Wednesday, 29 July 2026

 The DEPUTY SPEAKER (16:01): The Speaker has accepted a statement from the member for Gippsland South proposing the following matter of public importance for discussion:

That this house notes the appalling state of Victorian roads and condemns the Labor government for more than a decade of cuts to road maintenance, neglect and waste.

 Danny O’BRIEN (Gippsland South) (16:01): This is the issue du jour, particularly if you are in regional Victoria. It is the issue that is on everybody’s lips. It has been, if you are a country MP, for a long time. But I have got to say as I travel around the state and as I talk to colleagues, possibly even some on the other side, they are all saying how much this is an issue for Victorians. Our roads are in an absolutely appalling state. It is absolutely appalling what they have got to, and the number of potholes is out of control.

I will preface my comments with this: we do use potholes somewhat as a proxy for the state of the road, because it is not just about potholes. It is about cracking, rutting, uneven surfaces and patching over patching over patching over patching. It is about broken shoulders. It is about the shoulders not being graded. It is about drains not being cleared out. It is about vegetation growing through the sides of the road, not just grass. Particularly in the situation where there are roadside barriers, there are often saplings and sometimes even small trees coming through the sides of the roads. It is graffiti, and it is graffiti not just on the roadsides but on the freeways in Melbourne that people are talking about constantly. The rubbish, the neglect – it is symbolic. It is symbolic of the state that Victoria has come to, and that is what people are saying back to us. That is what I am hearing. People are saying our roads have deteriorated just like our state has. And it is extraordinary that we have a government that is continuing to blame the state of the roads on the weather.

Two weeks ago I went up to Bendigo on a Sunday, and I drove up the Calder Highway. The Calder Highway had multiple sections where the entire left-hand lane was closed, in some cases for a couple of kilometres, because they were actually filling potholes or they had filled potholes. There were signs up that simply said, ‘Potholes ahead next 20 km. Storm damage.’

Roma Britnell interjected.

Danny O’BRIEN: Storm damage, member for South-West Coast. Who is thinking that the government is unable to build a road that will cope with a storm? I would actually challenge the government to explain what storm that was. No question, about a month ago in northern Victoria there was a fair bit of rain. There was actually quite a bit of rain, but I do not think it was storm damage. As the member for South-West Coast indicated, Queensland, the Northern Territory and Western Australia have cyclones and monsoons. We have got places in the Northern Hemisphere that have temperatures from minus 50 through to 30-plus degrees, and snow and ice, and their roads can cope with the weather. Indeed the Romans made roads 2000 years ago, some of which in Europe are still being used.

Nathan Lambert interjected.

Danny O’BRIEN: Some people would say, member for Preston, ‘What have the Romans ever done for us?’ Well, they could build a road bloody better than the Victorian government does. That is what absolutely astounds me. Some of those Roman roads are still in use, and the Romans –

Jade Benham interjected.

Danny O’BRIEN: They have not got potholes, and the Romans were not blaming the weather. That is what it has come to in this state. It is simply extraordinary that our roads have got so bad. I was coming down the Goulburn Valley Highway about three weeks ago on my way back from Shepparton, that wonderful city of Shepparton, and I saw some horrendous potholes. Again, it was just after that bit of rain that we had. When I say ‘bit of rain’, it was a maximum of 80 to 100 mils. It was not a monsoon, it was not a flood, it was just normal winter rain – a good drop, but normal winter rain. The potholes on the Goulburn Valley Highway, which is duplicated and almost freeway standard, were extraordinary. I stopped, got out, took some photos and did a little socials video – as we do these days, because it is the thing that goes so good on socials because everyone is sick of it. I went a bit further along, about another kilometre down the road, and there were some more potholes. I thought, ‘Well, pull over. These are even better’ – as in worse. I pulled over, and there was a car there. Young Tanisha, who was a P-plater, was on her way from Shepparton. She was actually going to a job interview. She had hit a pothole and just smashed her tyre to smithereens.

A member interjected.

Danny O’BRIEN: A very common story indeed. As luck would have it, we saw her there and went over. She had her dad with her. She is actually originally from Singapore, and her dad was out visiting from Singapore. She was on the phone to the prospective employer she was going to see to say that she was going to be late because she had hit a pothole and blown a tyre. We fixed it up for her, changed her tyre and sent her on her way. But that is a story –

Jade Benham interjected.

Danny O’BRIEN: I would not have done that for you, member for Mildura, because you are a competent woman and you would have done it yourself. But in the days around that, the Leader of the Opposition and I went to the seat of Euroa, and we drove from Mangalore to Creightons Creek. Only about 20 k’s of that is on the Hume Freeway. In the time that I was there on a Sunday afternoon I saw five cars pulled over on the side of the road, changing tyres, in about 20 k’s, including one that was being put on the back of a truck, so I suspect it had blown more than one tyre or the vehicle had been damaged so badly that it literally had to be towed. This is the story we are hearing repeatedly around the state everywhere we go.

Jade Benham: It is the start of a new tunnel.

Danny O’BRIEN: You are stealing my thunder, member for Mildura. But when I posted the pictures of the Goulburn Valley Highway, one of the best comments was from someone who stated that it was not a pothole, it was just the start of a new Labor government tunnel. I thought that was actually probably pretty prescient, because the potholes are that big you could almost drive a train through them. It is out of control.

The response from the government every year is to say, ‘We’ve got this big road maintenance blitz.’ I have outlined here in the chamber before and literally read out six or seven years in a row the ‘Road maintenance blitz to fix our roads’ that the government does. The government is claiming to be spending $1.04 billion on road maintenance in the 2026–27 year. What they do not point out – and we pointed this out through the Public Accounts and Estimates Committee, where the member for Mildura asked questions on my behalf in the hearings. She put in a few good ones of her own as well, because she is a very intelligent MP. The government might claim to be spending more, but it is actually doing less, and this is the thing that is so hard to comprehend. The government puts its headline figures out there and says, ‘It was $964 million two years ago. It was $976 million this year. Now it is $1.04 billion’ – record spending, they always say. But they are actually doing less. If the government are actually spending that money, what are they spending it on? Because the roads are actually going downhill; they are actually getting worse.

The budget papers reveal that the government has reduced targets for regional roads, and I say ‘regional roads’ because obviously as a Nationals MP that is my focus, but it is also some 75 per cent of the road network – a road network, I might say, that at 23,000 kilometres is the state government’s single biggest asset. For the last couple of years, in 2021–22 the government was resurfacing or rehabilitating 11.8 million square metres of road. I will say it again: resurfacing or rehabilitating 11.8 ‍million square metres of road. The budget this year is just 2.9 million square metres of road. That is a reduction of 75 per cent.

This is where the government’s excuses are catching up with themselves, because they said a couple of years ago, after the 2022 floods, that they had to stop doing a lot of the resealing and resheeting of our roads and focus on rehabilitation, on patching, so they introduced a new performance measure in the budget for patching. Now they are saying that they are going back to doing more of the resurfacing, but the figures have still gone backwards. Indeed, on the patching alone, in this year’s budget the amount of road patching they will do is forecast to plunge from 556,000 square metres two years ago to just 76,000 square metres this year, an 86 per cent drop. Patching is going down, resurfacing is going down, resealing is going down and rehabilitation is going down, but the cost continues to go up. It is only a Labor government that could do less but still manage to spend more.

Jade Benham interjected.

Danny O’BRIEN: It is Labor maths, member for Mildura. Over the 12 years of this government this has been a particular recurring theme. Instead of fixing the roads, the government’s solution is to reduce the speed limit. We have seen it time and time again. In some cases you will actually see a permanent sign that says ‘Rough road ahead, 80’. Instead of fixing it, they just put up a sign. We now have, according to the budget this year, 185 sections of road subject to a ‘pavement in poor condition’ management plan. In other words, they have not fixed the road. They have put up a sign and maybe some flashing lights and just left the road as it is.

This is an appalling state, and it is galling to Victorians and particularly to regional Victorians when you compare the state of our roads to the $15 billion of taxpayers money lost to corruption, stolen by crooks and bikies on the Big Build. Just think what that could have done for our roads. We would be able to dig up the Romans and get them back to do some with the amount of money we would have had if that money had not been wasted and we could put it towards roads. It is an outrage. That is just the corruption. We know for a fact from the budget papers that over $40 billion has been wasted in cost blowouts on the Big Build, whether it is the North East Link, the Metro Tunnel or the West Gate Tunnel. All of these have had multimillion dollar blowouts while we are driving around on goat tracks in the country, because this government could not be bothered to actually prioritise the basics. The single biggest asset the Victorian government owns is our road network, and we are not maintaining it.

There are a lot of general rules of thumb in road construction and maintenance. One of the general rules of thumb for bitumen roads is that you want to reseal them about every 10 to 15 years, so you want to be doing about 10 per cent of the network per year. You want to put that lot of bitumen down and another load of stones to keep a seal on the road. That seal is important. The bitumen is a waterproof seal; it stops the water getting in. When water gets in, that is what creates potholes. Vehicles go over it, particularly trucks, and that is why you spray seal. You also make sure that the water is not getting stuck on the side of the road. You grade the side of the road to allow water to get away. You make sure you have got a camber and you have got a roadside, the road shoulder, and gutters and drains, table drains, where the water can get away. That is not happening.

Jade Benham interjected.

Danny O’BRIEN: One of the things that the member for Mildura points out is that when there are weeds or grass growing on the side of the road – and you can see it on thousands of kilometres of road across the state – it actually sits higher than the road. And what happens when it rains? That water then sits on the side of the road, eventually seeps in, subs under the road from the side, and that is when you get the surface breaking. Potholes form and you get a shocking road surface.

As I said, you should be doing about 10 per cent of the network a year. If you do that, you are resealing roughly every 10 or 15 years. Estimates are we are now down to 1.5 to 3 per cent of the network a year, and that is no surprise. Two years ago, in the 2023–24 summer season, the government did zero resealing. It did not do any. It was in a ministerial brief provided under freedom of information.

Jade Benham interjected.

