firefighters, those that are driving the drug and alcohol and other drug testing in Victoria Police and some of the work that is done. But the impact on emergency services is an important call-out in that bill. But there is a broader narrative as well.

I know that the Transport Workers’ Union did an extraordinary amount of work on safe roads and safe driving rates for Victorians and indeed Australians during that time, because the fatigue and the safety impacts on heavy vehicle drivers are substantial. I give a shout-out to that powerful union, the Transport Workers’ Union, which has done a huge amount of advocacy around safe travel on our roads and the support of drivers – that is unions and workers advocating and supporting those outcomes. I think the protections that have been changed over time are in large part from the safety and the improvements that have occurred on the back of the union movement to get national support. I think it is a really strong testament to the work that they do each and every day. This bill builds on our legacy each and every day in supporting Victorians to be safe and connected to their communities. There is nothing more important than supporting people who have been impacted by road trauma and avoiding the tragic impacts that that can have into the future. This is really important legislation, and I commend the bill to the house.

 John PESUTTO (Hawthorn) (16:14): I rise to speak on the Roads, Road Safety and Ports Legislation Amendment Bill 2026, and I do so on a day when, although we will not be opposing this bill, there is a long shadow over what the government has not said and not committed to today. We welcome and will not oppose any efforts that improve road safety measures, including point-to-point speed camera enforcement. To that extent, it already exists on parts of our road network, and to the extent that it can drive improvements in driver behaviour, it is something that we should all welcome.

But I do want to spend some time echoing the remarks of earlier speakers on this side of the house that this bill, like so many others, is emblematic of a government that, as we enter the final straight before the people’s verdict in November, across the long arc and span of 12 years of office has missed the opportunities and challenges of a growing community, with demands right across different portfolio areas that are becoming more intense.

In the road space we have heard the government today and in previous weeks talk about the highest level of road funding, a little over a billion dollars. Let us remember in budget papers 3 and 4 you will normally see a record amount of spending because from year to year you have indexation and commodity price movements and nominal prices growing, and they factor into the revenue streams that then factor into the outputs and the appropriations. All the government has done is rely on the normal carryover that comes from those movements in nominal prices. There is nothing in the government’s budget announcements today and in previous days around the $1 billion which suggests there is any serious effort to genuinely tackle the horrific state of our roads. It is an issue that comes across my desk as a member for an inner-metropolitan seat as much as it does for members representing regional communities. In my own electorate, if you drive down Canterbury Road, Riversdale Road, Toorak Road or Auburn Road, you will find potholes that are as bad as anywhere you will see across the road network. In Camberwell Junction there are potholes that are camouflaged only by the busy intersection of tram tracks.

The broader point I would make in terms of the government’s failure to see this as a serious backlog and a growing catalogue of unmet needs is that we have a number of factors coming together. First of all, there is growing demand on our roads. If you look at the population changes in Victoria, particularly immediately after the pandemic lockdowns ceased, Victoria’s population was growing at nearly 3 per cent. We were carrying nearly 30 per cent of the population load. Even this year at 1.7 per cent growth we are seeing the among the highest levels of population growth in the country. We had about 88,000 in the year to September 2025. That is bringing in a lot of new people who are using our roads. That is the first thing: the government is not planning for that. It is oblivious to that growing need on our road network. Its own housing statement talks about 800,000 homes in 10 years but, more importantly, 2.4 million homes or thereabouts by 2051. How are you supposed to do that if you are not investing in a road network that is fit for purpose? It is simply not meeting the demand that comes from that statement and the initiatives that are supposed to flow from that as well.

Then we have the problem with the billion dollars the government is spruiking as an historic amount for roads investment. Given construction inflation, which is much higher than the general rate of inflation that we see – whether it is the headline or the trimmed mean, it is still higher than that – you will get less for that amount of money. It will not surprise people to appreciate that, although it is more than the $970 million-odd that was spent last year trying to play catch-up on road maintenance, you will probably get less because it is not that far different in nominal terms from the amount last year, yet construction inflation will erode the extent to which you can use that funding to address the urgent need, particularly in regional and rural Victoria, to do that.

A further reflection on the budget in the context of roads is that this budget was a final missed opportunity to prepare the Victorian economy for a growth rate that can beat the natural limit that the Reserve Bank has spoken about. The Reserve Bank says that we cannot grow at more than 2 per cent without fuelling inflation, and perhaps that is reflected in the government’s growth forecasts in this budget, which are well under 2 per cent.

What that means is the government should have been looking, in this final budget before the election, at how you can unlock the economic potential of this state. The outer metropolitan ring – I do not see anything in there. Ports reform – the need, as others have spoken about, and something I have spoken about regularly, to get more freight onto rail. How do we build a road network that accommodates the growing housing estates around Melbourne and in regional and rural Victoria? How do we fund the many overpasses and interchanges that we need to see constructed if we are to reduce congestion, which is a serious problem. I know, Acting Speaker Kathage, that in your area congestion is a serious problem, and it is partly because no planning has gone into the explosion in population growth. The government’s own figures will reveal for anybody who takes the time to look that the population in the growth corridors in particular is growing by a multiple of three or four compared with established suburbs. You need to be planning for that, and that is simply not happening.

There is nothing in this budget that shows we have a government that appreciates that the key to giving Victorians rising living standards, lowering the cost of living and improving the quality of life in our state can only be secured by investing in infrastructure that genuinely improves productivity and safety, whether it is in aviation, whether it is in ports and freight, whether it is in public transport or whether it is in roads. Many suburbs, particularly new and emerging suburbs, will rely heavily on the vehicle fleet for a long time to come, because it is simply not going to be possible given the nature of the infrastructure portfolio and the spends that we see in the budget and in recent budgets to accommodate that in the short term. That is the great missed opportunity here. The government has been urged by me and by many others in Victoria to reorient the capital program so that you can start addressing those needs that I have spoken of.

I think history will be a fairly stern judge of the government’s preoccupation in particular with the Suburban Rail Loop. I do not want to get into an argument so much about the merits of the Suburban Rail Loop – my thoughts on that are on the record. But it came at an enormous opportunity cost, because seats like your own, Acting Speaker, seats like those in the west and the north and the south-east in particular, are crying out for infrastructure that they have been denied. As I said earlier, whether it is roads or ports and freight, there is an opportunity to improve the quality of life and ensure that we address what has been a growing and more pronounced problem of inequity in the way government over the last 12 years has funded infrastructure.

That is the broader context in which we debate this bill today – a bill which is important in improving road safety, and that is why we will not oppose it. But remember, the greatest threat to road safety at the moment are the potholes and the deterioration of so many parts of our network. I even had one of my daughters stranded in an inner suburb of Melbourne simply because she drove over a pothole. She was not alone that night. It was a Sunday night, and there were other drivers who drove over that pothole, and her car needed to be towed away. These are very real-life, very direct consequences on all of us. Every Victorian is affected by the failure of this government to properly fund roads and to make sure that its performance measures are a genuine discipline on it so it does deliver the funding and the outcomes Victorians need.

 Paul MERCURIO (Hastings) (16:24): I am very happy to stand and speak to the Roads, Road Safety and Ports Legislation Amendment Bill 2026. I am happy to be speaking after the member for Hawthorn. I am sorry to hear about his daughter – I think that is a shame; it does happen – but pretty much everything else he said I disagree with. But anyway, we get the opportunity to speak and we get the opportunity to put forward what we believe, and we get the opportunity to disagree completely with others in this place.

I am pleased to rise and support this bill. This is a practical, important piece of legislation that reflects exactly what Victorians expect from their government: action on the things that matter most, keeping people safe on roads, getting freight moving efficiently, supporting our emergency services and making sure the rules and systems that operate our transport network are as strong and modern as the roads themselves.

Before I speak to the measures in this bill, I just want to set the scene a little. We are a government that is investing in Victoria’s transport network on a historic scale. Through the Victorian budget of 2026–27 we are committing a record of over $1 billion to build, repair and resurface roads across the state – the largest roads maintenance blitz in Victoria’s history. I note also we spent just under a billion dollars last year and I believe a similar amount the year before. We are investing $102.6 million in vital road projects to improve safety and reduce congestion, and we are currently delivering real cost-of-living relief to everyday Victorians by cutting vehicle registration by 20 per cent as a rebate. That is money back in the pockets of families, tradies, small business owners and commuters right across the state. This bill sits alongside those investments. It ensures that the laws governing our transport system keep pace with the scale of what we are building, because it is not enough to simply pour money into roads if the rules, responsibilities and enforcement mechanisms that govern how those roads are used are not up to scratch.

Let me first turn to the road safety measures. Every year in Victoria speeding contributes to at least 30 per cent of road fatalities and a quarter of serious injuries sustained by occupants of light vehicles. That is not a statistic to be glossed over. Behind every one of those numbers is a family that has lost someone, a community that has been shaken and a life that has been changed forever, and this government takes that seriously, which is why we continue to support smarter and stronger enforcement on our roads. I might just also say it affects families but it also affects first responders in some very deep and traumatic ways. Better responsibility with roads is also about helping our first responders not have to deal with some of the things that they see and deal with.

Point-to-point average speed enforcement has already proven to be an effective tool in encouraging safer driver behaviour. The concept is pretty straightforward. Rather than catching a driver speeding at a single point in time, average speed enforcement measures how fast a vehicle has travelled across an entire stretch of road between two detection points. It removes the incentive to speed between cameras, and it encourages consistent responsible driving across the whole journey rather than just one moment – and it works, because I will make sure I stick to the speed limit between all of the cameras on the Hume Highway. Currently there is a gap in how this works. Average speed enforcement can only be applied where a single speed limit applies across the entire stretch of road between two detection points. That means that on roads where the speed limit changes, perhaps dropping through a town or a roadworks zone before going back up, average speed enforcement cannot be used. This bill fixes that. It introduces new formulas for calculating both the average speed limit across multiple speed zones and the average speed of a vehicle travelling between those detection points. If a driver’s calculated average speed exceeds the calculated average speed limit, they will face graduated penalties equivalent to existing speed offences. Did we follow that? It works. This is a sensible targeted reform. It does not create new bureaucracy or impose unreasonable burdens on law-abiding drivers. It simply closes a gap that has prevented enforcement on some of our most high-risk, high-speed roads, and it does so fairly, because temporary speed limits, such as those applied for roadworks, will be disregarded in calculating average speed, with those temporary limits continuing to be enforced through existing methods such as speed cameras. That is a balanced approach, and it will save lives.

I also want to touch on something that does not always get mentioned in debates like this, and that is the cost-of-living angle of road safety reform. When we talk about reducing road fatalities and serious injuries, we are also talking about reducing the enormous financial costs that flow from those tragedies. The cost of serious road accidents in terms of hospital care, rehabilitation, lost productivity and long-term support is staggering. Preventing even a small number of those accidents through smarter enforcement represents a significant saving not just to government but to families and communities. Road safety is a cost-of-living issue, and this bill treats it as one.

I go back again and thank our first responders – our ambos and firies, police, SES, CFA – because the cost to them to turn up to road trauma or road accidents is huge, and it is something that they have to live with. I would prefer that they do not have to go through those experiences. Bills like this to minimise road trauma are not just about a cost–benefit analysis – they are – but they are also about the mental health and wellbeing of everyone concerned, especially our first responders.

I want to spend a moment on the 20 per cent vehicle registration rebate because it deserves more attention than it sometimes gets. For many Victorians the family car is not a luxury; it is how they get to work, drop their kids off at school, visit their parents and get to medical appointments. The cost of running a vehicle includes registration, insurance, fuel and maintenance. It is a real pressure on household budgets across the state. Cutting registration by 20 per cent or getting a rebate from it is not a minor administrative tweak; it is real money returned directly to Victorians at a time when it is needed, and it sits alongside a government that is also investing record amounts in repairing and maintaining the roads, as I said previously. On some of the comments I am getting on my Facebook around the rebate, the time to actually claim the rebate is between 1 June and 31 July. The rebate is not based on registering your car in those two months, which is where there seems to be some confusion. If you register a car or a vehicle, when you register it you can get the rebate. You just need to apply for that rebate between 1 June and 31 July.

The freight and ports reforms are the kinds of changes that do not always make headlines but that quietly keep the economy ticking. Victoria is the freight and logistics centre of Australia. The Port of Melbourne is the country’s largest container point, and the efficiency of our freight supply chain has a direct bearing on the cost of goods, the competitiveness of Victorian businesses and the livelihood of workers across the supply chain. The measures in this bill to improve data sharing between government and industry, requiring stevedoring businesses to collect and share information on truck activity and requiring cargo vessel owners to supply container shipping information, will help drive real efficiencies through the supply chain. When containers move more smoothly and activity is better managed, costs come down, and when costs come down on freight and logistics, that flows through to businesses – small businesses, mum-and-dad businesses – and ultimately to consumers, and this is a real cost-of-living benefit.

The emergency services exemptions from Heavy Vehicle National Law fatigue management requirements are another measure worth highlighting, because they speak to the kind of practical, no-nonsense governance this government is committed to. Our emergency services, including our volunteers, do extraordinary work under extraordinary circumstances. The existing exemptions from certain fatigue management record-keeping requirements have been provided through time-limited notices, requiring ongoing renewal and creating uncertainty. Making those exemptions permanent removes a burden from volunteers and provides lasting clarity.

There is quite a bit more that could be said about this bill. I do believe the budget today was fantastic for roads and road safety and the work that the Labor government is doing is exemplary. As I said, the member for Hawthorn kind of disagreed with any positivity in terms of what this bill does, even though they are going to support it. I am very proud to be here and talk about it. I acknowledge our emergency services people for the fantastic work they do. I thank them, and I commend the bill to the house.

 Matthew GUY (Bulleen) (16:34): The coalition does not oppose this bill, the Roads, Road Safety and Ports Legislation Amendment Bill 2026, and we obviously are making some comments in relation to it. I want to focus on part 6, which talks specifically about the implementation of the Victorian freight plan, because I think the Victorian freight plan is an important document. I think that we need to do what we can to implement the Victorian freight plan in a succinct way to ensure that we have got all the necessary armoury in place to maintain our position as a logistics capital of this country, which I am not sure we are doing with the state of our roads and the difficulty we have had over the last decade with the declining amount of road maintenance.

