Wednesday, 18 October 2023

Wire rope barriers

Bev McARTHUR (Western Victoria) (18:10): (522) My adjournment matter is for the minister for transport and returns to an old theme: the Victorian Auditor-General’s report on Victoria’s regional road barriers 2019–20. It might be a report the minister and his department want to forget. It is difficult to imagine a more damning conclusion: almost $100 million over budget, over time and undermaintained. VAGO found VicRoads:

… failed to properly maintain and monitor the barriers it installed, which increases the risk that they will not perform as intended.

It noted:

If flexible barriers are not properly maintained, then their effectiveness is likely to reduce.

VAGO separately criticised the claimed effectiveness even of undamaged barriers, finding VicRoads did not have strong evidence to support its claims.

The fact that the project was over budget and over time hardly surprised anyone, but what I want to know is how effective the barriers were at preventing crashes and injuries and how much they cost to maintain, both periodically and in response to crashes. Damningly, the Auditor-General’s report showed VicRoads had no proper asset records and could not show ‘key information’ about the ‘location, installation date, state of repair and maintenance schedule’ of their own barriers. You could not make this stuff up. It should be the most basic and simple information conceivable and goes right to the point of my questions on the whole program: how can VicRoads and now the department begin to quantify the success or otherwise of the program if records are not maintained on the number of accidents at each site and on the frequency and cost of accident repair and routine maintenance?

VAGO certainly agreed. Recommendation 6 of their report, tabled now more than three years ago, was to remedy this baffling failure. Yet in response to my constituency question in March this year the minister revealed this has still not been complied with. The latest response revealed in VAGO’s excellent online data dashboard is that the department has collected information on the location of safety barriers and has developed a database to track and store the information. How basic is that? How on earth could it require a VAGO report to tell them to do it? And, worse, the department’s response to VAGO continues: in preparing to launch this tool for use it has been identified that further system development is required, so it is still not complete. The note attached says ‘In progress – due 28/2/2023’. You can probably guess the action I seek – it is pretty simple: Minister, when will the department comply with best practice, common sense and the Auditor-General’s request and assemble the most basic data, and how can any real evaluation be done without it?