Danny O’BRIEN: The government’s own numbers: it did zero. In the next year it did not much more, and in recent years it still is not doing anything. This is an issue that needs a solution, and the solution is a fresh start. The solution is a fair share for regional Victoria. We have announced our commitment to delivering $5 billion over four years to actually eliminate a million potholes – not just patch them so they come back again in three months time but actually eliminate them – and get back to doing that preventative maintenance that we need, get back to the resealing, get back to doing the roadside grading, cleaning out the drains and all of those issues. We will establish Better Roads Victoria to have technical and engineering expertise within the department to make sure that we are doing the roads properly.

This is important. It is not just about money; it is about doing the basics, and this government has failed to do the basics. We have spent our time in opposition learning and understanding and developing the policy, and we have a plan. We have a plan that will actually get our roads back under control. I warn Victorians: it is not going to happen overnight – indeed I think it will get worse before it gets better – but the Nationals and Liberals have got a plan to fix our roads, because they have been so badly neglected by this Labor government.

 John LISTER (Werribee) (16:16): I note the previous speaker said that the opposition has spent quite a bit of time in opposition considering their plan or policy or whatever glossy brochure they decide to put out next to again promise something that they cannot deliver, because in the end all they can deliver are cuts, not only for metropolitan Melbourne but for regional Victoria. But I will get to that in just a moment, because in the tradition of the member for Essendon, I do just want to take us to a little bit of ancient history here – and no, I am not talking about the last time the Liberals were in government. The member for Gippsland South mentioned the Romans, but I would like to mention the Greeks and go to the etymology of the word ‘asphalt’. It comes from the ancient Greek term ‘asphaltos’ which refers to a sticky, dark substance, because of course asphalt was something that was commonly occurring in nature and was accessible to those ancient civilisations. It is derived from two words put together, which is quite common in ancient Greek: the word ‘a’, which means ‘not’, and ‘sphallein’, which means ‘to fall or slip’ – that is, to make firm or secure, which is all this MPI is about for those opposite. To make firm or secure the threats that they are facing from One Nation out in the regions, they choose to chew up this good Parliament’s time with an MPI like this.

As someone who represents a peri-urban community where we have some regional roads as well as metropolitan roads – in fact one of the busiest metropolitan roads in the Princes Freeway, running right through the middle of my electorate – I know a lot about roads. What we are doing on this side when it comes to our roads has been quite a common feature since I have been elected in this place. In fact Labor is spending more on roads than any government in Victoria’s history – $1.04 billion this year alone, with 70 per cent of that funding going to regional Victoria. This MPI is a conservative amnesia when it comes to the cuts that they did when they were in government. 450 VicRoads staff were cut when they were in government. In only that short four years they were cut, so this is their amnesia dressed up as outrage.

When we are talking about this year’s budget, we have invested over a billion dollars in fixing potholes and resurfacing roads. But I do just want to return to some of the technicalities of what resurfacing means. Of course, when we resurface, we have a few different options. Not too long ago I got to join some of the road crews down in Werribee South and in central Werribee, where, as part of our western roads upgrade program, they are doing resurfacing works on all our major arterial roads throughout Wyndham. I joined them, and I got to speak to the engineers there that night about the way they do it. There are a few different choices of asphalt that they can use. First of all, there is hot mix asphalt, which of course is all about creating a top surface on that road that helps make it more impermeable to water. As the very learned member for Gippsland South observed, water and traffic are the two main factors behind the creation of potholes on our road.

The other particular form of asphalt that we use on our sites is warm mix asphalt. It is similar to hot mix, as you can presume, but it is slightly cooled down. It is put to that lower temperature because it means that we can add things to it to help create more of a base, and it makes it more workable during construction, which means that we can use it particularly to create the camber in the road, which is something the crews were showing me that night down at Duncans Road. Finally, the other form of asphalt that we use on these projects is cold mix asphalt. That means that throughout the whole process it is not heated up. This is particularly important as well because it can be transported easily and laid at a low temperature, particularly in some of those patching works that the member for Gippsland South observed are happening across the state.

When it comes to the maintenance of our roads this budget also invests $102.6 million in other road projects statewide. The vast majority of that funding is going to projects in regional Victoria, but some of that portion went to immediate works over the last few months in metropolitan Melbourne, including works on the Princes Freeway through Wyndham and the western suburbs, a very important stretch of road indeed. I observed over the break how the opposition spoke about how they have had, what is it now, 12 years to come up with a plan. They are still yet to come up with many plans for the west of Victoria, and particularly the western suburbs, but one of the plans they came up with was around raising the speed limit along the Princes Freeway to 110 kilometres an hour – an interesting proposition and certainly something that we see on our other freeways across Victoria. But in particular, the thing that I took note of in the opposition’s announcement is that they wanted to start the 110 kilometres an hour along the freeway from Laverton North. Laverton North through the Point Cook bend and ultimately through the Maltby Bypass in Werribee is one of the most dangerous stretches of road in Victoria. For a saving of 4 minutes between Laverton North, Kororoit Creek Road and the turn-off at the ring-road in Geelong, you would increase the stopping distance that it takes, particularly in bad weather, by nearly 200 metres. This risk is unacceptable.

Richard Riordan interjected.

John LISTER: If the member for Polwarth expects road crash rescue crews at Werribee fire brigade to be responding to such a risk all because of some glossy brochure plan they come up with, shame on them, because we already respond to some of the most dangerous accidents as a result of speed.

Members interjecting.

John LISTER: Speed – substance abuse on our roads. The safety that comes on our roads comes from people doing the right things, but it also comes from the way that we set up and control our roads and manage them, and one of those key ways is through our speed limits. To put that risk forward to our community in Wyndham is absolutely deplorable, and it shows that they absolutely do not understand the risks on the Princes Freeway. It is shameful, and for the member for Polwarth to want to shave 4 minutes off his drive home – and I understand he really wants to get back to Colac; it is a lovely part of the world, with lots of families down there – at the risk of –

Richard Riordan interjected.

John LISTER: If the member for Polwarth wants to take that risk on behalf of Victorians to increase that speed through our stretch of freeway, going around the Point Cook bend at 110 kilometres an hour, goodness gracious me, there is something wrong with that side over there. They clearly do not understand our local roads, particularly out there in the western suburbs.

I am going to return to the issue of road maintenance, particularly in Wyndham – something that I take particularly to heart because my predecessor, the former member for Werribee, put together a plan for across Wyndham as well as into parts of Hobsons Bay. It is a project with Netflow, the western roads upgrade, in a $1.8 billion partnership to do a few different projects: 120 kilometres of new traffic lanes; 62 intersection upgrades; five new and eight upgraded bridges, including the one at Duncans Road; 188 kilometres of roads resurfaced under this program; 300 services and utilities relocated; and 60 ‍kilometres of new cycling paths. Most of these capital works were completed in the first few years of the project.

But of course Netflow will continue to do that work as they maintain that network over the next 20 ‍years. During the capital phase of the project 4000 equivalent full-time jobs were created, with around 2200 for local businesses supplying to that project, and local businesses still supply to Netflow with their road maintenance projects today. In fact across all our arterial roads in the Werribee electorate we have seen road resurfacing works just in the last 12 months, including significant stretches along Ballan Road and Synnot Street as well as Princes Highway past the police station. These are really important works to people out in Werribee because these are heavily used roads not only for commuters going to and from the Princes Freeway back up to Wyndham Vale but also for our truck companies. We have a lot of logistics movements through Werribee, including the quarries out the back at Manor using our roads like Ballan Road.

This Netflow project – again, I had the benefit of going to visit them. They have a lot of really innovative ways to engage with the community, to show them not only what their work is but also how they are constantly monitoring and maintaining the roads in real time. Every week they have crews that drive the entire length of their controlled network, the arterial road network, monitoring for issues, including things like potholes, soft edges and where the road surface has been reduced. What they do from that is put together a maintenance plan so that every month they have crews going through and making sure that they are fixed and sealed. The other thing that they do too is every couple of weeks they go through and fix the soft edges along roads like Ballan Road and Princes Highway.

The important thing about this is they also deal with the issue of rubbish dumping along our roads in Wyndham. One of the things that I have been able to do recently, particularly at the top of Ballan Road, where we have seen an increase in illegal rubbish dumping, most usually by private developers and companies on nearby housing estates, is work with Netflow and council to put together a plan to help monitor that rubbish and try and get rid of that rubbish quicker and sooner after it is dumped and to provide that information to council and EPA for prosecution, because this is what happens when you have Labor governments that invest in road maintenance, particularly in our western suburbs.

The other thing about the Netflow project is that they also provide real-time data to Transport Victoria, and that then gets integrated into the system. I had the pleasure of visiting them last year with the Minister for Roads and Road Safety, just before the West Gate Tunnel opened actually, to see how that integrated system works with the data that they are getting from the crews as they drive along the roads and how that then feeds in with the road traffic camera network that we have set up through Transport Victoria.

There are a lot of really important things that this project has delivered for our community, not only local jobs and better arterial roads. It has also meant that we have been able to help Wyndham City Council to complete a lot of that work on council roads. I think this comes to one of the issues that those opposite often do their reels around, standing very close to traffic on the edge of the road as they do their reel and try and spark that outrage online again. When they go and do that, one of the issues that we see is a lot of those C roads that they go to are council-managed roads. I acknowledge that some councils are not necessarily flush, particularly some of those down in the south-west, but there are programs in place to help support councils with monitoring those roads and finding the right places where that work needs to be done.

Of course we are working too with the heavy vehicle register and police around whether or not people are overloading through those areas, because one of the key issues that we have had over the past few years is a significant increase in freight use along roads, particularly in regional communities. It is an unavoidable fact, particularly with harvest season, and as someone who lived and worked up in Dimboola for a few years, I totally understand that harvest season is usually when we see that real increase in traffic on our roads. Part of the maintenance program that we have is around making sure that those arterial roads but also those feeder roads that are managed by council are monitored and are repaired as needed.