What I do want to focus on is the state of our rail network, and the freight rail network in particular, referencing the Victorian freight plan and part 6 of this bill. What I firstly want to talk about are some of our private rail operators in Victoria. There has been a tendency to hoard locomotives, which I note the government has not intervened on, which has had a direct impact upon the ability to deliver the freight plan, hence this part of the bill. The issue with that is that once operators obtain locomotives, rather than disposing of them when they reach a certain timeframe, they are scrapping them. Some have been scrapped; they should have been sold. Rather than allowing another operator to purchase a locomotive, which may then become competition to the operator that is selling those locomotives, they are scrapping them. It is leaving our freight rail network at a peak time – which may be grain demand, for instance – with a dearth of motive power to move the goods that are needed on rail. We do not have it because those operators have hoarded them and either left them in the yard to rot or be scrapped, and the government has not intervened.

As a problem, a lot of that transport which should be on rail is going onto roads. That is causing huge issues with the quality of roads in regional Victoria. We have got a huge amount of road freight, which could be rail freight, because they have not got the motive power, which has been allowed to be scrapped by some of the private operators because the government has not said, ‘Well, actually, we’re not going to allow you to do that.’ What we do have are 70-year-old locomotives or older being requisitioned by private operators, and even some by the government – and I should say by Pacific National as well – to be used in in rail freight, which is not fit for purpose, but there are not any other options. I put that on record because this is a matter of importance when we are trying to mode share freight onto rail, which has a direct impact on roads and which has a direct impact on this bill through the Victorian freight plan. I put that on record because I think there is more that can be done.

There have been a number of freight lines in this state that have been allowed to either shut or fall into disrepair in the last 20 years. This is at a time, as I say again, when our freight plan, reasonable as it is, should be focusing on upgrading Victoria’s freight rail network. Not every railway line has passenger trains. The majority do not. In New South Wales country freight lines – for instance, to Griffith or beyond it to Lake Cargelligo and other places – operate at 100 to 215 kilometres an hour. New South Wales invests in its freight rail networks and in the infrastructure of freight rail, and thus it becomes a viable alternative to road transport for heavy and long haulage. In Victoria that is not the case. The Castlemaine–Maryborough line has been allowed to fall into disrepair and is running at just 30 kilometres an hour. That is not an option when it comes to a private operator wanting to put something onto freight rail. There is the Toolamba–Kyabram section, at 40 kilometres an hour. The Australian Rail Track Corporation standard gauge line down to Portland has numerous very long speed restrictions. I note some, particularly through Dunkeld, are being improved, but this has been a long time coming. We are trying to get freight onto rail, and this is not being helped. The Hopetoun–Warracknabeal line is 30 to 50 k’s an hour. The Yaapeet line is 55 kilometres an hour. That is 30 miles an hour in the old time. I mean, the steam trains ran faster than this.

When I look at our freight plan, again I will say it is a reasonable document. We need to have the armoury in place to make sure we can actually implement it. The line north of Sea Lake was closed in February 2010, and west of Ouyen in 2007. The Ultima–Robinvale section was booked out in January 2008. These have direct impacts on the ability, as I said before, of our regional and country economy to then be able to put stuff onto the railway lines. Look at the Murray Basin rail project, which the member for Murray Plains – and before that, Swan Hill – and me have talked about on numerous occasions in this chamber, and now the member for Mildura as well. We had an opportunity to get this line up and running with standard gauge through from the Port of Geelong all the way to Mildura. That has not been the case. The project was never completed in its entirety. All excuses were used in terms of standard-gauge trains through Ballarat and the like, but at the end of the day what we do have is a half-built project which is not servicing country and regional Victoria in the way it should.

The government had an opportunity to implement its own freight plan through standardising that line with federal government funds, which could have and should have delivered, at a minimum, an 80-kilometre-an-hour section all the way from Yelta down to the Port of Geelong, which was what the plan was about. That is how it should have been delivered, and it has not been delivered that way. As a consequence, what we now have is a half-built Murray Basin rail project which ends north of Ballarat, or Maryborough actually, and then links back to the standard gauge on a dual-gauge section down through to Ararat, which is not what the project was meant to be. Again, if we are going to do these things properly, they need to be done properly from the very start.

The member for Gippsland East, who is in the chamber with me, will know exactly what happened with Bunyip River rail bridge on the Gippsland line. The federal government effectively paid 90 per cent of the money to duplicate that bridge so the Gippsland line could be upgraded. There are still significant and heavy freight trains operating on the Gippsland line. They operate in between the VLocity services which run nowadays all the way to Bairnsdale but predominantly out of Traralgon. What the federal government did was give the money to the state to manage particularly the single-track section through from Bunyip to Longwarry. That could be duplicated. It would allow duplicated running all the way through to Longwarry, then a single-line section up through Drouin and then double line from there to Moe. That would at least improve that section. What the government then did was upgrade every part of the Gippsland line: signalling and the Stratford river bridge. I think it was the bridge at Stratford, wasn’t it?

Tim Bull interjected.

Matthew GUY: The Avon River bridge at Stratford. The member for Gippsland East can advise me. The one thing that was not done was the duplication of the one part of the line that should have been done, which was the Bunyip River rail bridge. I think there was an excuse found on a cabinet-in-confidence document that has never been released in relation to a possum or a bird – a bird, I think it was. It is like when I grew up in Eltham. The Eltham copper butterfly decided to stop at McDonald’s; it decided to stop the Fitzsimons Lane duplication. It stopped a few things. It is just that no-one has ever seen it. I lived in Eltham for 30 years, and I never saw the Eltham copper butterfly. A few people managed to find it. Around the time of the Greensborough by-election it was found; in the 1992 election it was found. Anyway, the point is that the state government did not do the job properly, which has a direct impact on freight and the Victorian freight plan, which directly relates back to this bill.

The western line, the standard-gauge line out to Adelaide, is in a deplorable condition, sections of it. Drivers are now constantly talking about sections of that track which need to be upgraded. It is going the way the north-eastern line did 15 years ago before it was effectively regraded and done again, or at least parts of it anyway. It is still very bouncy in sections. If you go on the XPT, which is the Sydney train, you probably do not want to go on the top bunk, because you might be finding yourself on the floor north of Benalla, the point being that that line out to the west is in a deplorable condition. Again, it is incumbent upon state and federal governments to ensure that those lines are maintained to a proper condition so that they can be used for higher speed – 110- or 115- kilometre-an-hour – freight running. That is what you would expect going out through western Victoria.

I will conclude on one line which is very important, and that is down to Hastings. The steel train which runs down there is the heaviest in the state. You have probably seen it running down there on the Frankston line, and then it heads down to Hastings. I have been in a cab on a train running down the Hastings line. It is actually a bit disconcerting. The weight of the train and the condition of the track on timber sleepers is something to behold when you realise the weight of that train. Of course if we are going to try and maintain the Port of Hastings and at least a semblance of freight compatibility from the port to the rail and then back into Melbourne, into logistics centres in and around the city on the broad gauge, then the line needs to be held to a proper standard, and it is not being. That is a direct result of the state government. I put those points as a point of concern in relation to the freight plan, which relates to this bill.

 Kat THEOPHANOUS (Northcote) (16:44): I am proud to speak on this bill, the Roads, Road Safety and Ports Legislation Amendment Bill 2026. It is a practical bill. It deals with speed enforcement, road declarations, toll road administration, heavy vehicle law, port data, freight movement and operator onus offences. In other words, it deals with the rules that sit behind the way people, goods and services move around Victoria every single day. In my electorate those rules are felt very directly. Our inner northern suburbs are dense, they are highly connected and they are doing a lot of work for the city.

We have High Street, St Georges Road, Bell Street, Heidelberg Road, Station Street, Darebin Road and Normanby Avenue. We have got trains, trams, buses, bikes, school routes, shopping strips, local parks and major arterials all intersecting in a very small geographical area and a geographical area enclosed by waterways. These roads are not just lines on a transport map; they are places people cross with prams and ride along to work and wait beside after school and drive on to care for family and rely on for local business and freight. So when we talk about road safety in this chamber, we are not talking about an abstract system, we are talking about whether a student can get from Thornbury High to the bus stop safely, whether a family in Alphington can get onto the Darebin Creek Trail without being pushed onto Heidelberg Road, whether a pedestrian on St Georges Road has a better chance of avoiding serious harm because the speed limits are appropriate, whether Fairfield Primary kids can cross Wingrove Street between their two campuses safely, whether a bus service is frequent enough to be a real transport option choice at night or whether heavy vehicles are on the right roads and local streets can be local streets. That is why this bill matters.

One of the most significant reforms is the expansion of point-to-point average speed enforcement. Speeding contributes to at least 30 per cent of road fatalities in Victoria and a quarter of serious injuries sustained by light vehicle occupants. That tells us very clearly that if we are serious about reducing road trauma we need a speed enforcement system that is modern, that is fair and that is capable of dealing with the road network as it actually exists. At the moment average speed enforcement can only operate where there is one speed limit between two detection points, but many roads do not work like that. A corridor can move through different speed environments and the law should be able to respond to that, so this bill will allow point-to-point average speed enforcement across a length of road with two or more different speed zones. It is a technical change, but the purpose is pretty straightforward: it encourages safer, steadier driving over high-risk corridors, and it strengthens the tools available to reduce road trauma.

In Northcote we know that speed reform makes a really big difference. On St Georges Road between Northcote and Preston we recently reduced the speed limit from 70 kilometres to 60 kilometres an hour along this hazardous 3-kilometre stretch. Over five years this stretch saw 80 crashes and 22 serious injuries; that is a crash every few weeks and a major injury every three months on one length of road in my community. So lower speeds reduce the likelihood of a collision and reduce the severity if one does occur. That is especially important on roads like St Georges Road, where there are cars, trams, cyclists and pedestrians all interacting and where there are kinder and school facilities. Families have raised really serious concerns with me about it, so I am happy we have achieved that.

That same evidence-based approach is guiding our work in Thornbury as well. On Normanby Avenue residents have long raised concerns about the speed limit of 60 kilometres an hour there. We have already delivered electronic speed signs that flash during peak school hours, reminding drivers to slow down through the 40-kilometre school zones between St Georges Road and Clapham Street. That was a really practical improvement, and it was secured because residents spoke up and because the road incident data supported action. But I know our community wants a more permanent solution there, so I am working with the Minister for Roads and Road Safety and the Department of Transport and Planning (DTP) to advocate for a safer speed environment on Normanby Avenue, including consideration of a further speed reduction there.

The same is true around Thornbury High School. Anyone who has travelled along Station Street near Collins Street at school time understands how complex that environment is. The road carries heavy north–south traffic, students are walking to and from bus stops and there are turning movements, visibility issues, a median, a bend and a crest. There is a lot happening in a very constrained space, and that is why I have been working closely with Thornbury High families, the school, Darebin council and the minister. There has already been a win on Matisi Street, with Darebin council committing to working with Thornbury High to construct a wombat crossing on the other side of the school. That is a positive step in the right direction, but we also need to work through some of those other pressure points. I was pleased to sponsor a petition in the Parliament from local resident Nina Collins, which was tabled with 720 signatures from local residents. It calls for a review of road safety at the intersection of Darebin Road and Wilmoth Street and at Station Street and Collins Street in Thornbury. They are highly active intersections used by students, families, pedestrians, cyclists, bus users and motorists every single day.

The community is asking for a really legitimate thing here, which is carefully assessing the situation, providing those practical improvements and action informed by data and local knowledge. I do welcome that, off the back of some of our advocacy there, DTP has already proposed a 40-kilometre school zone on Station Street at drop-off and pick-up times, recognising that proximity to Thornbury High. We are looking forward to that.

The bill also improves the way we manage new roads once they are open. Road declarations require land acquisition surveys and formal classifications, and sometimes those steps cannot be completed until construction is almost finished. Even though there is pressure to open the road to the public, without a proper declaration there can be uncertainty about who is responsible for inspection, maintenance and liability.

We see the importance of those good processes on projects close to home. In Alphington works are now underway for the Alphington link at Farm Road. This is a major milestone in a longstanding community priority. For years Alphington residents have been cut off from a safe, direct and practical connection to the spectacular Darebin Yarra trail that we built. The new link will deliver a 120-metre shared-use path from Farm Road to the trail, including a raised crossing. It will connect locals to the more than 600 kilometres of walking and cycling routes across Melbourne. That project involved sustained advocacy, community consultation, design work, planning approval, legislative change and land acquisition, and the final design has evolved in response to community consultation. The earlier plan had it as a bridge; now it is a ground-level path, and that will save trees and reduce construction impacts and blend more sensitively into the landscape. It is a really positive local outcome for us.

The broader network matters too. We have got the Eastern Freeway upgrades delivered as part of the North East Link Program. That will provide new traffic management technology, express lanes and Melbourne’s first dedicated express busway. But importantly for the inner north, it also includes new and upgraded walking and cycling connections through Yarra Bend Park, including a new bridge over the Yarra River that we are very excited about.

This bill sits alongside some pretty major investments from the state Labor government in roads. There is a $1 billion investment in the budget to rebuild, repair and resurface roads across the state, $102.6 million for vital road projects to improve safety and reduce congestion and those practical cost-of-living supports, including 20 per cent off vehicle registration for eligible Victorians. For Northcote that broader program is visible in the work we are doing every day. It is the safer speeds on St Georges Road; the continued advocacy on Normanby Avenue; the practical action around Thornbury High; the Alphington link moving forward into construction; more evening services on the route 508 bus; the North East Link taking pressure off our local roads; and the Eastern Freeway upgrades that include those walking and cycling connections through Yarra Bend Park.

This is what good transport reform looks like. It is not one project, it is not one road or one mode. It is a network, it is safety, it is freight, buses, bikes, walking, enforcement, maintenance and accountability all working together in an integrated system. That is why I support this bill. I commend it to the house.

