Thursday, 18 August 2022

Bulla-Diggers Rest Road

Mr FINN (Western Metropolitan) (18:07): (2073) I wish to raise a matter—actually, I was debating which minister I would raise it with, whether it be the Minister for Local Government or the Minister for Roads and Road Safety, but I will go with the minister for roads and maybe they can work together on this particular project. It concerns the Bulla-Diggers Rest Road, which has come to be in quite a state of disrepair. Being the main road between the Calder Highway and Melbourne Airport, it carries significant traffic already. But what is happening now is, because of the works to relocate a bottleneck on Sunbury Road, we are seeing many more vehicles—trucks and cars—travelling on this particular road, and the road surface is crumbling. We are seeing the trucks in particular, the B-doubles—the big ones; you know what I am talking about—and they are carrying very heavy loads of soil to dump at Sunbury Road, and they are causing significant damage to the road as well. Of course we also have the bridge there, which is a single-lane bridge, so only one vehicle can pass at any one time. All in all, it is a very, very unsatisfactory situation.

This is a road, as I understand it, which is under the control of the Hume council. I would expect that if I were to ask the Hume council to do what needs to be done on this road, they would throw their hands up in horror and say, ‘We haven’t got the money. Go away and leave me alone’. Well, the fact of the matter is that this road desperately needs attention. What I am asking the minister for roads to do is speak to his colleague the Minister for Local Government and try to get to a conversation with the Hume council so that some arrangement can be come to so that they can have a situation where the government and the council can perhaps share the outlay of money that needs to be spent on this road to bring it up to scratch. I sincerely hope that that will happen before there is a major accident on this road. There are potholes that are almost as big as spud boxes. They are significant and they are dangerous, and I ask the minister to take this on board, to take this matter under advisement and indeed to fix the surface of Bulla-Diggers Rest Road before we have a major tragedy on that road.