It is really important to remember that on this side it is about projects and practical solutions when it comes to these sorts of things, not just rhetoric or bluster on social media. The last time those opposite had their chance in the City of Wyndham there was one road project delivered in four years. That one road project was a set of lights, and admittedly it was very, very needed, just down there at the top of Point Cook and the intersection with Werribee. It is a very important set of lights there. However, in that same four years they also approved nearly 30,000 dwellings in one block next to Ballan Road, with no plan to do anything about Ballan Road. Now this government here is doing the huge Ballan Road upgrade, which is underway at the moment. Thank you to everyone out there for their patience as we upgrade that road. The member for Melton knows it quite well, coming from down our way. The thing about that, though, is that recently I saw the Liberal candidate for Werribee saying, ‘For whoever approved this estate right next to Ballan Road, why didn’t they have plans to do anything about the road and upgrade it?’ I was like, ‘Very good question. You should ask the member for Bulleen, because he was the one who approved that subdivision in Ballan Road with zero plans for infrastructure.’ Do we expect those opposite to care or to have any kind of plan? They are more than happy to fast-track housing in the outer-western suburbs, but they have no plan for infrastructure. They have no plan for any kind of infrastructure in the western suburbs. This is the hypocrisy of those opposite: faux outrage mixed with zero actual plans.

 Richard RIORDAN (Polwarth) (16:31): Listening to the rather bizarre contribution from the member for Werribee, it must dishearten Victorians enormously to think that on the day we are having a debate about the appalling state of Victoria’s roads a member of the government is proud of the fact that using slower and slower road speed signs is the solution to keeping Victorians safe. They are not investing in our roads but investing in signage, particularly variable signage, to make sure that people, particularly those in regional Victoria, can spend not just hours longer but so much extra time in the car. Right across the electorate of Polwarth there are whole sections of road that are down to 40 ‍kilometres, then down to 60 kilometres and then up to 80. These are built as 100-kilometre-an-hour roads, yet this government is proud. We have got members of this government proud of the fact that slowing people down is a solution to road safety, because they cannot afford to maintain roads to an adequate level.

South-west Victoria, where Polwarth sits proudly, is considered the worst road network in the state. It is bad because we are lucky enough to have pretty good average rainfall down our way, and with rainfall comes the need for government to invest money in drainage and to invest money in roadside clearing and maintenance. It also requires the government to return to the good old days when Victorian road management was roughly on a 10-year replacement cycle for road surfaces. This government has failed that appallingly. Now on many of our important rural and regional roads we have blown out to a 30-year cycle, and in fact in years 2021–22 and 2022–23 there was almost no investment in regional roads at all. There was a massive 90 per cent cut to the amount of resurfacing and maintenance of our country roads. It is simply not good enough.

What is the legacy of allowing that wonderful 10-year cycle that ensured we had roads where you could drive at 100 kilometres an hour? The legacy of not having that means that we so often now see our roads lowered down to 80 kilometres, 60 kilometres or 40 kilometres. In fact the local police in the Polwarth electorate have made it really clear to me that on the dual-lane carriageway between Colac and Geelong they no longer enforce the road rule of keeping to the left unless overtaking, because the left-hand lane is now so fundamentally dangerous. It is riddled with craters and potholes. In fact we famously had an accident about three months ago where a cheese truck overturned, spilling cheese all over the eastbound carriageway of the said Princes Highway, with the road closed for nearly 24 hours while they picked up all the wrapped-up cheese to put it on a truck heading in the opposite direction in the westbound lanes, only for it to come to grief on a pothole and spill the cheese all over the other side of the road. That is how bad road conditions and maintenance are in south-west Victoria.

The budget figures continue to tell the truth about why Victorians are continuing to feel that their roads in regional Victoria are totally and utterly neglected. The 2026–27 budget revealed Labor has reduced targets for regional road resurfacing and rehabilitation by more than 75 per cent. That comes off declines of nearly 90 per cent. This government continues to cut back the investment in keeping Victorian roads safe. Not only does that cutback contribute to potholes and not only does it contribute to the lack of edging; it also contributes to the lack of white lines and clear signage on our roads, which become very difficult at this time of year, with wet and cold and dark nights, when you simply cannot see the white lines on the edges or in the centre of the road.

But more concerning is just the general maintenance of our roads. With the proliferation of poorly kept wire rope barriers, which string most of our main highways across the state, there is now a mixture of wire rope barriers and pink safety signs stuck in where they are broken and continue to be broken. When the government rolled out its wire rope safety barrier program they made it very clear that the Monash University statistics and studies that they were using to justify that expenditure said in part that those wire rope barriers become less safe when they are damaged, and as a result there was a requirement for them to be repaired and maintained very quickly upon being broken or damaged. It is simply not happening. In fact it is common now to drive past the pink safety barriers, and they have actually faded and gone almost white because they have been sitting there so long.

As we all notice, those of us driving from western Victoria down the Princes Freeway into the west side of Melbourne, you can essentially furnish a house with the amount of rubbish that is now on either side of the Princes Highway and then the Princes Freeway. It is not uncommon to see beds, TVs, studio chairs, office desks, bookcases and whole car parts littered endlessly from one end of the journey into the city and back again. It is actually embarrassing, as a First World state, that that amount of litter and rubbish tangled up in long, overgrown grass and unkempt roadways has now become the standard and the norm here in Victoria. That is simply because this government no longer funds regular roadside maintenance. In fact, talking to roadside mowers recently, only a few years ago they were paid to do it two or three times a year at a minimum along our busy roadways and highways and byways. Today they are down to one cut, one run-through, on the sides of our roads a year, which is simply not enough, particularly in the parts of Victoria like mine, where you have higher rainfall and more grass growth. Not only is it about the unsightliness of the build-up of rubbish and refuse; it also speaks to the way this government drives around blindly unaware of the decay it is overseeing in our roads and our road maintenance across Victoria.

That is in the built-up, more urban areas that we drive through, but more generally across many of our minor Victorian state roads – I think in particular of the road from Birregurra through to Forrest and then on to Apollo Bay, Cobden-Stonyford Road and Cobden-Warrnambool Road, which connects up to my colleague the member for South-West Coast – these roadways are pretty heavily forested on either side, and the policy now is to just allow the trees to grow closer and closer to the roads. They do not allow proper removal of fallen trees. In fact when a tree falls today, the SES or someone comes to the immediate rescue, and large tree trunks and others are left perilously close to the edge of the road, creating a further hazard for drivers coming by. But even worse, the debris from a fallen tree is no longer allowed to be removed, and it is thrown onto the side of the road.

There are many of my roads, particularly the more heavily forested ones, where the fuel load now along the sides of the roads is very, very dangerous. It is dangerous for multiple reasons. Many of these roadways of course in the peak of summer will have a lot of tourist traffic that could have accidents. You have got lots of agricultural machinery and other things that may cause sparks or have hot exhausts and other things. If they pull to the side of many of our roads, they are a bonfire ready to happen, and this government has done nothing in its road management to keep these corridors of business, these corridors of life, these corridors of connection, open and safe for the people in country Victoria. It is simply not good enough.

Finally, in the moments I have left, the other major concern that has been in proliferation in Polwarth in recent times, as we have had a bit of a wet winter, is road slips. The Great Ocean Road has been closed multiple times this year through road slips. Lavers Hill-Cobden Road has been closed this year and has remained closed for quite some time. We have bridges, and particularly the Carlisle River community, who had all those bushfires down there and literally hundreds of fire trucks, was reduced to a single-lane temporary bridge because we simply cannot afford to maintain these more costly elements of road maintenance and road upkeep. It is a blight on this state that such a potentially prosperous and wealthy state as the state of Victoria is now so destitute it simply cannot maintain the basic roads, the basic bridges, the basic infrastructure and the basic cleanliness of good, safe roads.

 Anthony CIANFLONE (Pascoe Vale) (16:41): It is a privilege to stand up and speak here today to condemn this matter, which I, very much like all of us on this side of the chamber, oppose, because contrary to what this matter claims and the drivel from the previous two speakers, the fact is that it is this Victorian Labor government that is continuing to invest in our transport infrastructure, in our road infrastructure and in our public transport and services infrastructure. Every single step of the way the Liberals and Nationals coalition have just continued to oppose and do everything they can to prevent us from investing in it, particularly in my community in the northern suburbs of my electorate of Pascoe Vale, the electorate of Broadmeadows and the electorate of Greenvale. Never once have we seen the Liberals take any interest when it comes to taking real action, supporting our investments and our commitment to improving our roadways and our transport infrastructure.

The fact is that the only road that the Liberals know is the highway to hell, which Acca Dacca sings about very loudly and proudly. God forbid they and One Nation should form a coalition at the next election. They will take us on that highway to hell of cuts, of public sell-offs and of privatisation. That will mean bad, bad things for our public transport and particularly for our roads as well, because the only road that they know of and that they have continued to be on is, as John Lennon and Paul McCartney have also previously told us all about, that long and winding road in opposition, which is still taking them only to the highway to hell. That is the only road that they have been on and will continue to be on as far as I am concerned, and we will be doing everything we can to keep them on that road. That is the road that we want them to stay on. We do not want to get an off-ramp onto any other road.

But as the Parliamentary Secretary for Community Safety I also say that obviously road safety is a very high priority for our government across the entire state, through investments we have been making, which I will touch on, and also as the member for Pascoe Vale in my community, and as the member for Frankston I am sure can also appreciate in his community in the south-east. Again contrary to the claims that have been made by the opposition – the fact is they can do a bit of homework for a change and open up the budget papers to see it – in this year’s budget we have allocated and invested a record $1.04 billion. It is fact. They want to doubt this. They want to try and undermine this $1.04 billion investment specifically for roads and road maintenance, which is the highest in this state’s history. Guess what, 70 per cent of that funding – the member for Melton will appreciate this as well – has been allocated to regional and rural communities. Regional and rural communities are receiving 70 per cent of that funding.

Just on the coalition’s own paperwork, in their own figures their own commitment, which I will get to in a moment, should they form government, is that they will only commit 25 per cent of their roads funding to regional Victoria. They would be cutting funding. If they were to form government, they would cut funding to regional and rural communities to which the Victorian Labor government in this budget is allocating 70 per cent. It is shameful that the party that claims to stand up for regional and rural communities will cut the funding before they even get into office.