 Annabelle CLEELAND (Euroa) (16:54): I also rise to speak on the Roads, Road Safety and Ports Legislation Amendment Bill 2026. As we have heard, our side will not oppose the bill. However, it is being presented on a day we get to fact-check the Allan Labor government’s genuine commitment to road safety. I could not count how many times my colleagues and I have raised road safety during this Parliament, let alone over the last decade. It is important to us as the Nationals because we live in the communities that have to live with loss and the impact of poor roads and road safety.

We live with the families when they have an accident or a family member loses their life. One of my most harrowing challenges in this job was when having only been in this role for a few months I had lots of people reach out to me about the Euroa–Mansfield road and how dangerous that section of road is. I wrote repeatedly to the roads minister at the time to ask for a review of the speed limit and also to ask for a review of the shoulder. It was nearly 12 months on when we lost a life – an 18-year-old who had recently got her licence – that I got a response and the road speed was changed and the shoulder was broadened. What a shameful trigger for this government to act.

What we want to talk about from some of the feedback we have heard on our side is that it is about time. It is about time this government speaks about road safety. We are going insane on this side. We feel the gaslighting constantly about the neglect of our road network. And every time we raise it they are saying, ‘Well, we’re doing our job. We’re investing a billion dollars.’ That is basic maintenance in this day and age. So I wanted to start my contribution and list all of the roads that desperately need an upgrade in the Euroa electorate, but I will run out of time. Some of the critical roads that we must look at are the Murchison-Violet Town Road, the Benalla to Swanpool road and the Midland Highway. There is not a section that is not dangerous with poor lines, absolutely treacherous potholes and shoulders that are causing accidents – deteriorated, crumbling shoulders. The Kilmore main street, Benalla-Yarrawonga Road and the Colbinabbin to Murchison road – every arterial road that is not built for major freight but has become a major freight road because of the condition of people trying to get to places quicker is now incredibly dangerous. I dropped in to see a mate at Wahring Motors, Trevor Cubbin, just last week, and because he is a mechanic, 25 vehicles he does a week by himself, largely an impact of this government’s failure. Because of the conditions of the roads his business is booming. And he is frustrated. He does not want to see his mates in the community have that financial impact from a government that cannot manage its road network. Twenty-five vehicles a week, and he went through and he showed me the financial consequence of a government that does not invest in maintaining and upgrading our road network – it is felt by every Victorian.

What floors me about this bill is that the Allan Labor government are going to go down the path of fining and infringement rather than fixing the roads. It is just a different approach this government has compared to our side, where we believe in genuine repairs and maintenance. Not just fixing potholes; repairing and rebuilding the roads. Potholes, edge breaks, faded and non-existent line markings are becoming an absolute hazard, and this government has turned to enforcement rather than doing its own job, which is fixing the roads.

Shortly after the 2022 election we had the floods, which was the original excuse as to why the road network was so poor. It was the floods, then it was the bushfires and now it is the war. Anyway, the gaslighting is quite extraordinary. I went into Murchison, and on the entrance into town there were these extraordinary air pockets on the main road line-marked with yellow all over it. Every Victorian knows those damn line markings and what that means as a warning signal. The line markings wore off. They have not been fixed; it is just that the line markings no longer exist. This is dangerous. It brings me to Archie Baines’s story. He is a Broadford 82-year-old and an absolutely huge identity in our region. Driving down just past Wahring Motors on the Goulburn Valley Highway he hit a pothole that threw him across a lane past another car, destroyed his truck, destroyed a neighbouring vehicle and caused several people thousands and thousands of dollars worth of damage because of a pothole that was known to authorities. It has been repeatedly marked, and only when I raise it here in this place does the government go out to do its job and fill these potholes. It is a shameful use of resources when it takes us to individually name a pothole before this government responds.

I just want to talk about the infrastructure and the fact that we are not seeing that investment keep pace with some of our population growth and what that means for our road network. This government has put a 300 per cent population increase on the residents throughout the south of my region, from Kilmore to Broadford, the Mitchell shire – a 300 per cent increase in population. Yet, since the 2022–‍23 budget, the government has spent about $50 million on the Kilmore bypass but has not even acquired a paddock. Ask me where that money has gone – I have no idea, but there are plenty of questions. Labor planned, started and almost finished the West Gate Tunnel in the same period – a megaproject in less time than they can purchase a couple of paddocks for a roundabout. But still, mind you, they managed to spend $50 million. The money is there; the choice is not. Regional Victorians are sick and tired of missing out, because our lives are at risk; the roads are dangerous.

I want to highlight a couple of the issues within the budget, and it is a coincidence that this bill gets put forward on the day that we get to scrutinise the true spending of the road maintenance and safety budget by the Allan Labor government. A bit of creative accounting is happening, I think we can all notice, and plenty of road projects are moving from capital to operating expenditure. Why is that important? Capital works are about building and fixing. Operating spend is maintenance – the core responsibility, the job the government should be doing but is not. The outcome is the same: fewer upgrades, delayed works and patch jobs instead of long-term fixes. The fact that this government has put a 300 per cent increase on our population and we still do not even have a Kilmore bypass and can spend $50 million on bureaucrats but cannot buy a paddock are examples of how bad the Allan Labor government is at managing a project and managing the budget. Regional Victorians certainly pay the price time and time again.

Again, the bill focuses on infringements and targeting drivers, yet the Allan Labor government is failing to meet its core responsibility, which is to fix our roads. There is a pattern of neglect when it comes to the Allan Labor government’s investment in our road network. Short-term fixes are replacing that long-term planning. South of my electorate and in fact the whole north-east are paying the price for that. We can see it in the public transport gaps, energy reliability, the school infrastructure. Today’s budget shows shameful neglect when it comes to investment in regional Victoria, and roads are no different. What we actually want to see on our side of the house is the Nationals dream of safer roads, not more fines – that is not the way to go about it. Fix the roads: that is how you make community roads safer. We need to see viable upgrades and not just announcements – these hollow promises of a Kilmore bypass, and yet 50 million spent on who knows what.

Regional roads, as we have heard, are not a luxury. Acting Speaker Mercurio, you said it yourself: the emergency services that are turning out to the road tolls and driving patients on the roads – they are the ones that are experiencing the cost of the failure of our road network. It is the everyday Victorians, the freight operators and the families trying to get their kids to school that pay the price. They are all going to Trevor Cubbin’s place, Wahring Motors, and he cannot keep up. Actually, Acting Speaker, it was your term – you said ‘exemplary standard of roads’. Mate, that is gaslighting. The facts are in the budget. This government neglected our regional road networks. The greatest threat to road safety at the moment is the absolute neglect by the Allan Labor government of our roads.

 Steve McGHIE (Melton) (17:04): I rise to speak in support of the Roads, Road Safety and Ports Legislation Amendment Bill 2026, and in doing so I want to focus my contribution on road safety and the road management reforms contained within this bill. Let me just say initially that this bill is not about revenue raising and fining people. People would not get fined and we would not be raising revenue if people did not break the law. It is pretty simple: drive to the road laws and you will not get penalised. That is what laws are all about: do not break them.

It will not be any surprise to anyone in this place that I want to focus on saving lives as well as improving our accountability and ensuring that our road network keeps pace with a growing state. I think it is worth highlighting that this bill reflects a simple and urgent reality: too many lives are still being lost on Victorian roads. And as we have heard, speeding alone contributes to about 30 per cent of fatalities as well as a significant proportion of serious injuries each year – as I say, due to speeding alone, let alone the nonsensical decision by some drivers or some passengers not to wear seatbelts. I know in my days in the past as a paramedic, in many, many situations people that did not wear seatbelts did not end up in the car, they ended up out of the car and most times dead on the road, unfortunately. You do not need to be a paramedic to know that behind every one of those statistics is a family, a community and a future that has been irreversibly changed. That is the tragedy in these things – that it is avoidable, and it is avoidable by common sense and respectful driving and sticking within the road rules. Of course it is not just speeding drivers that pay the price for the choice that they make. I have seen literally countless instances where law-abiding motorists, the ones that are driving within the rules and driving respectfully, could not anticipate the actions of a driver that deliberately chose their own selfish needs over the safety of everyone else. That is what happens when we see these road accidents, unfortunately, in a lot of situations. So when we consider reforms like this bill, we are not debating percentages and statistics, we are debating measures that will directly influence whether people get home safely, and that is what this is all about: making it safer on the roads and allowing people to drive with, as I say, confidence that they can come home safely.

Certainly I would like to thank the minister in regard to this bill. The minister is at the table at the moment. I thank her and her team for all the great work that they have done in bringing this legislation forward. It takes practical, evidence-based steps to strengthen road safety enforcement and improve how our road network is managed. It does so in a way that is targeted and forward-looking and takes into consideration real scenarios and real-life situations that people have experienced and of course all of the data collection from Victoria Police, the coroner and the Monash University Accident Research Centre, who do a lot of the road accident research.

I want to reflect on the improvements to road safety enforcement. Of course one of the most significant reforms in this bill is the expansion of point-to-point average speed enforcement. I know a few people have spoken to this already today, but it is certainly infrastructure that affects the Melton electorate, given the highways that pass through Melton and the Western Freeway, which passes through Melton. It is a location at the end of the metro area and the beginning of the regional area as you are approaching Bacchus Marsh. The Western Highway travels through Melton from an east–west point of view and has a varying speed limit – many, many changes in the speed limit along the road. And of course when we upgrade that stretch of road between Melton and Caroline Springs it will become a freeway and it will have one speed limit on that freeway, which will change the way people drive into the future. It is important that people be aware of that.

Police radars and permanent speed cameras are for both the detection and the perception of detection to bring about traffic calming. And that is what it is all about – it is about making people aware that they could be breaking the laws and they could be penalised. As you know, when people see the roadside camera detections and things like that, they do slow down in that initial vicinity. Whether they speed up again is another issue. But again, some drivers take caution when there are detection cameras. We all will be familiar with the different types of technology that we are enforcing around this state. It measures the time it takes for a vehicle to travel between two fixed points and calculates an average speed. It is already in use across parts of Victoria and has been shown to reduce dangerous driving behaviour, particularly on high-risk roads. However, the current system has a critical limitation: it can only operate where the speed limit remains constant between the two points.

But in reality many of our roads, particularly major arterial roads and routes in Melton such as the Western Highway and the Old Western Highway, do not operate with point-to-point cameras. There are many speed zone changes, and the conditions obviously vary. As a result some of the very roads where enforcement would be most effective are currently excluded, which is a shame, because people know about that and the ones that want to break the law will break the law, unfortunately. In the end some of those will be caught up in some tragic situations, and some innocent people will be caught up in those tragic situations.

Back in 2019, through my office, we wrote to the federal minister for infrastructure at the time, Michael McCormack, asking about funding and the upgrades that were needed to the Western Highway in my particular electorate. The response that we got was they were planning to upgrade the highway, which thousands and thousands of western suburbs residents use every single day, but not in Melton. They were planning to upgrade it between Ararat and the South Australian border. Ararat is about 161 kilometres west of Melton, and of course no upgrading of that section on the national highway was going to help the Melton residents get to work on time or even get to work safely. We were seeking an upgrade back then from that federal government at that particular time, but there was little interest in it. Unfortunately, over the 10 years of Liberal–National governments there was no work done on the Western Highway – none at all, not even a murmur that they were going to upgrade the Western Highway.

I notice that our friends opposite criticise our government in regard to neglecting the west and not upgrading the Western Highway. I am pleased to say that both the state government contributed $10 million and the federal government, the Albanese government, put in $10 million for a $20 million business plan. I am pleased that our two local federal members Sam Rae and Alice Jordan-Baird were very supportive of that. Out of that the Albanese government committed $1 billion to starting an upgrade of the Western Freeway between Melton and Caroline Springs. At the moment there is already preconstruction work that has commenced before that upgrade starts, which I am pleased to say, having partners out of Canberra working with the state government, is the first opportunity that people in the west, in my corridor or in my electorate, will have to see an upgrade of the Western Freeway. Some will scream that it has taken too long. Again, it is a federal road, and we had 10 years of Liberal–National governments that did nothing for the Western Freeway in my patch.

While we are talking about roads, I want to talk about the removal of four level crossings in the local government area of Melton, three in my patch, my electorate, and one in the electorate of Kororoit. The Hopkins Road bridge over the level crossing will open in only two weeks time, and it will be a major change for traffic flow within Melton. Then in July we will have the Ferris Road overpass over the level crossing in Ferris Road, where the new hospital is being built and the TAFE college and we have just opened a secondary school. There is so much activity going on down at Ferris Road at Cobblebank. That traffic flow will completely change with that bridge going over the level crossing. Then later this year the Coburns Road and Exford Road level crossings will be completed and opened up, which will change traffic movement in Melton. It will make it safer. It will allow people to go to where they want to go – to schools, to the hospital, to the TAFE college, out with their friends, to the local railway station at Cobblebank. It will change traffic movement. It is so important in my electorate that those level crossings are being removed, and those road networks will be open, all of them, later this year, which is fantastic for our electorate.

Of course there is a lot more that I could talk on in regard to this particular bill, and I just noticed that I am running out of time. This is an important bill. I am pleased to say that the opposition are supporting this bill, although with some contributions you would not realise that. I commend the bill to the house.

 Richard RIORDAN (Polwarth) (17:14): I too rise to talk about the Roads, Road Safety and Ports Legislation Amendment Bill 2026, and I am just having a little chuckle to myself as I look at this bill today. On the day the budget gets handed down, when we learn of the massive crippling debt that is striking the state of Victoria and the good people of Victoria, we have a bill called the Roads, Road Safety and Ports Legislation Amendment Bill. The average punter out there in voter land is probably thinking this might be a bit of legislation that is going to make sure our roads are safer, fill up the potholes, fix the edges, fix the dangerous intersections, replace the one-way bridges – the list goes on ‍– even fix up some traffic lights, add a few more roundabouts, I do not know, to make the driving experience safer and more conducive for the people of Victoria considering that they are now paying $50 billion worth of tax. You would think that would be what it is, but no.

Cunningly, as this government does, part 2 is about how we can make speed cameras detect more people on our crumbling, failing roads. Any of us in country Victoria know that as you go along a 100-kilometre-an-hour road, for a lifetime it was a given that a 100-kilometre road is a 100-kilometre road – not in Victoria anymore. No, a 100-kilometre-an-hour road could be 40, could be 70, could be 80, back to 40, up to 60, back to 70, up to 40. A drive in country Victoria is like ‘Spot the 100-kilometre-an-hour zone’ because the government’s only way it can try and keep people safe on the roads is to say, ‘Folks, for the last hundred years you’ve been on a 100-kilometre-an-hour road, but through our mismanagement and absolute chaos we’re going to slash it down. We’re going to leave it at 40 kilometres and 60 kilometres for years.’ That marvellous bit of road network that we tried to get all the way down to Polwarth, Princes Highway West, is a joke. It is a two-lane road that has not even officially opened yet, I might add. It is still officially under construction even though it has been essentially finished for quite a few years. But most of that is 80 kilometres or 70 kilometres. It is all over the place. A dual-lane beautiful bit of potentially new road that the incompetence of this government has seen as one of the roads that will likely benefit the government and disadvantage the taxpayer because they have now cunningly set the rules so that we can fine people who fail to see the blown-over 40-kilometre-an-hour or 70-kilometre-an-hour zone temporary road repair signs that just litter our highways and byways in country Victoria now.

Parts 5 and 7 of this wonderfully important, diabolically interesting bill that has come to the Parliament today are about how we do not miss out on the fines that we are giving our foreign drivers. We are here today to make sure that the State Revenue Office, which struggles to get its billing right at the best of times, is going to go overseas and cross country and go track down the fines issued on these same roads to our tourists and visitors to the area. Ordinarily I do not have a problem with tracking down someone who has been issued a fine who has then done a runner overseas. It is not such a bad thing, because it raises the interesting question: what are we actually doing as a state on road safety?

Sadly and unfortunately – in the great electorate of Polwarth we have the Great Ocean Road – one of the great torments for people in my electorate is the volume and number of overseas drivers who have literally landed at Tullamarine airport and have been given the okay to drive 4 hours one way – an 8-hour drive, essentially, in a day – based on their stated capacity to be eligible to drive on an Australian road. There are many examples. One was as recently, sadly, as only yesterday, where we had a minibus-and-car accident on the Great Ocean Road. My best wishes to those involved in that, and I hope there was nothing serious. You may also be aware there is an ongoing court case at the moment from a young German backpacker who had literally been in Australia for less than 24 hours, hired his Jucy van and went off to the Twelve Apostles. I am imagining a poor young German backpacker had probably never driven more than an hour at any one time in his life, but we allowed him to come onto our road with no fundamental understanding of the distances when driving around Australia.

The question I would pose is: rather than having a road safety amendment bill that is more concerned with making sure we hunt people down to get the money from speeding fines, wouldn’t it be a good piece of legislation to bring to the Parliament where we actually verify and confirm that people, when they are from overseas, are fit to drive on our roads? At the moment anecdotally there is ample evidence that people are buying bogus licences overseas and being able to hire a car here without fundamentally ever having driven.

I draw on my own experience, having gone to some South-East Asian countries that drive on the other side of the road and drive in very different habits and norms when driving on the road. I would make the observation from having done a few laps around a few countries in South-East Asia, for example, that they do not really get up to the speeds we get up to on our roads because there is a fair bit more chaos and it is a very different way to drive. That in itself is fine, because it seems to work quite well. I have actually found quite a bit of enjoyment in trying to cross a seven-lane road in Ho Chi Minh City or somewhere, only to find that the traffic just swerves beautifully around you. But when you drive on a country road in Australia, the road might look clear and open, and it might look enticing to go at 70 kilometres or 40 kilometres or 60 kilometres or 100 kilometres or whatever the road is allowing you to do, but what we have in Australia that you do not see in many of these jurisdictions is a thumping big B-double or B-triple hurtling down the road at 100 kilometres an hour fully laden with sheep or cattle or milk or grain and stock, which makes driving conditions in Australia very different, and we do not do very much to deal with that. As a consequence we have this tragic court case on at the moment where a young 18- or 19-year-old has now been in jail in Australia for 18 months awaiting his trial for culpable driving. I pose the question: could we have avoided the trauma to the two families that were affected by that terrible double fatality, and could we have avoided the clear tragedy that will be wrought on this young driver who landed in Australia for 24 hours and found himself in jail and is still in a costly and ongoing court case? Could we have avoided that after having spent some time verifying his ability to drive on our long distances and with our very different driving requirements here, particularly in regional Victoria and in regional Australia for that matter? For those of us brought up in it, we are used to it; we know the fact that you cannot get over very much on a Victorian country road because there are simply no shoulders and if you have had a bit of rain, the clay and the muck on the side of the road can be quite deadly, particularly if you are in an unfamiliar vehicle and you do not know what you are doing.

These are real issues about road safety, but sadly, while we are supporting this bill because it is probably going to serve to help dig this poor broken state out of the financial pickle it is in, it is really not addressing some of the fundamental issues we have with roads and road safety. As many of my colleagues have highlighted this afternoon in their contributions, when we talk about roads and road safety, those of us representing regional and rural Victoria can wax lyrical for a very long time about what we want to see a good, responsible government do in these areas, and quite frankly it really does not involve the amount of time and effort this government has clearly gone to to figure out how it can squeeze a bit more money out of road users. I would rather they talk about how we can actually save road users money. I would rather be having the debate today about how we make our roads safer, how we make sure our drivers are better educated and better trained and how we can make sure that the investment in our roads is long lasting and effective.

I make a final statement with a minute to go that I have been amused over recent days when this government have been claiming this extra money spent on roads for pothole management, and they are talking about all the potholes they are going to fill. I do not know, but I think they came up with a figure of about $3 million. I would guess I have got 3 million potholes alone just in my own electorate, without sharing the money or the resources with anyone else’s. But I want to see this government actually fix the road surfaces, and it is more than just potholes, because I have seen what they do with potholes: they allocate a little length of road they are going to do, and they will cut a pothole in half and fill half of it and leave the other half empty, which of course, as we all know, blows out. Roads and road safety are important issues; we need to take them seriously. This government’s attempt at it today is a pretty lame effort.

 Meng Heang TAK (Clarinda) (17:24): I am delighted to join this side of the house and the hardworking member for Melton, who spoke just before me, in support of the Roads, Road Safety and Ports Legislation Amendment Bill 2026. This is another important bill, one that will improve road safety outcomes and the management of Victoria’s roads. This is welcome news for my constituents and for my electorate, because road safety is a very important priority in the Clarinda electorate, particularly in Springvale South. Unfortunately we have had several fatal crashes in the electorate over the past few years. There were a few things, they were either to do with traffic lights or to do with the driver behaviour, and that is why we have this bill today. I send my condolences and best wishes to all the families that have been affected by these horrible accidents.

One intersection that gets raised with me very consistently is the Springvale Road and Athol Road T-intersection. Unfortunately earlier this year there was a three-vehicle accident at the T-intersection which involved a vehicle travelling south running a red light. Prior to this I can remember another incident there midyear at the same intersection where a southbound car travelling along Springvale Road collided with a car turning right from Athol Road, tragically resulting in the loss of life of the driver of the right-turning vehicle. Again, I send my condolences, thoughts and best wishes to all those affected by this incident.

I understand that over the two-year period ending 31 December 2024 there were four reported casualty crashes at the same intersection. Of these, three resulted in serious injuries and one resulted in non-serious injuries sustained by those involved. Not only is it a busy intersection but there are three temples along this Springvale South road. There is a school. There is a small shopping strip there. During school hours parents pick up the kids and are also in a hurry to pick up something at the grocery shops. Sometimes during the festival seasons we have visitors to the wonderfully multicultural Springvale South. There is a Cambodian temple, there is a Vietnamese temple, there is a church and there is also the Bright Moon Temple down south. Residents can just walk across and sometimes do not wait for the green light. That is on an already busy road, so it is congested, and I believe this bill will fix some of the issues that we are having.

Along this road, as I said, there are three temples, and on the right-hand side there is the Athol Road shopping centre. The area in front of the shopping centre had a 60-kilometre sign some time back. My constituents and I would welcome a reduction of the speed limit along this road and have requested for this to be investigated by the department as soon as possible. I thank the minister at the table, the Minister for Roads and Road Safety, for her engagement there and look forward to working together with her to deliver some change to improve the safety of that intersection in my electorate.

As mentioned, the focus of this bill is to improve road safety outcomes and the management of Victoria’s roads. That begins with an amendment to the Road Safety Act 1986 to reduce the number of lives lost on Victoria’s road and improve road safety outcomes by enabling the expansion of the point-to-point average speed enforcement to cover a broader range of circumstances, which will help to encourage safer driver behaviour through the use of stronger and smarter enforcement practices.

Currently under the existing legislation point-to-point average speed enforcement can only operate on sections of the road where there is a single speed limit. This reform will allow point-to-point average speed enforcement across sections of the road with multiple speed limits and continuous roads with varying road names and enable the use of different camera types, including fixed and mobile, to improve coverage and flexibility. Together these changes allow point-to-point average speed enforcement to better influence driver behaviour over larger sections of the Victorian road network. By monitoring driver behaviour over long road sections, point-to-point average speed cameras encourage consistent compliance with speed limits rather than monitoring compliance near a single camera. This is considered to be a fairer approach because infringements are only issued when a driver’s average speed for the whole section is above the limit, showing that they were exceeding the speed limit for a sustained period.

Research conducted by the Monash University Accident Research Centre has shown that the point-to-point average speed system achieves crash reductions comparable to fixed spot cameras but across much longer sections of road. This demonstrates the significant impact of point-to-point average speed technology in reducing speeds and saving lives on Victorian highways. These are some really compelling conclusions from the Monash University Accident Research Centre which demonstrate that these are really important changes that can greatly improve road safety outcomes. Instead of just measuring speed at one single point in time, we are talking about monitoring driver behaviour over a long stretch of road and encouraging consistent compliance, which is really, really positive. Further, we have improved the process of nominations for the operator onus offences to ensure the penalty is paid by the driver responsible, an important and commonsense change.

We are also amending the Road Management Act 2004 to improve the management of Victoria’s road network by introducing a new power to temporarily declare and classify a road in order to provide certainty around road authority functions and responsibilities. As we have heard from colleagues on this side, there are also changes to implement relevant actions from the Victorian freight plan to support the efficient movement of freight and future policy development, as well as the delivery of improved processes and administrative outcomes across transport legislation, all of which I am happy to support here today.

Road safety is a real priority for my constituents. We have seen some positive improvement locally, in particular with the black spot project at Westall Road and Rowan Road in Dingley Village not long ago. The intersection has long been recognised by residents, as well as the City of Kingston, the City of Greater Dandenong and the department, as a critical concern due to its record of serious accidents, frequent crashes and fatalities. Local schools, including Kingswood Primary School and Dingley Primary School, and the wider community have reiterated those concerns, stressing the urgent need for action. It has been great to be part of that treatment there, with a new traffic signal to control right-turn movement into Rowan Road linked to both nearby walk signals and the signals at Springvale Road. This is an important improvement with a great result. It has significantly improved the road safety of Dingley Village and Springvale South residents, schools, families and road users. I commend the minister for that work and for bringing this bill forward today. It is an important bill to improve road safety for all, and I commend the bill to the house.

 Chris CREWTHER (Mornington) (17:33): I rise to speak on the Roads, Road Safety and Ports Legislation Amendment Bill 2026. This is an omnibus bill dealing with a range of matters across the roads, road safety, freight and ports portfolios. Broadly the bill makes a number of technical and practical amendments to existing transport legislation. The main feature of the bill, though, is the expansion of Victoria’s point-to-point speed camera framework.

The bill allows point-to-point speed cameras to operate across sections of road with multiple speed limits and even across more than one road or road network. In practical terms this means that a driver’s average speed can be calculated across a journey where, for example, part of the road is 100 kilometres per hour and another part is 110 kilometres per hour. This Labor government says that this is about improving road safety not just about revenue raising, but I have my doubts on the latter, particularly given the budget just handed down where we will see debt rise very soon to $199 billion and interest payments on that debt – that is, taxpayer-funded interest payments – being over $1.35 million every single hour. That is $1.35 million every single hour that could be used on our roads for road safety, for road maintenance, for fixing potholes and much more.

Road safety is something the Liberal and National parties take seriously, but Victorians are entitled to ask fair questions about how these measures will be used. Speed enforcement should always be about safety, not simply about raising revenue. That is particularly important in a state where motorists have seen speed limits reduced on many roads, often because the road network itself has been allowed to deteriorate. Indeed it is easier to fundraise on roads where there is deterioration and where there are reduced speed limits. There are so many roads that have been reduced down to, say, 40 or 60 or 80 due to not just bad roads but also poor road maintenance. One example is the Peninsula Link roadworks, where over summer the speed limit was reduced from 100 down to 80 kilometres an hour when no works were happening at all over a two-month period between December and February. We are going to have a very similar situation upcoming for the Peninsula Link works, which will pause again in winter of this year.

Indeed motorists have to look out when they are facing, say, 40 or 60 or 80, back to 40, back to 60. There are so many speed changes, often because of bad roads and poor road maintenance, that they are often spending more time looking at the speed signs than the road. It seems that Labor’s modus operandi is lower speeds instead of actually fixing our roads. And what have we seen in Victoria on roads and on road safety? We have seen roads deteriorating, we have seen potholes, we have seen poor management of road contracts and we have seen a lack of road oversight and coordination. Three examples in and affecting my electorate are the Peninsula Link works, the Bungower Road and Racecourse Road works and the works now on Nepean Highway, all involving state government at the same time, to the point where it has become road Armageddon on the Mornington Peninsula.