Again, they do not want to do their homework. The last two Victorian Labor budgets invest in the order of $1 billion per annum at least. Just over 2024–25, for example, 211,000 potholes were repaired as a result of that investment – 200,000 potholes. This year we are on track to fix 200,000-plus again, and already 187,000 have been fixed. I had the privilege to drive down to Warrnambool to have that parliamentary hearing. It is a wonderful community down in Warrnambool, and I saw many of the upgraded works on those roads on the way in and out, member for South-West Coast.

I really want to acknowledge our lead speaker on this matter as well, the member for Werribee, who gave a really thorough and in-depth contribution with respect to the history of roadways and road infrastructure, even going back as far as the ancient Romans. But just to shadow his remarks in this respect, the opposition do not even want to talk about the impact that severe weather events, severe flooding and substantial rainfall, which we have had over the last couple of years, have had on our roadways and the need for us to be doing more to repair our roadways, particularly in regional and rural Victoria. Now it is more important than ever that we invest more not less into regional and rural roads like the Liberal opposition are proposing to do.

Do not just take my word for it. When the Liberals made their announcement a few weeks ago, I think it was, or a couple of weeks ago, around their supposed road blitz, there was a lot of confusion from some of the stakeholders in terms of what exactly this commitment meant. Rural Councils Victoria itself said it is unclear how much of the promised $5 billion would be spent on country roads specifically. Even Rural Councils Victoria immediately criticised and undermined this supposed election commitment from the opposition, because even to their own supposed stakeholders in regional and rural communities they are not being very clear, this potential Liberal–National–One Nation coalition.

Again, you cannot make a commitment to supposedly investing more money into roads or into any policy area for that matter if, on the other hand, at the same time you are actually proposing – not you, Deputy Speaker, but the opposition – to cut $40 billion from the Victorian budget. Forty billion dollars they are proposing to take right out of the Victorian budget should they form government, part of which involves sacking one in seven public servants. One in seven public servants would be sacked, and they are kidding themselves if they think that is not going to have an impact on frontline services like education, teachers, police and nurses. But also, they are kidding themselves if they think that is not going to have an impact on the Department of Transport and Planning, which is responsible for helping maintain, upgrade, fix up and enhance our roadways and transport network.

They cannot be claiming to do more with $40 billion less across the entire state budget and forward estimates. They were last in government for any meaningful period during 2010 to 2014, and how can we forget those forgettable Baillieu and Napthine years, when they did absolutely nothing, and anything they did do harmed the interests of this state? When it came to roads – they do not want to talk about this – they sacked 450 workers from VicRoads. They cut 70 jobs from the TAC, the Transport Accident Commission, in Geelong. They cut $100 million from the VicRoads budget across every single region in Victoria. Every single region in Victoria felt that cumulative cut of $100 million. They also, most shamefully, cut compensation to the TAC and grieving families. They cut the compensation packages to those people who needed it most in their hour of need.

Again, this is a stark contrast. While they talk and cut on that side of the house, we are getting on with doing what matters when it comes to roads and infrastructure, whether it is the big infrastructure projects that are needed to support our state’s growing population and communities through the Metro Tunnel, the West Gate Tunnel, North East Link and the M80 ring-road upgrades which support so many commuters across the north-western suburbs; the upgrades we delivered through the Tullamarine corridor, particularly with linking in and out of Melbourne Airport which is only continuing to grow in terms of visitation; or whether it is the Tullamarine Bulla Road and Bell Street on-and-off ramps, untangling that previous bottleneck to keep the traffic flow moving in and out and around Essendon Airport and Essendon Fields.

In my community as well we have continued to deliver record amounts of funding to improve our transport and road network, which the Liberals have never committed to and would never invest in, ever. We are talking about the level crossing removals through the Upfield line in Coburg. They never would have removed the level crossings at Moreland Road, Munro Street and Reynard Street, and they will never remove the eight level crossings through Brunswick, let alone upgrade the rest of the Upfield line, which we are making a business case towards progressing as we speak. The new pedestrian crossing on Gaffney Street near Cumberland Road to support Pascoe Vale Primary School families – they never would have delivered that. We are reducing the speed limit and a creating a new school speed zone on Murray Road and also an extended zone on Bell Street. They are committing to increasing speed limits, we have heard, along the Princes Freeway to Geelong when the parliamentary inquiry evidence has told us we need safer limits across the state. On that note, I oppose this matter and support our action.

 Roma BRITNELL (South-West Coast) (16:51): Our regional roads are appalling, and it is just galling to listen to the Labor members of Parliament sitting here trying to deny the facts that sit in front of every regional Victorian driver. Every journey on our roads has become an obstacle course of potholes, crumbling road edges and broken pavements. It forces motorists to have to swerve, often across double lines, and to go off edges that drop down inches. It is frightening. People are terrified now to drive at night if it is raining. In fact I recommend they do not. Across my electorate and across regional Victoria people stop me everywhere I go with the same story: another blown tyre, another smashed rim, another suspension repair costing hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars. One local tyre business owner contacted me not to complain about the lack of work, but to actually state that he is sick of being forced to tell people that they have another large bill and they are having to empty their wallets.

This is not bad luck. This is a direct consequence of a Labor government that has allowed Victoria’s roads to deteriorate year after year. This is the worst condition I have ever seen roads in, and every year they get worse, while ministers insist they are spending more than ever. We have had five ministers over the last 10 years who have continued to starve the roads of funds. Victorians are no longer buying the spin because they are living the reality every single day they get behind the wheel. The truth is that the crisis has not happened overnight. It is the predictable result of a decade of neglect, and that decade has been the result of road maintenance not occurring under the Victorian Labor government, whose responsibility it is to fix the Victorian state roads. They are the majority of the roads that we are driving on every single day, full of potholes. It tells a story in itself of how this government has neglected regional Victoria in particular.

In the 2026–27 budget it was revealed that Labor has reduced targets for regional road resurfacing and rehabilitation by more than 75 per cent. That is down from 11.8 million square metres in 2021 to just 2.9 million square metres in 2026–27. The budget figures this year demonstrate road patching in regional Victoria is forecast to plunge from 556,000 square metres just two years ago to 76,000 square metres. That is an 86 per cent drop in two years. This is the patching that was the new measure that the government implemented, as though patching a number of potholes per year was something to celebrate. I was listening to the member for Pascoe Vale talking about the success it is to patch 220,000 ‍potholes, but how many potholes are they patching over and over and over again? If you keep patching the same pothole, is that a measure of success? No, it is a measure of failure. Despite the government’s claims of additional maintenance spending, the area of roads that will be patched, resurfaced or rehabilitated continues to go backwards. And we can see it. We see it when we are driving around. Rather than prioritising essential repairs and maintenance, speed limit reductions are being implemented as bandaids for deteriorating roads. That is not how you run the state.

As of May this year there were 185 sections of road subject to pavement in poor condition, and we knew this was the prediction of the Victorian Auditor-General in 2017. If we continued down that trajectory as a state, we would have more than 91 per cent of our roads in poor or very poor condition, and that is where we are today. The Victorian Auditor-General’s Office report identified it, and we are waiting for the next report – coming out in 2026, this year – which will tell a damning story, no doubt. Victorians are putting up with a pothole every 100 metres across the state. The new Premier was the minister responsible for roads and road safety when regional road surfacing fell by more than a third. Under his watch the department missed its own regional resurfacing target, and in 2023 they did not even set a target. That is right. My colleague at the table has just highlighted how the new Premier does not care about the regions, and there is your evidence there. That is exactly what he did: he cut the funding to roads when he was the Minister for Roads and Road Safety. That is why we are putting up with a pothole every 100 metres, because he cut the budget during his time by $240 million.

This is a government that does not do the recommended engineering standard of 10 per cent renewal of roads every year. That is what you do in any business: you make sure you repair 10 per cent so you always have a functioning plant. We did it on the farm: 10 per cent of your pastures renovated. But this has stopped under this government. In fact if you do 10 per cent, you never have a situation like we have at the moment where there is just a massive job in front of us to fix the roads. But this government has been doing about 1 to 3 per cent repairs instead of 10 per cent per annum. This is a government that has not been spray sealing, a technique that waterproofs our roads by putting the gravel in place and spray sealing it so that it waterproofs it. No, this is a government that has ignored that, so the cracks appear, the water infiltrates and the road falls apart. It is also a government that does not use graders on the sides of the roads. It lets the vegetation creep up to the side of the road. The water gets trapped and it undermines the roads.

These are all the reasons why, when Jess Wilson, the leader of the Liberals, came to visit my electorate on her 88-electorate visit over the winter recess, she said the roads are shocking everywhere, and they certainly were shocking in South-West Coast. But we announced a $5 billion investment in our roads, and this is to fix the roads properly. It is to actually return to resurfacing and fixing roads to eliminate potholes – not patch potholes so that with the next rainfall the patch pops out and you have to re-patch that pothole. Five billion dollars is 25 per cent more than the current government is investing, but the key to this is we will actually be fixing them properly. We will not be saying, ‘We’re patching potholes,’ because that is not fixing a road. That is a temporary cover-up like painting rotten wood. It does not work. We will fix the potholes by repairing the road properly. We will re-establish a proper planned system of preventative maintenance, and we will establish Better Roads Victoria, a standalone division within the department. This government got rid of VicRoads, and they actually established Regional Roads Victoria with fanfare, saying they would be fixing the roads properly. But, guess what, three years ago, what did they do? They quietly got rid of it – no announcement about that. We will be making sure we return engineers to the role, the experts who know how to fix roads, not the economists who just want to keep cutting. We will be boosting roadside maintenance, including grass slashing, drain clearing and grading.

We will review the contract standards. The construction standards are really important, because currently what goes on, contractors tell me, is they say to the government, ‘This contract won’t build a road fit for purpose; it’ll start crumbling within months.’ And the government says, ‘Go ahead.’ That is what the local contractors are telling us: ‘Just go ahead. We don’t care. Just fix the road; we know it won’t work.’ So instead of digging, say, 18 inches to build the road, they are going down 8 inches. We are seeing this everywhere we drive, even new roads crumbling within months. It is disgraceful.

Under Labor we are receiving 12 per cent of the infrastructure funding budget, but under the Liberals we have committed to a 25 per cent investment in infrastructure, because 25 per cent of the people in Victoria live in the regions. And, do you know what, with 25 per cent of people living in the regions, the most disgraceful statistic is that 60 per cent of road deaths are occurring on regional roads. We only have 25 per cent of the population, but we have 60 per cent of the road deaths. That is a disgrace.