On Pen Link, that is a road being upgraded, even though many people say that the Peninsula Link, where it is being upgraded, did not need an upgrade as compared to so many other projects that are needed in the electorate and beyond. But that is being upgraded under a 25-year public–private partnership signed by the state Labor government in 2010 to this day, where Labor have oversight over that contract. It is a project that started mid last year, with the first stage meant to be completed in October last year, which was then extended to mid-November. The final layer was not done at the time, with works paused over December to February, with drivers limited to 80 kilometres an hour due to weather. Then the works continued, but we have an upcoming pause again, as mentioned, in winter, again due to weather. I am not sure how they build any roads in places like Iceland or Saudi Arabia when weather is continually used as an excuse. Then we have the major impact and lack of planning with Peninsula Link on diversion roads, putting people’s lives at risk in some places, including a few months ago outside of Moorooduc Primary School. A big one at the moment is the intersection of Derril Road and Bungower Road, where it is so dangerous. I know my wife and two kids nearly had an accident where they were about an inch off being hit by another driver, and so many people are at risk on that intersection just trying to turn right and left to get in and out of that road. In that situation there was a lack of consideration, there were no temporary traffic lights put in and there was no consideration as to what the impacts would be because of those roadworks.

We have said in the Liberal Party that if we form government in November, under the Peninsula Link contract we will keep the contractors accountable. We will penalise them when there are time delays or when the work is not being done properly. This is something that this Labor government have refused to do despite us saying they should keep the contractors accountable under the existing contract again and again and again. It is no wonder we have seen such waste and mismanagement under this government, because they cannot coordinate contracts and they cannot keep people or organisations accountable under contracts. It is no wonder we have seen $15 billion of CFMEU waste due to situations like this.

I mentioned Peninsula Link, but at the same time we also have the state Labor government undertaking bus stop works on Bungower and Racecourse roads, two diversion roads off Peninsula Link, impacting traffic there as well. Yes, bus stops are needed, but we need coordination between government departments. We need the minister to actually take responsibility to coordinate both Pen Link and these other works at the same time. And thirdly, we now have the Nepean Highway outside of Bata for this Neue Space project. This has been an absolute disaster, again impacting another diversion road from the Peninsula Link as well as the diversion road from the Bungower and Racecourse roadworks. As mentioned, it has been an absolute disaster. We have had one lane closed. The state government gave permission, but they and the developer, Neue Space, did not notify me or most locals beyond minimal legal requirements. We have seen drivers spending up to an hour between Mount Eliza and Mount Martha, only just down the road, in what is normally a 15- to 20-minute trip. We have seen a big impact on surrounding streets like Grant, Shotton and Cobb roads, which include dirt roads in residential areas not made for heavy traffic. We have had parents running late for kids, sport, community work and more.

My office team and I have had hundreds of emails, phone calls, contacts on social media and more – indeed I think it is over a thousand now on Pen Link, the Nepean Highway works and Bungower and Racecourse roads – and this all links to road management and road safety. I have had no response, though, from the minister; I have only had a response from Neue Space. Now today I have had further reports of closures greatly impacting Padua College, without notification to Padua either by the minister or by Neue Space. Indeed Padua wrote to parents, guardians and staff today, and they said:

These changes were implemented without any prior notice to the College.

I note this is on Nepean Highway, which is a state government road.

This meant there was no opportunity for us, or key transport providers including bus operators, to plan or put alternative arrangements in place. The resulting congestion and delays were entirely foreseeable and have had a substantial impact on our community.

…

At this stage, we understand that, unless changes are made, the current traffic conditions are likely to remain in place until the end of June. We recognise that this is not an acceptable position for many in our community and will continue to press for improvements.

I have had so many people from the school – parents, staff, commuters, community members – contacting me about this situation today, where I and the school were not contacted. We are putting students’ lives at risk in a school that has over 2000 students and over 300 staff. Indeed the school said they have a situation where over 2000 students, 300 staff and so many parents are accessing the Mornington campus every single day in addition to a significant number of bus services. The absence of any communication to the college, transport providers or relevant authorities meant that there was no opportunity to plan or mitigate the impact of these changes. The school said that this situation was entirely avoidable with appropriate communication and planning. At present the burden of that failure is borne by students, families and staff.

This is a situation where this Labor government, in this bill today, talk about roads and talk about road safety, but when it comes to dealing with actual road safety issues that I have contacted them hundreds of times about and that we see every single day, every single week, we see little to no response from this Labor government, we see little to no response from the Labor minister, we see a lack of coordination, we see a lack of action and we do not see any planning between these three different projects. This is a government that cannot manage the budget. They cannot manage roads. They cannot fix roads properly. They are panicking at the moment, putting some money into fixing potholes in an election year. But this is something that should be done every single year on a continual basis and done properly, fixing the potholes so the road lasts.

Members interjecting.

Chris CREWTHER: I know the member opposite talks about these things, but I know that it is impacting your electorate as well. Many people are suffering because of this Labor government.

 Sarah CONNOLLY (Laverton) (17:44): I would welcome an audience for a little committee called the Public Accounts and Estimates Committee. They are about to undergo budget estimates, and there will be lots of conversations about roads and road safety and potholes. With the amount of conversation here around potholes being filled, not filled, not fit for purpose, I often have to reflect: do those on the other side ever read the budget papers or ever listen to budget estimates and the very clear explanations around the situation with roads and getting on with fixing potholes across this state and the record amount of funding over successive years that has been delivered by this government to do just that? I would say to the previous member on his feet: 15 May. It is going to run for seven days. We love having an audience. There is an open gallery. You are more than welcome to come in; maybe you will learn something.

But I do rise to speak on Roads, Road Safety and Ports Legislation Amendment Bill 2026. This is a really important bill and piece of legislation that has come before the house. It aims to deliver a range of improvements to road safety outcomes, the management of our transport network and the movement, most importantly, of freight across Victoria. I love talking about the movement of freight across Victoria, because in the seat of Laverton we have one of the biggest freight corridors here in this state, running through the belt of – dare I try and name it? We have got Tottenham. We have got Brooklyn. We have got Laverton North. We have got Laverton, and then we have got Truganina and Trug North. It is a big area, and there is a lot of movement of freight in and around this area. But at its core this bill truly is about safety, and that is something that I would say that both sides of this chamber would have to agree on: safety is absolutely paramount and must be paramount on our roads.

Because today is budget day I am very pleased to personally acknowledge that the budget has delivered much-needed safety upgrades for my community in Laverton. Road safety is not just about safety for drivers, and sometimes that gets forgotten here in this place, especially by those on the other side. It is also about pedestrians; it is about the foot traffic. This budget invests around $29 million into improving and upgrading local roads, intersections and roundabouts across Melbourne. I am just so happy to say this because there has been a community campaign that I have been helping lead for one intersection, and one of the intersections we are going to upgrade with pedestrian signalisation is at Dohertys and Woods roads in the mighty Truganina.

Paul Edbrooke interjected.

Sarah CONNOLLY: It is life saving. I say to the member for Frankston that it is life saving, because hundreds of children and their parents and their grandparents cross every week at this pedestrian crossing. It is a very busy road. Truganina is one of the fastest growth postcodes in this state and this country. Dohertys Road has always been a very busy road, and so is Woods, as we have continued to build out Truganina, and we have the mighty Trug Central that people love going to and shopping at. But most importantly, it is just a couple of hundred metres to a really special precinct where this Labor government went ahead and purchased the land, got the plans delivered and went ahead and built and opened not just one school, not just two schools but three amazing education precincts on this piece of land. We have got a kinder, we have got a primary school and we have got the junior campus of Bemin Secondary – Truganina’s only high school – so there are hundreds and hundreds of children of all ages using this crossing at least five days a week.

The community has been talking to me for some time about the need to put in pedestrian signalisation at this crossing. They want to use it. Not everyone can catch a bus. Some kids, as parents here in this place would know, love to be able to ride their bike to school, and they want to get on their bike. And whether their parents are walking with them or they are riding alone, the kids need to be able to cross that busy road intersection safely and be able to get to school safely. I am absolutely stoked to say Labor has delivered that in this budget. We have listened to the community, and we have delivered what is needed. I am also very pleased to say to the community that that means the very controversial Wyndham City Council can now open that pedestrian footpath that they cornered off, waiting for us to do this signalisation, full well knowing that it was sitting as a budget bid and hoping that today would come and deliver funding for that signalisation. The time has come, people.

For locals, even if they do not have children, it means that they can walk to Truganina Central. Next door to Truganina Central is a gorgeous pool. In this case it is a private pool that we have not built and invested in, but we have got a community centre that has a library which was co-funded by the Allan Labor government, so this is a really busy hub.

I do want to acknowledge in particular the staff and the students at local schools who have continued to raise this with me over the past 12 months, and I have to say to them on a personal level: I am so glad that together we have been able to deliver this. It may not seem a big project, and it probably does not seem like a big project to those opposite, but it is a massive win for a very big and very vocal local community who wanted this signalisation.

But of course I do have to say it is not just our cars when we are talking about road safety. It is not just our cars that use our roads, it is buses too. I have been out and about a lot lately in Sunshine and in Braybrook talking about the 408 bus, which I am very glad to say has received a major service uplift in this budget as well. The 408 bus travels from St Albans station to Highpoint shopping centre. For those that are not from Melbourne’s west, Highpoint shopping centre – the member for Werribee is going to say, ‘No, it’s not’ – is the Chadstone of Melbourne’s west. It is a very popular shopping centre. It is somewhere that I love to go shopping with my kids on the weekend. But there are folks, whether they are in St Albans, Sunshine, Braybrook or Maribyrnong, who want to catch the 408 bus to either do some shopping in Highpoint or go and have some great food in Sunshine or great food and lunch in St Albans. One of the things that folks have been talking to us a lot about is that they wanted services to run more often but they also wanted more services on weekends. Now that is something they are going to receive, in particular a major boost to Sunday services. Who does not love shopping and eating out on a Sunday? Now the community will have a bus that they can catch.

These budget initiatives are important for road safety because they get people out of their cars in the first place by putting them on buses or making it easier to walk, but this is bigger than the Laverton electorate. This budget invests a record just over $1 billion to rebuild, repair and resurface roads, and that is right across Victoria. The largest roads maintenance blitz in Victorian history – that says it all, doesn’t it? We hear all the time about our roads, about potholes and about how the servicing of major roads can be a hazard for drivers. I think we have all been there. That is not something that we argue against on this side, and that is why we are making a record investment of over a billion dollars in this budget to fix just that. That is because Labor will always deliver real support for our roads, ensuring that Victorians can get to work and get home every day no matter where they live and, more importantly, that Victorians get to go where they want to go in one piece, safe and sound.

Of course there is more that we can do to make our roads safer, which this bill also contains. I will not have the time this evening to go to those changes, but this bill does deliver important reforms to our road safety laws to keep Victorians safe, whether they drive, whether they catch a bus or whether they walk like folks in Truganina or ride their bike like the kids in Truganina. This bill will allow us to improve the operation of the road safety network, including average speed calculations, detection across changing road speed conditions and improving the nomination process for a fined driver. I will give again a huge shout-out to my local Laverton community who got behind my campaign. They were very patient. Thank you for waiting, and I am very proud to say we have been able to deliver.

 Kim O’KEEFFE (Shepparton) (17:54): I rise to make a contribution on the Roads, Road Safety and Ports Legislation Amendment Bill 2026. The bill includes road safety enforcement, freight and port operations, toll road administration, emergency services fatigue exemptions and road management powers. We are not opposing this bill and welcome road safety measures, but we also know that there is so much more that is not here in front of us in this bill today. This legislation aims to improve road safety outcomes and increase efficiency and modernise transport management.

One of the key amendments contained in this bill is around the Road Safety Act 1986, to which it introduces amendments and formulas to enable point-to-point average speed camera enforcement across multiple speed limit zones and across more than one road or network of roads. Most drivers often see these cameras on the Hume Freeway and the Peninsula Link. I often see drivers hit their brakes when they see the cameras, not understanding the way that they work. We know that speed kills, and any measures to reduce speeding behaviour are welcomed-

The road toll in Victoria remains deeply concerning. In 2025, 290 people lost their lives on Victorian roads, an increase on the previous year, with rural and regional Victoria accounting for 156 of those fatalities. Regional roads continue to carry a disproportionate burden of road trauma despite lower population density. The TAC statistics also show that regional municipalities continue to be among the hardest hit areas in the state. The Moira shire recorded one of the highest road tolls in regional Victoria, highlighting the ongoing challenges faced across the broader Goulburn Valley region. The GV road safety group and local stakeholders have repeatedly raised concerns about the rising road toll in our region and the urgent need for greater investment in prevention, education and safer road design and to also address the appalling and unsafe condition of our roads and intersections. Communities continue to raise concerns about the appalling, unsafe conditions of our roads, which are crumbling and full of potholes, and road maintenance delays and their fear of the dangerous road network they face every single day.

Today this government has announced funding for roads, labelling it a roads blitz once again. The government’s failure and neglect for many years have led to the appalling and unsafe condition of our roads. The suggestion to fix 200,000 potholes is astounding – to think that there are even that many, but we know there are possibly even more. But road repairs are more than just fixing potholes. The other question is: will the quality of works be done to a standard that will last and not begin to deteriorate in a short period of time, not just the patch-up jobs that we have constantly seen? We need the roads fixed correctly and for the long term. Patching up potholes and dodgy works are not the long-term solution to maintaining and repairing our roads.

Wherever you might travel right across Victoria the roads are deplorable. This government has failed to support critical road safety upgrades in the Moira shire and the Greater Shepparton region for some of our most dangerous roads and intersections, which have had numerous fatalities. The Barmah-Shepparton Road intersection is in desperate need of an upgrade and a known black spot location on a major arterial road, recording five separate casualty crashes in the last five years. Most accidents have been related to a failure to give way, and it is proposed that the upgrade will prevent speeding through the intersection. This is a $2 million upgrade. The Numurkah Road–Naring Road–Tocumwal Road intersection is another dangerous intersection, and Department of Transport and Planning safety analysis has identified this intersection as Moira shire’s highest transport infrastructure risk. It is a known black spot risk. Serious casualty crashes have been recorded in the past three years. We are not talking billions of dollars for these projects. We are talking money invested to save lives – lives that will continue to be lost at these dangerous intersections.