A family who came into my office just this last week with two children were going on a little holiday for the weekend in my electorate with a caravan and their four-wheel drive. They hit a pothole and smashed up into a tree; the caravan took off the other way. They are so lucky to be alive, and it was definitely a pothole. They have got photos to prove it. A police report, they told me, had written in it that it was caused by potholes, so the government cannot continue to deny our roads are causing the damage that they are. They are responsible, and they cannot keep denying it. I have mentioned roads in the last decade in this place 2691 times, because they are important in our electorate.

 Tim RICHARDSON (Mordialloc) (17:01): What an extraordinary MPI we have been offered up this afternoon by the member for Gippsland South: that this house notes the state of Victorian roads. Well, I will tell you, the road to nowhere is over that side, a One Nation–Liberal coalition, because we know about the false start tour around the state – going all over the place, not taking media sometimes, not taking the press pack out to have a chat, no policy announcements out there, just sort of running into a cafe, going into your local Coles, going to the servo and no new announcements, because the reality is there are no new announcements under the Liberal–One Nation coalition opposition because they do not have any coin. They have committed to $40 billion in cuts. They have announced their cash surplus. And to the credit of the member for Kew and Leader of the Opposition, the member for Kew does not deny that there is going to be a $40 billion black hole.

Let us go through this MPI. Let us go through; it is very short. It is very quick, isn’t it, this one? You know when opposition offices are a bit light on and they are a bit distracted? They have got all of about 18 words in this one. Remember when they used to write War and Peace about how bad the government was? They have dropped off a bit. So to those across the road on Spring Street: at least give us a bit more colour and flavour when you want to give us a smack; at least give us a little more in this.

The notion that we have not invested in road maintenance does not stack up in the budget when you read through it – the more than $1 billion allocation that was made in the Victorian budget, the hundreds of thousands of potholes that will be filled, the workers that are out there each and every day. It might shock you, it might come as a surprise, that I used to paint lines on roads back in the day. I was not an asphalter, but I would get the smell. You would go, ‘Hello, there’s something going on here. We’re filling roads. It won’t be long before the line markers are out and about.’ And so for years, when the asphalt went down or there was resurfacing, I would be deployed out there. There are a few wobbly ones out there still with my name on them. But there are tons and tons of asphalt going down now that are backed in by workers and their contractors that are funded by the work that we are doing on that. That is what Labor governments do. They invest in infrastructure; they invest in our roads and our rail. And we see this across each and every part of our state.

I know it is hard arithmetic over that side. Remember, the then shadow finance minister and now Leader of the Opposition and Shadow Treasurer said the quiet bit out loud when she acknowledged that substantial cuts would be made to Victoria and our services, in health and education, across the state. She said that to Steve Price on Sky News, that great Labor bastion of a network – you know Sky News, the only thing we have in common. They are now News 24; they have rebranded. I saw that the other day; News 24 they now are. But we saw that the Leader of the Opposition committed to substantial cuts to education and health. Well, now we see that it just does not stack up that they would put any money – a 25 per cent increase, they say – on the road maintenance funding. Tell me how you can take billions out of revenue. From revenue you will not take any more. You cut the public service and you take funds out, and then you commit to a cash surplus that means you cannot do any infrastructure. Show me on a spreadsheet, those opposite. Show me how it stacks up that you have got any coin to invest in anything.

This false start tour, this false promise that was put forward by those opposite, does not stack up at all. Once again we see that there is literally no policy narrative or engine room. The member for Kew has had over a year now since tearing down the then very popular member for Berwick and has seen the primary vote cascade down to the 24 to 25 per cent region. That is what we see now. Angus Taylor in federal Parliament is far worse, with around 17 or 18 per cent. They have been captured by One Nation. In trying to be populist and in trying to see the next headline in the Herald Sun, they have lost that policy engine room and have lost that edge, and so we now see policy made on the run. It is not a substantive policy, this roads funding commitment they have put forward. They clearly did not see how substantial the government’s funded and allocated portfolio is on road maintenance. It is not really a headturner; it is a few hundred million over four years. It is literally topping up a little bit of the forward estimates. It is not a big gravitas piece that you would put forward.

Then they had the audacity to commit to the reheated microwave policy of the member for Bulleen from when he was opposition leader – you know, the one with the 25 per cent regional guarantee. That is his brainchild that one. They got that out. They said, ‘Oh, let’s get the microwave dinner out. Let’s run that one again because we do not have anything new to put forward to our party conference.’ So they reheated that one. In about five or six key policy areas, including road maintenance, you actually see a cut in those commitments. The 25 per cent ceiling of funding that they would put into regional areas, particularly in education and health, is a real cut in those areas. Before they came up with their false start tour, their false promises tour, this was also a cut to that aspiration in the funding that has been put forward. This is again reheating some of the key lines that have been put forward by those opposite.

The coalition is in utter chaos at the moment. We see now some of the polling saying that the only pathway to government is via Queensland Senator Pauline Hanson and One Nation. It is a terrifying prospect. I said it in a grievance debate if you tuned in a little while ago. I said to them that they had to stand up to it, even though Tony Abbott was pleading with the Liberals to do a deal with One Nation. There is an absence of that. It is a Nationals member of Parliament, the Leader of the Nationals, who has raised this matter of public importance. You do not see Tony Abbott asking for a coalition with the Nationals and One Nation. You do not see that at all. They have already written them off. One Nation has written off the Nationals into the future. So if the Liberals have a coalition with One Nation, who is going to be advocating for the regions? Well, it will not be One Nation. They will be absolutely in chaos going forward. Who is going to front up for road maintenance? It is going to have to be, again, our Labor government supporting the regions. We have more regional MPs in this Parliament than those opposite. This is the kind of thing that we need to consider going forward.

An MPI like this is a joke. When you see their legacy of the past, the cutting back of road project funding in the Baillieu–Napthine era, you see underinvestment consistently. We see, if anything, that the Leader of the Opposition has endorsed the funding that has been put forward – you know, the 25 ‍per cent difference; she actually endorses that.

You can see some of the investments that we have made in roads in my region in my community. Those opposite completely opposed the Mordialloc Freeway. Then when they thought that it might be a good thing, they were going to run it halfway up the alignment and stop it at Lower Dandenong Road. That was talked about. It was actually on a map from the Hamer government of plans from long ago, and it was meant to run all the way through to Moorabbin and beyond. It was a Labor government that invested in that project. There was great opposition to it from some of those opposite, who talked down that program. It was going to be the Mordialloc bypass but was delivered as the Mordialloc Freeway, and that was a substantial investment in our community. We have seen the resurfacing and paving at Station Street and the Nepean Highway in my community. We are building Mordialloc for the future and our constituents. There has been huge resurfacing through there as we have removed level crossings, upgraded our local roads and improved intersection connections.

This MPI does not stack up, and it is just some of the tired, lazy effort that we have become used to, unfortunately. When I saw it, I will tell you, I was a bit excited. I thought, ‘Is it our MPI this week? Is it the government’s MPI?’ It was not ours. I thought, ‘Who’s coming up with it? Let’s see some of the effort that’s been put forward.’ And I was just terribly disappointed. I have fond affection for the Leader of the Nationals, the member for Gippsland South. I am going to say that he might not have written this one, because I think there would have been a little more depth – just a little more colour and movement and a little more flavour – than just to condemn the government in the absence of reality or of the fact that there is $1 billion allocated each year, hundreds of thousands of potholes filled, a significant amount of work going in and thousands of workers across our state on road projects that are upgrading and maintaining our roads into the future.

Is there more to do? Of course. We have had challenges in cost escalation across road projects that have seen $1 billion not go as far as it could a few years ago. That is the environment that we are in. That is why we are putting more funding in and more support into the future. That is why we need the workforce to meet the requirements of that investment. But the notion that there has been neglect or waste does not stack up in reality. Time and time again this government’s investment has been shown in the contribution that has been made and in the impacts on those communities. And once again – maybe it is the member for Bulleen who is next or the member for Lowan – tell us how a cash surplus and cuts of $40 billion add up to the ability, with a revenue base deteriorating, to invest more. If any of those opposite can explain those economics to any of us – those economic wizards over there – just let us know how that stacks up, and we will give you a listen.

 Emma KEALY (Lowan) (17:11): It is always a great pleasure to be able to raise again and correct the history on what Labor have done to our roads, because while we might have heard Labor members speaking to this matter of public importance and saying what a great job they are doing on our road network, I would invite any of them to step outside the tram network of Melbourne and go out and actually see firsthand the dilapidated state of our rural and regional roads. It is not just one or two potholes. It is not just one or two crumbling edges. It is not one or two instances of rutting or of cracks or of areas where there is no roadside maintenance or maintenance of the water run-off through that area. It is actually now throughout my entire electorate of Lowan and across the entirety of the road network in rural and regional Victoria. This is a problem that is of Labor’s own doing, because if you cut funding to road asset maintenance in the budget, as I have seen in each and every budget since I was first elected 12 years ago, then, guess what, your roads end up in worse condition.

In my electorate of Lowan it is a running joke that you do not drive on the left side of the road, you drive on what is left of the road. For many of my roads you can walk down there – because it is too dangerous to drive there – and pick up where some of the issues are. People are driving on both sides of the road because it is simply so dangerous now. You look at it, and it is like a patchwork quilt. We are not seeing roads rebuilt from the base up. The infrastructure underneath the road top is completely broken and falling apart, and this is why we have this endless cycle of more and more potholes filled. I note the member for Mordialloc said that they were filling potholes. This is the problem. It is consistent filling of potholes, but they get broken up almost immediately because there is no test or scrutiny around the quality of the workmanship that is going into those pothole fills. We are not seeing the investment to do the job once and do it right to rebuild our roads from the base up. This is what we see time and time again. In fact I have seen it with my own eyes in Penshurst. I could not believe it. One day I pulled up for a mobile office session, sat down and a ute pulled up. They got a shovel out, shovelled some hot mix out of the back, put it into the pothole, one stomp of the boot and off they went back out in their ute to find the next one. It literally was not even compacted fully. About 1 ‍minute later a log truck came through that exact section of road and blew it all out completely. That is how long road asset maintenance works under Labor, and the truth is it just is not working. It is actually costing the people of Lowan an enormous amount of money.