I see we have the new Minister for Roads and Road Safety at the table today, and I would welcome the minister to come out to my region and see firsthand some of the roads that I am talking about and some of these dangerous intersections. I met with Moira shire just last week in regard to these roads. They are constantly advocating, along with the Greater Shepparton City Council, to upgrade their roads for the safety of their communities. There are so many roads in my electorate. There are many others than just these two that I have mentioned. Council have an extensive list. To show you the level of neglect, there are nine here on my list, but just to name a couple: River Road, Kialla, $15 million; Ford Road, $7 million – the Shepparton alternate route; and Congupna, $20 million. They are not billions of dollars of projects. These are roads that desperately need safety upgrades, which have been neglected.

I do not think many on that side of the house truly understand the regional road network that we have to use every single day, because it is very different. I travel constantly between my small towns on back rural roads, and these are known to be dangerous. Navigating narrow backroads are trucks, vehicles and other users. As our region continues to grow, so does the pressure on the local and broader road network. I have mentioned in this place before the incredible volume of truck transport movement, with 25 per cent of the state’s trucks registered in my region. We must have an adequate, safe and fit-for-purpose road network. Today my electorate is still facing the same unsafe road networks and intersections and the very high risk of more fatalities without the government’s investment.

It is not just major highways where we need to address speeding. As I have said, the regions have alarming statistics when it comes to the road toll. I wish to acknowledge my friend Sharon O’Dwyer, who lost her 26-year-old son Matthew in a car accident a few years ago. It was so devastating, as you can imagine – a wonderful young man’s life cut short too soon and a grieving family who will never get over it. Sharon has become a passionate advocate and spokesperson for road safety and has spoken at many community events, sharing her experience and the need for young drivers to be aware of the dangers when driving and how, like her son Matthew, their life can be taken away in an instant.

Sharon does not want other families to go through what her family has gone through, but we also know that there are so many others who are impacted each and every day by road trauma whose lives and those of their loved ones are changed forever.

We all know that road safety is not simply about addressing enforcement; it is also about creating a road network that is safe, reliable and fit for purpose for every road user. Road safety policy should always be focused on saving lives and reducing the alarming road toll outcomes. Road safety is not achieved through cameras and compliance alone. It requires investment in safer roads and intersections, road maintenance, better lighting, clearer signage, improved line marking, stronger maintenance programs and roads capable of handling increasing freight and heavy vehicle movements safely. It requires investment in public transport and freight efficiency, and it requires government to listen to communities raising concerns long before tragedies occur.

Regional communities should not have to accept a lower standard of road safety whilst this government focus on their citycentric spending, billions of dollars in waste, cost blowouts and financial mismanagement. The $15 billion blown in rorts on Big Build sites should have gone to fixing and maintaining the dangerous roads and intersections that I have just mentioned in my electorate, which have been neglected for far too long, and also put into our hospitals, sporting facilities, critical services and infrastructure. Labor can no longer fool the people. Victorians simply do not trust or believe you, and they want to know where their $15 billion has gone, as do I. And there is the $600 million loss to the Commonwealth Games and nothing to show for that money. The financial mismanagement of this government is just appalling. As we stand here on budget day, nothing has changed, and the significant debt will continue to impact all Victorians and my electorate.

Wherever you might travel on our roads right across regional Victoria, as we have said, they are deplorable. I will finish off by saying I jumped in a truck with one of our local truck drivers, who wanted me to experience the impact on his vehicle every single day and what he was having to navigate. It was actually unbelievable. The driver has a special seat that assists with the impact, but the passenger seat does not, and I was thrown around and shaken around. The appalling condition of our roads is very real. That same driver raised the enormous costs in repairs that his company has experienced, and it has been in the thousands of dollars every single month. This government has allowed our roads to get to the condition that they are in today. It is astounding that this government think that the past level of neglect can just be ignored. It is because of their neglect that we are faced with enormous amounts of crumbling and unsafe roads and damage to vehicles. So many of my constituents have had to pay hundreds of dollars in repairs that they cannot afford. They are angry and they can see through Labor’s spin because it is happening time and time again: big promises and failure to deliver.

I hope I get to speak on the budget, as there is so much in my region that is being neglected by this government, and it is simply wrong. We do not have adequate public bus transport services. We have small towns that have limited or no bus services and parts of Shepparton where you cannot get a bus. There is so much more that I will share, and I look forward to responding to the budget. But coming back to the bill in the few minutes that I have, we do know that there is so much more that needs to be done. As we said, we welcome road safety measures, but we also want to see this government invest where it is needed. If they are serious about investing in road safety, those intersections that I have referred to today where lives have been lost should have been invested in, and they have not been. We have many roads. We have many drivers trying to navigate regional roads, and it is dangerous. It is time for this government now to step up and fix the roads. That will make a difference and save lives.

 John LISTER (Werribee) (18:04): It is my pleasure to rise to speak on the Roads, Road Safety and Ports Legislation Amendment Bill 2026. Road safety is something particularly important for me and residents in my electorate, which I will come to more broadly. But I think it is personally very important for me too. As a road crash rescue operator with the CFA, I have certainly seen my fair share of and probably too much trauma on our roads in responding to some of the most horrific accidents across the response zone that we have at Werribee, which goes all the way from the Derrimut interchange at the Western Ring Road all the way out towards Tarneit and the back of Werribee into Little River. Some of the accidents I have seen have been horrendous. I do not want to speak for my colleague the member for Melton, but as people who have spent a lot of time on the job we have seen our fair share.

We know that the sorts of reforms that we have in this bill are all about building a system which not only helps keep people safe on our roads but also responds to some of those little quirks, which I will talk about, particularly when it comes to the emergency services.

I have got a few anecdotes on the issue of heavy vehicle licensing and regulation, particularly as a code one driver and pump operator, and some of the things that come from that regulation when you are trying to respond to an incident. As I said, as a road crash rescue operator, I have seen my fair share. A lot of my comrades at the fire brigade have been to some pretty heavy jobs over the years. Werribee fire brigade was one of the first CFA brigades to develop a road crash rescue response. In fact we pioneered quite a lot of the techniques that we use today. And in that pioneering spirit, every year we send a team to New South Wales to compete against the New South Wales emergency services, and we show them up most of the time at what they think they are quite good at doing but Werribee does better. Only this weekend our road crash rescue operators went to Dubbo, so I would like to give a little shout-out to Dan, Dom, Neil, Trevor, Hilly, Greeny, Aiden and Blix for all their efforts at this road crash rescue event.

One of the particular things about this event is that they develop new techniques. One of the newest techniques that we have got in road crash rescue is around relocation, which has helped save countless lives by literally relocating a vehicle to be able to make better access to the patient and obviously have safer egress and quicker response to getting them to that tertiary care hospital. The pioneering spirit of Werribee road crash rescue response is well known throughout the Asia Pacific as well, having won many awards.

The reason I touch on this in particular is we talk a lot and we hear a lot from those opposite. Whenever we have discussions around our speed cameras – road safety cameras, I should call them – there is always this old argument of it being about revenue raising and that it is just another way for the government to get money. It is absurd. I have seen where the revenue goes from our road safety camera program. It goes towards new equipment in the back of Werribee’s rescue truck. It goes towards things like vehicles that we can practice on. People might not know, but it costs about 800 bucks to get a vehicle debugged and into our yard for us to practise on and cut up. All that practice is so vital to having, whatever time of day, that response.

That money also goes towards other sorts of projects around the station that we have had over the years, including a better electronic turnout system, which helps us get out a lot quicker to these events, because we are responding in road crash rescue anywhere up to 20 minutes from our station. The quicker we get out – our service delivery standard is one of the best in metropolitan Melbourne – the quicker we get on scene and the quicker we can help them. These rubbish claims of revenue raising show that those opposite really do not understand the system. It has been that long since they have had the privilege of being in government that they do not understand the system.

When we talk about the very modest changes to what we are doing around those point-to-point speed cameras and having that way of taking into account varying speeds along a stretch of road, the accusations that this is some way of raising revenue are just wrong. We have got to remember that if you are caught by one of our road safety cameras, it is because you have broken the law. I would think from those opposite, that go on so much about community safety and holding offenders to account, that having proper enforcement mechanisms, including road safety cameras, would be one of the key ways that we can make sure that we hold people who break the law to account. I have very little time for excuses for speeding on our roads because I have seen the impact – literally the impact – of that speeding on our roads. I would counsel those opposite when it comes to discussing this bill that we remember that the road safety camera program is important for enforcing that.

There have been other reforms in the space too, including in finding ways to deliver those infringements more quickly, because we know the effectiveness when someone cops that fine in the mail, and hopefully in the future electronically, and the impact it has on their driving behaviour.

The other thing I would like to touch on is, as I mentioned earlier, as a code 1 driver in the fire brigade there are a lot of different responsibilities that we have. The first responsibility and primary responsibility is our safety and the safety of the crew that is in the truck with us and, alongside that, of the community as we are driving code 1. As part of this – I drive a truck that is nearly 13 tonnes usually at about 110 kilometres an hour down the Princes Freeway – we have some particular hazards that we need to be mindful of, but at the same time we are all heavy vehicle licence holders, and there are laws that are in place for our licence generally. The requirements and the exemptions under that heavy vehicle legislation, the national legislation, mean that in responding to an incident we do not have to necessarily have the brakes that we would need to have if we were just driving generally or commercially. There are some other things too around the types of trucks that we can drive. There has also been a lot of discussion in CFA circles around some of the logbook requirements that we have to have, and we all know in the fire brigade just how annoying it is to do the logbook. It is very important, obviously, because it helps us keep track of who is driving and how many drives we get, but it is important when it comes to managing fatigue in emergency situations that the CFA has its own policies and procedures to help manage fatigue. It is an emergency situation, so it requires a different response to what would be normally considered for commercial operators who might be driving day after day after day. Every time we have this exemption it expires and we have to go back and redo that exemption, so changing that part and amending that part of the Heavy Vehicle National Law and its applicability to Victoria is particularly important so that we can have that continuing on. That certainty for code 1 drivers and for heavy vehicle operators in the emergency services is so vital.

In the short amount of time that I have left I just want to touch on the work that we are doing to improve road safety, particularly in the electorate of Werribee. One of the issues that we have had in Werribee as a result of poor planning decisions by those opposite when they last had the chance to govern is rapid growth in precinct plans and rapid housing growth. So we have been meeting that demand with projects like our Wyndham ring-road, building the Ison Road link and the bridge across from Wyndham Vale to Tarneit, for which land acquisition is underway currently. Having more local roads to reduce congestion is better than just building one giant road to funnel everyone through, because we know that when it comes to duplicating roads and when it comes to having wider roads with increased speed we end up having more accidents. So having more ways to move people between different parts of the municipality can often be safer than just having one big road.

This Labor government has invested hundreds of millions of dollars into road maintenance across Wyndham with our western roads upgrade package. Every few months you see the crews come through and they are repaving stretches of Wyndham’s arterial roads, most recently on Princes Highway and down at Duncans Road as well, where you will find the surfaces are being kept to safe standards, and they regularly monitor it using our partner that we have got with that western roads upgrade program. This is an example of how the government is meeting those demands of our growth suburbs, particularly when it comes to roads. I commend this bill to the house, and I would remind everyone as we debate this of the importance of keeping safety front and centre in what we are considering in this bill.

 Martin CAMERON (Morwell) (18:14): I rise to contribute on the Roads, Road Safety and Ports Legislation Amendment Bill 2026, and in doing so I note that we are not opposing this bill, and that is the way it should be with anything that we can do to make sure our roads are safer not only for ourselves but for our families and every single person in Victoria. I do not care where you come from or what region you represent; I think we can all stand in agreeance here that our roads in Victoria have disintegrated. They are not up to standard, and we need to do some work to make sure that we are saving the lives of the wonderful people that we represent in Victoria.

I will roll the dice tonight, because after Parliament finishes here I will be leaving Parliament and I will be driving back to the Latrobe Valley, back to my home town of Traralgon.

On the way down and over the many journeys that I have made over the last few years to Parliament I have seen firsthand and virtually now know where the potholes are on the way home. I know you, Acting Speaker Farnham, use the same route on the way home too going back to Warragul. When we get to that stage where we know that the potholes that we do have are getting worse – and it does not matter if we are in a rain event like what has happened around the state or if it is just our normal weather cycle and we have no rain – these potholes continually come back. We have seen in the budget that over a billion dollars is going to be spent on repairing potholes around Victoria and a lot in regional Victoria. Well, I have seen the trucks out over the last few years repairing the potholes, but they come back. Repairing potholes will not fix the issue. We have to do major works on many, many sections of roads to make sure that they are up to standard. I know that on this side of the house we talk about our cars having to be roadworthy, but our roads are not car-worthy. That is exactly the point that we bring up every single time we are spending money. We are spending a lot of money patching our roads. I have got roads in my electorate in the Latrobe Valley – I have got one where they have got signs up just outside of Moe. If I am heading from Traralgon to Melbourne, and I am coming up to the Moe turnoff, they actually have a sign there with a car and a few skids on it: ‘When wet, slow down to 80’. The reason is because that road is not up to standard to be able to have cars go around the corner at 100 kilometres an hour. When it is dry it is okay, but when it is wet we have a sign warning us we need to slow down to 80. Wouldn’t the responsible thing to do – and this is right across the state, not just in the Latrobe Valley – be to actually stand up and make sure that our roads are up to scratch? It seems that for the Allan Labor government the easiest way to fix our roads is to reduce our speed limit, and we need the speed limits reduced, unfortunately, because our roads are deteriorating right before our eyes. How many of these potholes that we are going to fix will need to be repaired again in six months time? I am thinking most of them, because I have seen over the last two years that when they are repaired these potholes materialise once again, especially if we have a little bit of rain. If we have a storm, well, then it is game on: we have potholes everywhere on our roads.

It is not just our roads with the potholes that are deteriorating, it is the edges on the side of the roads. We have grass that is actually off the edge of the road which has now encroached onto the road surface itself, so when it does rain the rain cannot get off the road, and we see people aquaplaning on roads all the time. I do it in my car. It does not matter if I am responsibly driving at the speed limit, which we all in this place always do, I am sure, but we can be going at 60 kilometres an hour, and we hit a patch of road where there is water over it, and it is hard to see these days. We have got kilometre after kilometre after kilometre of road barriers, which have been put up to protect us, that have been hit by a truck or a car, and now they are in disrepair, and they have not been fixed. I am not talking about being fixed over the last 30 days, 60 days; I am talking about two, three, sometimes four years that these barriers have been left there. I would love to know what the number of unfinished maintenance jobs in Victoria is. It would be in the tens of thousands. There would be tens of thousands of jobs which they just cannot get to because the money has not been put forward.

Lloyd Street in Moe is a railway crossing with boom gates. We have B-double trucks that cross that and actually get stuck on the railway lines as they try to negotiate this horrendous intersection, which we have been wanting to have upgraded. The government have gone through their supposed due diligence of acquiring land. This intersection was going to be done three or four years ago, but it still sits the same way there today. We have another intersection at Bank Street in Traralgon where over the journey works have been done, and we talk about it all the time. There is a section of road on the Princes Highway on the corner of Bank Street where there are traffic lights that have been put up, except for the lights – the poles are there, the intersection has been done, the roads have all been reconfigured to make it work, but we do not have traffic lights to make it safe to actually cross the highway.

Who is coming up with this stuff, Acting Speaker Farnham? I know you will also be aware of intersections in your community, but who comes up with road upgrades but will not put traffic lights there to finish the job? Who are these people that are sitting and making the decisions? I have asked time and time again for the roads minister to come down. We do have a new Minister for Roads and Road Safety now, and I will invite her to come down and have a look. It was meant to be finished 18 months ago, 12 months ago, six months ago, and now we are hearing it is not going to be finished until 2027. They do not give a timeframe for when these lights will be going up. Believe me, not only is it our road users and our car users that are in trouble, it is the poor old train driver that is going to come hurtling through the Waterloo Road intersection with a B-double truck parked over it or that is going to move through the intersection at Bank Street and either hit a car or hit students and people that have to walk up over the railway line to get from one side of the road to the other.

These are intersections in my community that you just shake your head at. What is the hold-up? Why aren’t we protecting our community? Why aren’t we making it safe? At that Bank Street intersection we have Latrobe Valley Funeral Services, and I do not want to see any of my constituents at all end up at Latrobe Valley Funeral Services. We have had a bus that crashed with school students on it at that intersection. What did the government do – drop the speed limit from 80 to 60. That will fix it! How is that going to fix it? They take the easy options all the time. The infrastructure is there; all they need to do is supposedly put the lights up. Just let us know what is going on. These hidden faces – I get questioned all the time about who is coming up with the responses to say, ‘No, it’ll be right; it will happen in 12 months time.’ Who knows, it might be 18 months time. We just need to know.

There are unintended consequences that I talk about in this place all the time from issues that arise with stuff the government has done. We have talked about the shutting of the timber industry and the effect on white paper having to shut that industry. I am coming up with a theory that our roads are now so bad that when I go into Woolworths and I go to buy my weekly lot of eggs, every time I open them up there are more and more eggs in that carton that are broken. I am putting it down to the poor state of our roads. How much is that costing us? Because I am sure that Woolworths and Coles and anyone, in particular our IGAs, will be throwing the eggs out. It never used to be like that. You used to open them up and you might have one. Nowadays, with our roads that are so poor, it will not matter where you are. Go and check when you get home this weekend. I can see the smile on your face, Acting Speaker. You will be the first one calling in tonight. Open up the box of eggs. There are half a dozen of them broken, and the only reason is because our roads are so poor. Let us get this done. I am glad we are spending some more money on the roads, but let us make sure we get it in the right spots.

 Alison MARCHANT (Bellarine) (18:24): Eggs are fine on the Bellarine. They are great on the Bellarine, and we get our eggs around the Bellarine. It is really lovely to speak on the Roads, Road Safety and Ports Legislation Amendment Bill 2026. Roads are something that I have spoken about many times in this place, because they are a really important issue for my constituents and for me personally. I think that also, having chaired the Economy and Infrastructure Committee’s inquiry a few years ago, with you, Acting Speaker Farnham, on that inquiry around road safety behaviour and vulnerable road users, it really has given me an insight into the expert advice that comes around our road safety and our road safety behaviours. I am going to touch a little bit on that inquiry as we go.

There was an incredible amount of investment announced in the budget – a record investment of just over a billion dollars – for our roads, and as a regional MP, to see 70 per cent of that coming to regional Victoria is certainly very welcome.

When I do doorknocking, when I do stalls and when I am out and about in the community the issue of roads is raised with me by my constituents, and it is certainly something that I continue to advocate for here in this place to the minister and the Treasurer to ensure that we get our fair share in the Bellarine. We have certainly done that. I have been really proud to see some significant investment across the Bellarine. We have had the Bellarine Highway resurfaced all the way from Wallington down into Leopold. We have had some pedestrian upgrades, including making sure that a very busy roundabout in Ocean Grove, at Shell Road and Grubb Road, now has the wombat crossings. They are not for wombats, as people might have originally thought, they are for pedestrians. But they are raised pedestrian crossings that slow down people entering the roundabout for a start, but they also allow safety for people to cross. Because this was such a busy roundabout, I have seen that it has worked. It has been able to get motorists to slow down. Because it is near schools and sporting facilities I see children, particularly on their bikes, getting across that roundabout very safely now. We are also about to install wombat crossings at a Barwon Heads roundabout at Golf Links Road. So I am really excited to see that as well.

In today’s budget we also have further announcements for Barwon Heads Road at Tomara Drive, and that again is about pedestrian safety. We have a new roundabout down in Clifton Springs, which is sort of an entrance to the Clifton Springs boat ramp and boat harbour. It is a really busy intersection because obviously boats and trailers need to navigate that intersection. That has been terrific. We have new lights coming on Grubb Road and Smithton Grove, and that is really about supporting an industrial area, which has become very busy and very hard for people to come in and out of that area. I continue to advocate for roads, as I have said, across my electorate, including roads for Indented Head and Portarlington, across the Portarlington Road; Murradoc Road going down towards Drysdale and St Leonards; Banks Road in Ocean Grove, which I note is a council road; and again Melaluka Road and Kensington Road in Leopold. They continue to be on my radar and the community continue to raise them with me, and I hope to continue to advocate for those projects. I do want to just also note that when a lot of people contact me about roads, being a regional area we still have a lot of unsealed and dirt roads across our electorate, but they are council-managed roads. I think sometimes people do not understand there is a difference in terms of who manages those roads. We try and navigate that and talk to our constituents about who is responsible for which roads across the Bellarine.

Just about this this bill, though, this is really an important piece of legislation, which is about delivering a broader package of reform. People have talked here in the chamber today about road safety and strengthening management of our transport network and really more efficient movement of freight across Victoria. But ultimately there is one objective of this bill, and that is making roads safer. This bill, as I have talked about, is going to complement the significant investment that we are making and have made obviously in this budget as well. One of the things I would like to highlight in this bill and some reforms is around that point-to-point average speed enforcement. We know some of the facts, and Acting Speaker Farnham, you were on the committee when we looked at vulnerable road users in the inquiry into road safety behaviours. We know that at least 30 per cent of our road fatalities in Victoria and a quarter of our serious injuries have been contributed to by speeding. We know speeding is a real contributing factor to that. They are horrible statistics, but they are real lives and lives that have been lost and families that have been changed forever. That is why we have committed to strengthening the enforcement, and I am talking a little bit more about that point-to-point enforcement, or it might be cameras and it might be red-light cameras that we see across Victoria. But we know that we also have areas where the zones change, and we have changing conditions from highways and then back into maybe suburban roads. This bill is really about modernising that system.

Importantly, the Economy and Infrastructure Committee had a final report in May 2024 about those behaviours that we were seeing post pandemic. Submissions that came to us and witnesses that came to us in that inquiry certainly told us that something had shifted in the community post COVID.

They were seeing more people taking risks on the road. They were seeing people speeding more. They were seeing people deliberately running red lights. They were seeing more drug and alcohol affected drivers. People were making these conscious decisions to undertake these risky behaviours. Incredibly, we have seen an uplift of people who just do not want to wear seatbelts. It is absolutely incredible to think that. But some of the most vulnerable people on our roads are our pedestrians, our cyclists, our children who are walking to school, our older seniors that may simply be trying to get across the road. They are not protected. They are the most vulnerable. In our inquiry we talked about having a hierarchy system where they should be the ones that we think about the most, at the top of a hierarchy system, with trucks and big buses down at the bottom, and our infrastructure should be designed better for those vulnerable road users.

Importantly too in that inquiry, and I want to touch on this, we saw significant submissions around cameras, road safety cameras. That could be a speed camera, it could be a red-light camera or that new driver distraction technology where it takes a picture above the head of a driver and it might detect that a driver is on their phone, and we are seeing more drivers on their phones in their cars while driving. But what stood out was not really just the policy argument but more the community sentiment. People understood that these dangerous behaviours, like I have talked about, were putting lives at risk. Many people were calling for more tools to deter that type of behaviour.

We cannot ignore the challenges, but we also need to address the public perception that the cameras are there for revenue raising. That is not supported by the evidence. It is not supported by the experts, because the evidence was really clear in the inquiry that we undertook. From the researchers and from police we know that cameras and reducing speed save lives. They are there to improve compliance. But that does not mean we should not be more transparent and we should not be sharing data. That is certainly what the inquiry recommended to the government. That is what really this bill today in the house is supporting with that approach. It is not punishment for punishment’s sake. It is about that deterrence, it is about safety but it is ensuring that people can use the road safely, with confidence. We want to do that. This is part of broader work that we are doing in responding to that inquiry but also making sure that we continue to strengthen our laws and continue to improve our enforcement and continue investing in those safer roads because we know that every life lost on our roads is one too many.

In conclusion, this bill does include a number of minor amendments. They may not be headline reforms, but they are essential in keeping the system running smoothly. This is all about making sure that we are investing in our roads and that we are strengthening the rules, the systems and the safeguards that support all that. We want to make sure that our roads are safer. We want to ensure that we are also addressing some of those little pressures that families are facing. I want to quickly mention that it is fantastic to have that 20 per cent off your car rego coming up. I am encouraging the Bellarine to apply for that 20 per cent off. I commend the bill to the house.

 Peter WALSH (Murray Plains) (18:34): I rise to make my contribution on the Roads, Road Safety and Ports Legislation Amendment Bill 2026. In the 10 days running up to the budget the Premier made her annual announcement about how much money was going to be spent on roads: a billion dollars. I think I have seen that press release for about five years now. About the only thing that has changed on that press release is the date or probably the year – the date is very similar.

Every year there is an announcement. But what I found intriguing this year was that the Premier blamed the weather for the condition of the roads. If you go back in time, we had dirt roads with horses and carts, then we had gravel and then we started sealing roads. We called them all-weather roads. They are made to be able to stand the weather. The fact that the Premier would blame the weather for the roads – if they were built properly, if they had good foundations, if they had a good seal, if the shoulders were maintained to let the water run away, which they are not, the roads would not be worried by the weather. They would be fine.

A number of years ago I went out to what was then the Australian Road Research Board, which is now called the National Transport Research Organisation. We went out there to that research organisation, which is very good, and they said, ‘What are you doing here?’ And we said, ‘Our perception is, if you talk about all the states in Australia, Victoria has the worst roads. If you go to South Australia or you go to Western Australia, they have a 110 speed limit. The roads are better. When you come back from South Australia into Victoria you do not have to look for the sign that says you are entering Victoria; you can just see by the potholes on the road that you have come back into Victoria.’ We said to the people that ran what was then the Australian Road Research Board that we believe that Victorian roads are worse than other states and we do not believe we are getting value for money in our road spend. They said, ‘That’s true. Victoria does not build its roads as well as the other states.’ They actually said, ‘We have the research and we have the advice that we can give to the road authorities on how they can actually build roads better, but no-one comes to talk to us,’ and they were very glad that we were there to talk to them. A number of my colleagues and I followed up over the years and met with the new organisation, which actually now has that semitrailer that can drive down the highway at 80 k an hour and can use the technology in that truck to tell you the condition of the pavement and when that road needs to be upgraded or re-sheeted. The dilemma is the people that build the roads here in Victoria do not take that advice and actually do not build the roads properly.

I will come back to the issue of the shoulders. One of the dangerous things with a lot of country roads is the drop-off on the edge of the seal. There is anything from up to 6 inches of drop-off, and you can see that when you follow a semitrailer. If the trailer moves and the wheels get over, there is a big swing around because there is such a huge drop-off there. That is dangerous. Years ago they used to actually have a small road grader that would go along and maintain the shoulders and make sure the water would run away. Now you see there is a dip-off, grass grows, the water lays there, it gets in under the seal and it breaks away more. It would make a lot of economic sense to actually maintain the shoulders of our sealed roads so that the water would run away and the seal would last longer.

I come back to what I said about the Premier. They are called all-weather roads for a reason. If you actually build them properly and you maintain them properly, there is not an issue with the weather – except when there are floods, and I will make that exception. Talking to the people from the National Transport Research Organisation, one of the challenges we have in Victoria is that under our flood recovery legislation, local government or the roads authority are paid to build the roads back to how they were before the flood. They are not actually paid to put enhancements into that road. They said there is very good research that if you put in a different mix of seal and put some rubber compound in so they are slightly flexible, they will actually withstand a flood better than a traditional road will. So our rules are wrong. We are building the roads back to what they were rather than actually having enhancements, or betterment, as it is called, to make sure those roads would withstand floods into the future. There is a very good adage that if you invest in country roads, you save country lives. One of the tragedies is we have not had the investment. What investment there has been has not been spent well, and that is why we have the issue with the higher fatality rate in country Victoria.