For example, I talked to Judy of Lake Bolac recently. She is currently doing a regular commute to Melbourne for cancer treatment, and we know that that is a heavy burden for anybody – it is not just the physical impact, it is the mental impact as well. But what makes it even harder is when you have the additional expense of your tyres blowing out or damage to your rims, and this is exactly what has happened to Judy. In fact Judy has blown seven tyres during her cancer treatment, and she has damaged four rims on her car. While you are not working, while you are already going through the pressures of getting cancer treatment, this is the last thing that anybody would ever want. This is not an isolated incident that is just on the roads that Judy uses from Lake Bolac to Melbourne. I have heard this recently as well from people who use the Western Highway. I have heard it from people in Horsham and even in Rainbow, where tyres and rims are being damaged because they cannot access the health care that they need close to home in the Wimmera region. They have to travel to either Ballarat or Melbourne to get those services that they used to be able to access in their local community or in Horsham. They have to drive much further, but then people are blowing out tyres on the way, and so the cost to delayed health care is then on top of the added expense of having to repair their vehicle, because they have to travel much, much further to access health care.

We have so many instances right across my electorate. Donald of Mumbannar is so deeply concerned about the state of the Princes Highway near Dartmoor that he contacted my office with significant concerns because vehicles, including trucks and loaded logging trucks, were always driving on the wrong side of the road, putting everybody at risk of a head-on accident because they are simply trying to avoid potholes. But for those drivers there is less risk in crossing onto the wrong side of the road and risking a head-on collision than there is driving through the deep potholes through the area that riddle the left side of the road. Daniel of Rainbow has contacted me, concerned about the serious safety risks of the Birchip-Rainbow Road, where gravel shoulders have a 12-inch drop in places. This is a road that is regularly used by trucks filled with grain. For anybody who has ever been in a truck or understands how a loaded grain truck moves with any ripple, if you go off the edge in a loaded grain truck, it will shift your load. When you have a shifting load, it is basically like the whole centre of gravity is moving across your truck, and you are at extreme risk of a rollover or losing control of your vehicle to go on the opposite side of the road if you overcorrect. It is an incredibly dangerous situation.

I have seen firsthand some of these roads. I have travelled in a truck with Ryan Milgate, who is now the Victorian Farmers Federation president, to look at some of these exact roads, and being in that truck, you can feel how dangerous it is. You have to get into the white-knuckle position to hold onto that steering wheel because you have got such a narrow section of road left because of the crumbling edges, and when you have a truck coming in the other direction, you just have to hope and pray that you are not going to have an accident. These are also roads that are used by our school bus network. These are not roads that are optional for our people to travel on; these are roads that we use each and every day. We use them to get to work, we use them to take our kids to school, we use them to get to football and netball training and we also use them to get our produce to market. They are not optional for us. They are an essential part of how we connect to business, how we connect to education and how we connect to our community, our friends and our family. Yet under Labor we are just seeing extreme neglect. It has gone too far and is putting lives at risk, and too many lives have been lost.

One of the worst roads in my electorate, and even further on from my electorate, is the Western Highway, a highway that should have been duplicated over 10 years ago but still remains undone, although all of a sudden, in the lead-up to the election, we have seen a redirection of planning money for bypasses around Ararat and Beaufort to be redirected to finally have a section of road duplicated, which should have been done a long time ago. By now the Western Highway should have been duplicated to the South Australian border. We are hundreds of kilometres away from that being achieved.

Greg of Edenhope has contacted me concerned about the Coleraine-Edenhope Road and its deep structural crevices on that big dipper section just out of Coleraine. I know that stretch. Penrose has also been a big advocate around getting this fixed, and he has recently organised a large number of community members to actually take a stand and say, ‘This isn’t good enough, Labor.’ We need to make sure our roads are fit for purpose. You need to make sure that your car is roadworthy; we need to ensure that our roads are carworthy. Wendy of Jeparit is concerned about the already perilous state of the Jeparit-Warracknabeal Road, which will only deteriorate further when nearby renewables developments are up and running because this road will be used to get materials to the project.

There are so many examples that I could go through, but it just reflects what happens to roads under a Labor government that simply does not care about rural and regional Victoria. I am so proud that a Wilson–O’Brien Nationals and Liberals government will deliver $5 billion to fix our crumbling road network. This is important not only to ensure that local people have access to a safe road network but also to make sure we can get our goods to market safely. This is something that we should see as not just an election commitment; it is something that should be embedded to make sure that every government understands that rural and regional people count. It is time for a fresh start in Victoria. It is time to say that we have had enough of Labor wrecking this state and particularly underselling regional Victoria. We are sick of not getting our fair share of infrastructure funding – getting only 12 ‍per cent of the infrastructure budget when we represent 25 per cent of the state’s population. I look forward to the November election because the Nationals have got a clear plan to make sure we get our fair share of investment in country Victoria. After November we will see, finally, a Liberals and Nationals government that will deliver for rural and regional people to make sure that our communities are supported, our people are supported and our key businesses are supported and that we can get on with rebuilding Victoria from the disastrous effects of a Labor government that is tired and old.

 Nina TAYLOR (Albert Park) (17:21): I certainly welcome a discussion about roads. No question, they are extraordinarily important for cars and bikes and buses and trucks et cetera – the whole spectrum of vehicles. Whether it is erring on active transport or whether it is your heavy trucks et ‍cetera, it is really important that roads are well maintained. So I am very happy to discuss that but also to get down to the facts on this issue, because I think when we are talking about fellow Victorians, it is important for them to know exactly what is being invested and compare and contrast with history ‍– that is, of the opposition claims versus reality. I think that is really important. This is a good opportunity to really nut that through, and I welcome that.

Firstly, it should be noted that Labor is spending more on roads than any government in Victoria’s history: $1.04 billion this year alone, and, just to allay the concerns of the member who just spoke, with 70 per cent going to regional Victoria. We were talking about proportionality, and I think it is very fair to raise that. I appreciate the sheer distances that people in regional Victoria have to travel to get to and from some of the basic things that they need, as opposed to someone like me who lives in Southbank and can walk over the road to the supermarket. I am very respectful of that and the distances that people travel, hence the emphasis on this very important issue. But just to reiterate, 70 per cent is going to regional Victoria, and so mathematically we can see that that is a significant proportion that is being allocated to regional parts of our state. I think we should all note also that when the Liberals were last in it was all about cuts to jobs, to maintenance crews and to the regional roads workforce. I think it is important when we are having this discussion that we look at reality rather than creating a different perspective on the past that does not actually reflect what transpired.

Drilling down to exactly what the Victorian government is investing in roads – and I will also discuss last year and not only this year, because there were comments about how it is only because of the election, but I think, again, it is important to look at the record as it stands – we have doubled the road maintenance budget from what the Liberals and Nationals last invested to more than $1.04 billion in this year’s budget. If we look back at the past – and I will go into this further – the Liberals and Nationals slashed funding and sacked 450 VicRoads staff.

I know there are some tired old tropes that get repeated around this chamber from those opposite who make the inference that public servants just shuffle papers; they do not really have much of a role to fulfil. We heard some sharp criticism about the way in which the road maintenance crews are repairing the roads as well. Certainly I am not someone who would have a clue about how to repair roads, so I am not here in any way to enunciate, dictate or clarify that in the chamber, because it will serve no purpose. However, I think that one should be a little cautious about how we reflect on those who are doing the hard yards, those hardworking road crews who are out there actually filling and repairing the potholes and resurfacing and doing all the hard work that enables us to use our vehicles or our bikes et cetera, our buses on the roads, getting to and from where we need to every day.

The 2026–27 budget invests over a billion dollars. This is including an additional $560 million approved in this budget and following nearly a billion dollars in each of the past two budgets. Just to rebut that inference that somehow it is all 2 minutes before midnight with an election in November, we can see nearly a billion dollars in each of the last two budgets. I think it is just important to reflect on the facts as they stand. This follows the $976 million better roads blitz this past year, with 70 per cent of all funding directed to regional roads. So again we can see, if we are looking at proportionality, the maths is quite stark there. It is quite apparent.

Under the 2024–25 program alone crews repaired more than 211,000 potholes, including major rehabilitation, resurfacing and pothole repairs; mowed and slashed over 50,000 kilometres of grass; replaced almost 41,000 signs; cleaned more than 20,727 square metres of graffiti from the network; inspected more than 8000 structures; and repaired more than 3000 safety barriers on major highways. This year’s program is on track to remove a further 200,000 potholes, with 187,000 already fixed. The budget also invests $102.6 million in vital road projects statewide, $29.2 million in metro Melbourne and $73.4 million in regional Victoria. Again, the proportionality issue is very important, so I am just going to repeat that: $29.2 million in metro Melbourne and $73.4 million in regional Victoria. On the most basic maths we can see the apparent proportionality there on top of maintenance funding, fixing bad intersections and more.

When the Liberals were last in government – I think this is why we are all a little curious about this particular MPI, because they talk a big game and it sounds really, really good, to be honest. The Liberals are promising $5 billion over four years, a 25 per cent increase – oh, but hang on a minute – while simultaneously promising to find $40 billion in cuts elsewhere in the budget to fund their other pledges. I am not sure – giving, taking, giving, taking – how does the math pan out there? Again, it is quite perplexing. We know that the Leader of the Opposition is going to cut $40 billion and one in seven public servants, including from the very Department of Transport and Planning that would have to deliver this promise. So how are they going to deliver it with those kinds of savage cuts? Again, if we are talking about reality and how this will pan out, it is really important to drill down to the facts: the opposition leader cannot do this without cutting essential services. So really, when you look at the maths, this is not a plan to repair roads; it is all about cuts.

Looking at history, I did say it is important to look at history. I welcome these debates. As I say, in this way we can actually compare and contrast, and this is important for the broader community. I am not sure how many of the community are watching us here and now – you never know, there might be a couple – but at least we will be on the record in Hansard. In this state whilst in office they cut 450 ‍jobs from VicRoads, they cut 70 TAC jobs in Geelong and they cut maintenance funding for roads across every single VicRoads region – a $100 million cut.

They also cut compensation for grieving families of road accident victims and to emergency services workers suffering post-traumatic stress disorder. They scrapped the safe driver discount rewards scheme for drivers over the age of 26. They scrapped Labor’s truck action plan, which would have delivered a new truck link from the West Gate Freeway to the Port of Melbourne, taking trucks off residential streets.

If we are thinking about what it is they are promising versus what they will actually do, the best way to assess current behaviour is to look at past behaviour, and we can see from their record it was about cuts. In fact it is our Labor government who is delivering significantly more, as I said from the outset, when it comes to road maintenance literally as we speak, with a significantly higher proportion – and that is appropriate, I should say – going to regional Victoria. So contrast and compare reality versus promises and past behaviour with present behaviour. You can see why on this side of the house we really do not believe that they will fulfil the promises here: one, because they have already forecast $40 billion worth of cuts so the maths simply does not add up, and secondly, because they have form in this space in terms of not delivering and cutting.

 Wayne FARNHAM (Narracan) (17:31): I am pleased to rise today on the matter of public importance put forward by the member for Gippsland South. It is quite short, and rightly so:

That this house notes the appalling state of Victorian roads and condemns the Labor government for more than a decade of cuts to road maintenance, neglect and waste.

I will note that the member for Mordialloc, when he got up to speak, said this is very short, that it is normally a War and Peace version of things. Well, it does not need to be long when the evidence is so obvious, and that is the point. The member for Mordialloc – I did not know this about him – let us know that he used to paint roads. Well, I am not making any imputations on the member for Mordialloc, but I think a few of the fumes might have affected his judgement in his contribution. That is not an imputation; that is a concern. It is just concern about your health and safety.

It is interesting. Today we are up talking about roads. Again, I am going to reference the member for Mordialloc because he gives me a fair bit of ammunition. The member for Mordialloc got up and stated that the Labor Party have more regional MPs than this side of the chamber, and that might be the case. It is probably an accurate description, but what is interesting at the moment is the speakers from that side of the chamber have all been city speakers. We have had Werribee, Pascoe Vale, Mordialloc and Albert Park preaching to regional MPs about roads. Why do not you get the regional MPs up on that side of the chamber to talk about roads? You want to know why they are not doing that? It is because those MPs could not put that on their socials, because their communities would say that is not quite accurate. That is why all the speakers so far have been city speakers, not regional speakers. I may be surprised; one may get pulled out of the woodwork for the last contribution of the day, but I doubt it. I doubt it because the regional MPs have probably said, ‘No, this MPI is right. Drive through my electorate.’

The member for Werribee gave us a lecture about what ‘asphalt’ means and Greek and whatever, and he went into the –

A member interjected.

Wayne FARNHAM: No, I tend not to listen to the member for Werribee, because he bores me after a while. It is boring. But he talked about how roads are built and everything else. He went into great detail. He went down there – it is probably the only time in his life he has seen a road crew – and said, ‘What is that stuff down there?’ And they said, ‘Well, that is class 3 crushed rock, and you have got 40 mil of that, and then class 2 with 20 mil to create the road surfaces.’

John Lister interjected.

Wayne FARNHAM: That is education for you, member for Werribee. I just said I will enlighten you on that. It has been interesting, the contributions from those opposite today, because they have not touched the real purpose of this MPI and the reason why we have brought this MPI forward: because the condition of our roads is very, very poor – extremely poor. When you get out of the city and you get into the regions, that is when you see the real effects of it. The member for Polwarth got up earlier, as did the member for South-West Coast. I was on a committee inquiry into housing in regional Victoria. I had to drive through their electorates, and I will put this on the record: they have the worst roads in the state. Those road networks down the south-west coast are absolutely terrible, right up through to Colac. They are horrendous, absolutely horrendous. When you drive on them you are dodging potholes, and you cannot go any faster than 80 kilometres an hour. They are bad.

A constituent of mine rang me. When you get a damaged tyre or a damaged rim, you can claim compensation from the government. I am happy to be corrected on the number, but I think it is about $1200 or something, or $1400, and then you pay everything after that. That is fine. But this constituent of mine is a pensioner, and a responsible pensioner has his car insured. He hit one pothole one day, and he had to pay $500 excess on the insurance. Then a little while later he was towing his boat and he hit another pothole, which caused about $4000 or $5000 damage to his boat, and he had to pay the excess on the insurance for that, which was about $700. This poor pensioner, who is not on a great wage, has just forked out $1200 in excess for his insurance but cannot get that compensated. I think that is a little bit rough. If he did not have the insurance, he could have claimed right up to the threshold, but he did. This poor fellow in my electorate was out of pocket $1200, through no fault of his own, through the condition of the roads, and this is the problem. The government is spruiking a big game on roads but delivering very little, and this is the issue.

The 2026–27 budget revealed Labor has reduced the targets for regional road resurfacing and rehabilitation by more than 75 per cent. That is a massive reduction. So you cannot sit there and say, ‘We’re investing in roads, we’re doing this, we’re doing that,’ when you are cutting the delivery by 75 per cent. You cannot make this up. Well, that side does make it up, and that is the problem. The budget figures this year demonstrate road patching in regional Victoria is forecast to plunge from 556,000 square metres two years ago to 76,000 square metres, an 86 per cent drop in road maintenance. So you cannot stand on that side of the chamber and say, ‘We’re doing a great job of roads in regional Victoria, or in Victoria as a whole.’

In my area, when you get to Pakenham East, to the Bunyip River, you drive along that 15-kilometre stretch and you have seven different speed zones on a major highway in this state. Why – because of the dangerous condition of the road, because of the potholes that have not been fixed. We had last year a pothole at Nar Nar Goon – and the Minister for Ports and Freight at the table will acknowledge this because I spoke to her about it – where 30-something cars hit that pothole and were on the side of the road trying to fix it. Then a member in the other place, Ms Terpstra, said, ‘No, it wasn’t there. I went down to get some chickens, and I didn’t see it.’ I think she might have had bird flu that day, because when you have got 30-odd cars lined up on the side of the road changing their tyres in the rain, there is a problem with the condition of the roads. Just last week another person at Bunyip hit a pothole on the side of the road and was fixing their tyre again. This is not unusual in regional Victoria. This is common.

The problem is that when you have got a pothole and it is in winter, if you do not fix it and fix it properly and you leave that pothole unattended through the wetter months of the year, that pothole becomes greater and greater. The moisture gets into the subsurface of the road and starts to dissipate that subsurface. If anyone in this chamber has ever built roads – I have built roads; I have built car parks – then they know the right process to do it. You can fix potholes in winter; you have just got to do it right. But this is the problem with the government: they do not do it right. They leave things way too long. The maintenance program on our roads and our road verges in this state has been neglected for a very long time, and unfortunately regional Victorians are paying the price, not just on their travel away from home or trying to get home in a reasonable timeframe but in the back pocket when they have to fix their tyres constantly and with the frustration of trying to get home and being unable to get home safely.

This government has failed when it comes to roads and road maintenance and road resurfacing. They have failed dismally. That is why under a Wilson-led Liberal–National government we have announced that we will be investing $5 billion in the roads, a 25 per cent increase on the current forward estimates, and we have to do that. I got asked by the local media: why such a big investment? And it was quite simple: the roads are stuffed and someone has to fix them. That is why we have that $5 billion commitment on roads, and we need to do that. Yes, 25 per cent of that will go to regional Victoria. We have a 25 per cent regional infrastructure guarantee into regional Victoria because it is required. I tell you what, come 28 November, if people in this state want better roads, they should vote for Liberal–Nationals.

 Steve McGHIE (Melton) (17:42): I rise in response to this matter of public importance raised by the member for Gippsland South, and I think I am the last speaker from this side of the house. This matter asks the house to condemn a government that has invested more in Victorian roads than any other government in our state’s history. It certainly asks Victorians to believe that the opposition suddenly has all the answers on roads. We can hear it in all the expert advice over there on building roads. I thought he was a builder; I did not think he was a road builder. But of course we had someone that painted lines on roads, so that was pretty important too.

Of course this debate comes down to one simple question, and that is: who do Victorians trust to deliver us the roads that they need? I am certain that they trust our government over the opposition. We have invested $1.04 billion this year alone out of the budget on maintaining our roads, rebuilding the highways, repairing potholes and making roads safer. Again, I know how important it is, with my background as a paramedic, to have safe roads. I know that we have also invested money in safer roads and given money to councils. I think it is on average about $2 million to all 79 councils to make roads safer – safety that prevents risk to drivers on the road, which is really important.

Those opposite are saying that they are going to make a major investment in roads, but while they are saying that they are also stating that they will have $40 billion cut from the state budget, which does not seem to add up – $5 billion in roads maintenance and then cutting $40 billion from their budget. At some point those promises collide with reality, and the reality is that when governments make cuts at that scale, infrastructure suffers, maintenance suffers and communities miss out. We have seen it all before. We have seen the history of what they have done. Our government has taken a completely different approach. This year’s budget invested, as I said earlier, $1.04 billion in road maintenance. It is the highest investment Victoria has ever made. That follows a billion dollars each year in the previous two budgets, and it also includes another $560 million announced this year to continue repairing, resurfacing and rebuilding roads across the state.

I drive the Western Freeway through to Ballarat most days, and I have got to say, while there might be some potholes – and generally it is due to rain and the massive trucks that are on the road, damaging our roads – the travel is pretty good and very safe. I have never had an issue with potholes on the Western Freeway all the way through to Ballarat. If it is past Ballarat that is the issue, then that may be the case, but I have never seen it.