The other thing I want to touch on, which again is an issue, is the number of animals that we have on our roads now. Particularly since the Labor Party was re-elected into government, they have stopped the harvesting and culling of kangaroos like it was done before, so we see a lot more kangaroos. The second highest place in Australia for kangaroo collisions with cars is actually Heathcote. Canberra is the highest. Effectively because of the do-gooders and the greenies up there they cannot cull kangaroos in Canberra. But the second highest in Australia is Heathcote, and that is because there are just so many kangaroos there. If we actually had a well-managed program that harvested that protein for pet food, we could make sure there were less collisions between cars and kangaroos. They are a native animal, but the other issue is the introduced species, particularly deer.

The deer numbers in the state have exploded, and you would know from your area, Acting Speaker Farnham, if you hit a deer – with a kangaroo, the advice I give everyone is ‘Don’t swerve, just hit the skids and hang on’, because there is very little risk of you actually being physically hurt by hitting a kangaroo. If you swerve and you crash into an oncoming vehicle or you hit a tree on the side of the road, yes, there will be fatalities. But a deer is a lot bigger and does a lot more damage to a car, and if it gets in the air and comes through your windscreen, you are in a lot of trouble as well. So if we actually had better control of deer, particularly around our more populous areas, there would be less accidents there too. With both the kangaroo and the deer, it would probably do some of the panelbeaters out of some business, but I think they have got more than enough work to do, fixing the cars that do hit kangaroos and deer at the moment, let alone the issue, as the member for Eildon will talk to you about, of wombats. If you hit a wombat, it is pretty brutal, and it does a lot of damage underneath your car – again, as you would know, Acting Speaker.

The last thing on the roads issue – some previous speakers talked about fixing half a pothole. It was actually explained to me that with the privatisation of a lot of road repairs there are tenders let and there are designs done of how much would be fixed here, there and everywhere else.

Members interjecting.

Peter WALSH: No, this is a true story. A guy at the Elmore Field Days last year came up to me who worked for a road repair business, and he said, ‘We get given the specifications that we’re to go out to that road and we’re to fix a hole that has got 1 cubic metre or 1 square metre that needs fixing.’ But from when that contract was let to when they actually got there to fix the pothole, the pothole was twice as big. But the specification sheet and the amount of money that was paid to the contractor said ‘You’re fixing X amount of the size of a pothole.’ So we are finding that potholes actually are not being totally fixed because the need has changed from when the specifications were designed. So we have a huge issue that with the privatisation of a lot of road repair work and pothole fixing the system fails, because from the time of being told ‘That pothole needs fixing’ to the money being allocated, to a contractor going out to do it, the pothole is twice the size, and they say, ‘We’re only going to fix half, because that’s what we’re told to do and that’s what we’re paid to do.’

The whole system of road maintenance and repair in this state is not well done at all. The alleged or supposed billion dollars that the government announced to fix roads, with the huge increase in cost of road construction, is only a fraction of what it was worth five years ago and, tragically, is not going to make a lot of difference. I cannot see any difference on the roads that I travel on every week or that any roads are improving. They are getting worse. One time the road guy would go out with his can of white paint and put some lines on it; now, where the bulges or the holes are worse, they put yellow paint. I did a social media post on it, and he rang me up and said, ‘Well, the reason I do that is particularly for motorbikes, because they know that if I put yellow paint on it, that is more dangerous than the white paint hole.’ Wouldn’t it be great in the world if we did not have any white paint holes, we did not have any yellow paint holes and the government actually fixed the roads and saved country lives by spending the money wisely so it was a lot safer to drive on our roads?

 Iwan WALTERS (Greenvale) (18:44): I also rise to contribute on the Roads, Road Safety and Ports Legislation Amendment Bill 2026, and I want to thank the ministers for roads and road safety past and present and the Minister for Ports and Freight for bringing this bill to this place. I was taken with the member for Essendon’s characterisation of the bill earlier in the debate as being an example of iterative improvement, or kaizen, that ensures that across our road network we are consistently striving to improve safety outcomes, to strengthen more broadly the management of our transport network and also to support the efficient movement and distribution of freight across Victoria.

I begin my contribution by recognising that Victoria has been a world leader in some of the innovations around road safety and really at the vanguard of some of the technologies and statutory innovations that have driven down the road toll in effectively a secular decline over about five to six decades now, from a period of crisis when seatbelts were not mandatory and were not used and when drink driving was pretty commonplace in the absence of either legislation or enforcement mechanisms.

But from 1970, when seatbelts became compulsory in Victoria, the first jurisdiction to do so anywhere in the world, followed by random breath testing in 1976 and assorted mechanisms and enforcement strategies associated with that after 1976, and Victoria was the first in Australia, we have also adopted sophisticated advertising campaigns that have sought to highlight the impact of driver behaviour. Again, the member for Essendon and the member for Werribee talked very powerfully about why those road safety campaigns were needed and the impact they have had. One of the core measures within this bill is to enable a more sophisticated set of point-to-point camera arrangements to both detect and deter speeding. As anybody listening to the debate so far would know, currently the enforcement of average speed can only be undertaken where there is one consistent speed limit between two detection points – in practice, on highways or freeways like the Hume Freeway in north-eastern Victoria, where there are well-established point-to-point cameras – whereas this bill will enable the use of those cameras to be implemented more broadly across the state by allowing the enforcement of point-to-point average speed across a stretch of road that might contain two or indeed more different speed zones. The bill, in doing so, will introduce a new formula for calculating the average speed that would apply between those two detection points, spanning multiple speed zones.

There has been a lot of discussion across the house about the merits of speed detection cameras, with some suggesting or positing that they are simply a cynical revenue-raising exercise. I think, by contrast, they are a proven technology for reducing the incidence of really dangerous speeding. I think particularly of the many instances of feedback that I have had from constituents in my own community and those particularly travelling along Mickleham Road and Pascoe Vale Road, as the member for Broadmeadows can attest, who have talked to me about the impact on them and the threat they feel to themselves and their families of drivers exceeding the speed limits on those arterial roads by a very significant amount. That dangerous behaviour does not just threaten drivers and make them feel unsafe while using the roads, as well as obviously pedestrians and cyclists and road users more broadly, but costs lives. It is a deeply tragic thing that that kind of reckless behaviour, whether it is speeding down Mickleham Road or running red lights at Alanbrae Terrace or the intersections of Pascoe Vale Road and Somerton Road or the entry points into Meadow Heights between Roxburgh Park station and Coolaroo, causes fatalities.

I was very pleased to be with the Minister for Police in 2023 when there was funding provided to implement road safety cameras at the intersection of Alanbrae Terrace and Mickleham Road in Attwood, which has had a marked improvement in driver behaviour in that area, with far fewer incidents of red light running and really egregious speeding in an area that has not only a large volume of traffic but also a very large population of kangaroos. The member for Murray Plains talked about the impact of wildlife strike on cars and on their occupants. In those areas of grassland adjacent to Melbourne Airport and Woodlands Historic Park there are very large populations of kangaroos on roadside verges. Ensuring that drivers, to the greatest extent possible, adhere to the speed limit saves lives and ensures that first responders, like the member for Werribee was describing, are not obligated to be in really harrowing circumstances any more than is sadly already the case. I am cognisant of the positive impact that those safety cameras have had in my own community and the feedback from residents about them.

I also want to talk about one of the provisions in the bill to amend the Port Management Act 1995 in relation to information gathering and charges, and in doing so this really enacts a recommendation within the Victorian freight plan. Requiring container shipping information to be provided to Ports Victoria and then shared with third parties is a really important step towards enabling an effective and efficient functioning market. Again, the member for Essendon talked about how the Baltic dry index, a measure of shipping costs across the world, is a really important forward-looking indicator of economic activity. If government and third parties more broadly have the capacity to see data pertaining to shipping in and out of Victoria’s ports, that is a really important economic indicator that can help to drive improved decision-making and market activity in a whole swathe of areas. I think that is a really important tweak to our Port Management Act, and at the margin it helps to improve productivity and economic efficiency.

Similarly, the changes to the Rail Management Act 1996 to improve access regimes for rail I think are another important step. The bill will remove a requirement to consult when maximum rail access prices are maintained or increased by no more than CPI. That seems like a really sensible, straightforward measure that reduces an unnecessary compliance burden and red tape. In reflecting upon the importance of an efficient rail network and the capacity of operators to utilise assets like rail corridors, I just want to reflect upon this government’s investment in the port rail shuttle network, which is in fact itself designed to operate as an open-access non-discriminatory network connecting the $500 million privately funded intermodal freight terminal in my own electorate, in Somerton, with the Port of Melbourne down at the docks. To make it work, it requires there to be fair and efficient pricing so that rail operators can get containers and bring them up to Somerton for distribution. That requires equitable market access. There is a need to address potentially monopolistic power of rail asset owners, especially in a jurisdiction like Victoria, where we have had a separation of track and rolling stock with either VicTrack or the Australian Rail Track Corporation owning the infrastructure asset underneath trains and now an open-access market existing in the context of the utilisation of those rail assets. In a sense there are two alternatives to address the challenge of the very high cost that is associated with building and then operating rail corridors, which can potentially be exploited as monopolies: either a government could allow unfettered construction of railways, which would be hugely inefficient and you would have parallel infrastructure along the same corridor – and other jurisdictions have seen that, such as the railway booms of the 19th century in England and the UK and Europe, which then resulted in many railways being closed, and it is a really significant waste of capital; or you can have effective regulation and pricing structures which enable competition and which allow a number of operators to utilise a single track, irrespective of ownership. But for that to happen there needs to be an effective pricing regulatory mechanism that has really clear pricing that is available to all potential market users, rather than enabling the owner of that track to charge monopolistic prices, which would obviously be a deterrent to freight operators being able to use assets like the VicTrack-owned and ARTC-owned corridors between Somerton and the port. These things are superficially quite small but also actually help to improve the productivity of our economy and the efficiency within it. I commend the bill to the house.

 Bronwyn HALFPENNY (Thomastown) (18:54): I also rise to speak in support of the Roads, Road Safety and Ports Legislation Amendment Bill 2026. This bill really is a collection of amendments to various pieces of legislation, and the purpose is of course to continue supporting the implementation of the Victorian Road Safety Strategy 2021–2030. It also is a raft of legislative amendments to sort out some anomalies, to update practices and bring legislation into the modern day, often reflecting different ways of doing things and perhaps new technology and ways that we need to support road safety as contained in the road safety strategy. We all have different views on the road rules and road safety programs and also the state of the roads, and this bill, which looks at many pieces of legislation, is about trying to refine and fine-tune legislation and bring it into the modern era, as well as of course listening to stakeholders, pedestrians and drivers of vehicles so that we are also taking on some of that feedback.

One of the things that we all agree with and totally believe in, and I think there would be no disagreement from anybody, is that we want to make sure and see that the road toll is going down. One life lost on our roads is one too many. This bill also makes some amendments to legislation regarding freight. With the need for increasing volumes of freight on our roads and truck numbers required to transport goods in support of our growing population, again there needs to be corresponding legislative change to enable some of that to happen. But I will really more be speaking around the roads rather than the freight.

I will just go through a couple of amendments that are contained in this bill and give some examples of what they are about and what they do. I think previous speakers have also raised all these things. There are gaps in the legislation when it comes to drivers who live overseas that may have come here as tourists or visitors, they breach road laws and they get a fine. But the way that the legislation is worded can make it often difficult to issue those fines and penalties for such breaches. This legislation is about making sure it is easier to track down and to issue fines to overseas residents.

The other issue is that at least 30 per cent of all road fatalities and serious injuries involve speeding as a contributing factor. We have technology that allows speed detection for a fixed point on a road where as soon as you pass that fixed point it reads the speed that you are going, but now we have technology that is much more useful and more accurate in really picking up drivers that are speeding along a stretch of road. It is not just a matter of stopping or going a bit slow where you know the camera is and then going fast again to avoid being in breach and getting your photo taken; this is where there are stretches of road and we have technology that can actually measure from particular points the average speed that a driver is going. Therefore if it is over the speed limit, a fine can be issued. However, this does not work when there are differing speed zones within that stretch of road. In the legislation that we are talking about here one of the amendments is to ensure that we can continue to issue fines based on drivers exceeding the speed limit. We do not want people exceeding the speed limit, because it can lead to serious injury and fatalities. The technology is able to average out that speed within those multiple speed zones and determine whether you were actually going over the speed limit or not. We need to make sure that legislation keeps up with that sort of technology. This is again an example of us modifying current legislation to adapt to changing conditions and changing technology.

The third and really significant reform is the road management declaration that ensures roads can be managed as soon as they are built. In various parts of the Thomastown electorate – in the outer suburbs, in the new estates – new roads that were never there before are being built all the time. One of the problems has been that sometimes those roads are not open, because they have not yet been declared. That declaration requires surveying, making sure that the boundaries are correct and, in order to do that, also nominating what various level of government is responsible for or has ownership of that road. This delays much-needed infrastructure that we really need to use straightaway. It also reduces productivity if we are not using those roads quickly. I can think of a couple of examples where this is maybe the reason why this has happened – Edgars Road in Epping. Hopefully with this legislative change we will not see the same thing occurring at Koukoura Drive, which is under construction at the moment, another road that goes into the outer suburbs of Wollert, where it will relieve congestion on Edgars Road, which is going in the same direction – those north–south connections – to make sure that residents have the full benefit of those roads as soon as possible.

The DEPUTY SPEAKER: The time set down for consideration of the item on the government business program has arrived, and I am required to interrupt business.

Motion agreed to.

Read second time.

The DEPUTY SPEAKER: The bill will now be sent to the Legislative Council and their agreement requested.

Business interrupted under sessional orders.