Our government has made real investments in improving our roads. With the opposition the facts tell a different story. We have shown that crews have repaired more than 211,000 potholes, and they have resurfaced roads across the state. They have replaced thousands of road signs and they have repaired safety barriers, and we know the importance of those safety barriers. They have saved lives. When safety barriers have been knocked down that obviously has occurred because cars have run into them, but that has saved lives. It has been proven that they save lives. I know that motorcycle riders are against them, but again, they are life savers. And yes, they have to be repaired, constantly repaired, and that is not an easy task to do. We have done 50,000 kilometres of roadside vegetation to improve safety for our motorists, and this year we are on track to repair another 200,000 potholes. It is not an exciting task. Road maintenance is not very exciting. I do not know what line marking is like, but road maintenance is not very exciting, and it certainly does not generate headlines. But there is always more to be done, and we will continue to do it as a government that is delivering on road maintenance and road repairs. It takes time, and it is a massive network to try and maintain. In having good roads, with people driving to work, taking their kids to school, running businesses and doing courier deliveries and those sorts of things, it is important for all of us to have good road maintenance and good road safety. Our government will continue to invest year after year in preventative maintenance, and it will save taxpayers money in the long run. It delivers safer roads and reduces injury and death on our roads.

Let us compare the opposition’s record. They would rather talk about today than talk about their history and what happened in the past and the last coalition –

Cindy McLeish interjected.

Steve McGHIE: When you were in government you did not do anything in four years. That is why you have been in opposition for such a long time. The last time the coalition was in government – it was a long time ago, thank God – they cut around 450 VicRoads jobs. They also cut $100 million from road maintenance. They slashed resurfacing targets across regional Victoria. That is just not rhetoric. They are the facts; that is the record. Maybe they do not remember that. I know it is hard to remember when you have not been in government for a long time, and you do not like to hear those facts, of course. If you cut budgets on roads then they will deteriorate, and we saw that during their time. When you lose those experienced staff that were road maintenance workers – as I say, the 450 ‍positions – then that is going to take its toll also in maintenance of roads. The opposition has announced a multibillion-dollar roads promise. Again, it sounds impressive until you start questioning, trying to seek some answers about it. Where is the money coming from? How do you fund billions in additional road spending while cutting $40 billion from the state budget? Which projects get defunded? Which communities miss out? None of those questions have been answered, and there have been no explanations in regard to how they are going to deliver their road maintenance program while they have massive budget cuts. Even rural councils in Victoria have questioned that and tried to get answers in regard to the opposition’s announcement, and they have not got the answers. We hear the preaching in this house by the opposition about how they are going to support regional areas, but we cannot get any accurate details in regard to what their plans are.

I have got to talk about a couple of things in my electorate in regard to roads and things like that. It is important where some links come together. We have just opened up and removed the 92nd level crossing, at Ferris Road in Cobblebank. I know a couple of weeks earlier the Hopkins Road level crossing was opened, and that was the 91st. We have got another two in Melton happening, one at Exford Road and one at Coburns Road, and of course the new Melton railway station is opening up in September. They will all be open by the end of September. The road network there improves traffic flow and safety in Melton alone.

We have done a couple of big intersections in Melton in regard to upgrading the Coburns Road and High Street intersection from a massive roundabout. The busiest intersection in Melton has been improved by having a lighted intersection. It is really important to have those sorts of upgrades. Norton Drive and High Street is another important upgrade, and we continue to do that. There is constant work on our roads around Melton. I know there was some reference from the member for Narracan saying that it is only metropolitan speakers that have got up on our side of the house, and we would not have a clue about regional roads. Well, that is not quite true. I have some regional roads in my electorate within the Moorabool shire at Bacchus Marsh, Hopetoun Park, Parwan and those types of areas – Exford, Eynesbury and down towards Ballan Road. The member for Werribee spoke earlier, our lead speaker, and he has some regional and rural roads. So we do have that experience of not only metropolitan roads. We do have that experience of those other roads, not just metropolitan roads. This MPI, as I say, was put up by the member for Gippsland South, and I reject it.

 Cindy McLEISH (Eildon) (17:52): The reason this matter of public importance has been put forward is because the roads are in an appalling state in Victoria. I think most people do know that, but a lot of people are happy to have their head in the sand. The member for Melton was talking about facts and saying that people are scared to put facts on the table. Well, let me give you a couple. The 2026–27 budget revealed Labor has reduced targets for regional road resurfacing and rehabilitation by more than 75 per cent, from 11.8 million square metres in 2021–22 to just 2.9 million square metres in 2026–27. There is a fact. Budget figures this year demonstrate road patching in regional Victoria is forecast to plunge from 556,000 square metres two years ago to just 76,000 square metres – an 86 per cent drop over two years. There are a couple of facts, and I will give you a third. The new Premier was the minister responsible for roads and road safety when regional road surfacing fell by more than a third. Under his watch the department missed its own regional resurfacing target and in 2023 did not set a target at all. I am happy to table the documents that show that.

Roads, and bad roads, are something that I am all too familiar with. I hear this constantly from constituents who ring me, who email me and who stop me in the street. They are not only constituents, actually. People travelling through will stop and duck into the public toilet near my office and come in and tell me about the bad roads as well. Other MPs tell me, my friends tell me constantly, my family tell me constantly, and I know firsthand because I travel these roads extensively. It was only maybe one or two months ago that I had three punctures in the space of one month. One of them involved a tow truck having to travel on a Saturday afternoon. I was lucky to get that repaired. Then I was introduced to that magic spray you can shove in your tyres to get you to Fast Freddies in Healesville, who do a remarkable job.

But it does not matter what it is about our roads; there are so many elements that are appalling. We have got the centre rope barriers near me and between Yea and Molesworth. They are damaged. I have counted up to 50 dings in there. There are too many to count, really. Multiple barriers are down. Some of them have no guards at all; they are just the wire. Some of them we have got orange plastic things. We have trees growing in between them. The trees are at least 1.5 metres high and 1.5 metres wide. That must undermine the road surface. There are trees that have fallen that stay just on the edge of the road and do not get removed. Dumped rubbish litters our roadways.

We have got no line markings in a certain spot in Kinglake, which is a dreadful area for fog. The line markings in some areas are so faded you cannot see them. The cat’s eyes are damaged and broken, and in an area that is windy, that is dangerous across the top of the mountain, this is something that should be attended to immediately. The sidelines on the Black Spur are difficult. It is a tricky road to navigate, and it would be very easy to pop off the sides if you could not see the roadside lines or the cat’s eyes, and they are covered in debris as well.

We have got all of these issues. We have got cracked, crumbling surfaces and crumbling shoulders. We are losing some seals. We have blocked drains. There was a blocked drain on the Healesville-Yarra Glen Road for way too long. Every time it rained, it flooded and you would have to veer onto the other side of the road. We have got landslips in spots that really concern me at Castella and at Cottons Pinch at Killingworth. The potholes themselves are extraordinary. There are some that I saw in Kinglake the other day that are a tiny series, but it will not take long before they are a very large series of potholes. There are some at Castella on the Melba Highway that are so large that you need to veer onto the other side of the road. The problem and the real danger with that is that you are on double lines coming around a bend and you cannot easily see oncoming traffic. If it is dusk, if there are shadows on the road, sometimes people cannot even see the potholes. When it is wet, that is even worse.

In the Nillumbik shire the Eltham-Yarra Glen Road needs works. Diamond Creek Road got fixed not so long ago, but it was in a dreadful state. In Hurstbridge the traffic speeds through the town. They need to have road safety treatments there to make it safer for road users and pedestrians. In the Murrindindi shire at Cathkin there are huge potholes. Some were just recently filled, but many are still there. Between Yea and Molesworth and on to Yarck, the potholes are incredible. I have mentioned across the Slide at Kinglake. At Devlins Bridge a farmer who owns a property there, a local councillor, mentioned to me the other day that the day before he saw three people pulled over because they had hit potholes. The Maroondah Highway in Maindample has been shocking for so long. The Mount Buller Road at Sawmill Settlement and up the mountain – the last time I went up to Mount Buller was in probably March, February, and it was a disgrace. The Midland Highway, all the way from Mansfield to Benalla, the Midland Link Highway, is a shocking piece of road.

In Whittlesea, on the Wallan-Whittlesea Road and the Donnybrook Road there is litter dumped everywhere. There are rubbish, potholes, lousy surfaces and constant road blockages and jams, and it needs to be duplicated. The Epping-Kilmore Road at Wandong, the Plenty Road–Donnybrook Road intersection at Arthurs Creek – I could go on and on with the issues. In the Yarra Ranges there are issues with the Warburton Highway. They are changing speed limits constantly. We need a dedicated right-hand turn outside Launch Fresh, that particularly great business, so that traffic can turn safely without having traffic bump into them from behind onto the Gembrook Road. The Don Road has had a big patchwork between the Home Hotel and Don Valley. The Healesville-Koo-Wee Rup Road has had all sorts of issues. It is patchwork, and it is particularly bad. On the Melba Highway from Coldstream towards Yarra Glen there are a series of potholes that need roadworks as well.

What we do not need is the constant speed reductions because the government are not fixing the roads. Signs are staying up for way too long. Speeds are being reduced. Between Coldstream and Yarra Glen: 100 kilometres an hour, down to 80, now down to 70. It is the same between Merrijig and Sawmill on the Mount Buller Road. The speed limits are being lowered all the time because the roads are not being addressed. I have listened to some of the contributions from members, and particularly the city members. I was listening carefully to the comments of the member for Mordialloc, and I urge him to get out of the city, get out into the regions, go and visit his grandmother in Woori Yallock and ask her. She will tell you. Lorraine knows. Ask Nan, and wish Nan happy birthday for me for tomorrow. But she will tell you how appalling the roads are.

There is so much that needs to be done all across my electorate. My electorate is some 10,000-plus square kilometres, and I can think of every township that has potholes through all sorts of parts that need addressing. It is just not good enough that we have had to put up with this. We are now putting up with a pothole every 100 metres across the state’s road network, and as of May 2026, for the 2025–26 financial year, 592 motorists lodged a claim for compensation due to damage caused by the poor condition of the road, but only 13, or 2 per cent, were successful. I have heard so many people come to me talking about the damage to their cars, to their tyres.

Steve Dimopoulos interjected.

Cindy McLEISH: How many, you would like to know? Probably about 500 people have come and spoken to me over the last few years about the popped tyres, cracked rims and dented surfaces of their cars. I urge those opposite to get out from the tram tracks and have a look at the state of Victorian roads, because you will not be able to deny how bad these roads are.

Business interrupted under resolution of house today.