Wednesday, 18 October 2023

Midland Highway

Joe McCRACKEN (Western Victoria) (18:22): (526) My adjournment matter is for the Minister for Roads and Road Safety, and it concerns the lack of any decent maintenance that has been done on the Midland Highway. For those that are not aware, and I know that country highways are a bit of a mystery to a lot of those in the government, the Midland Highway goes from Geelong, it does a big circle all the way around Melbourne, it goes up to Shepparton and it ends up in Mansfield. The particular section that I am talking about is the section between Geelong and Ballarat, which is in my electorate and Mrs McArthur’s electorate as well. Between Elaine and Ballarat is a particularly bad section. I have had a number of constituents come to my office and tell me that they have suffered damage on their vehicles because of the surface of the road. One gentleman even said to me that he had to dodge a pothole, probably the size of that desk actually, and in also doing so the car in front of him flicked up one of the witches hats that was on the road – no repairs were being done, mind you – and it shattered the windshield on his car. Unfortunately that did not get to the damage level of, I think, $1500 or whatever it is that VicRoads will cover, so he was left with quite a significant bill.

This is not acceptable. Let me just put that on the record: this sort of treatment of country Victorians is not acceptable. It does not happen in the city. These sorts of things just do not happen at all. But country people have to put up with this every single day. So the action that I seek, to put it simply, is for the minister to fix the Midland Highway, particularly between Elaine and, let us say, Buninyong near Ballarat. There are countless other stories of where constituents have come through and said that they face similar sorts of circumstances – potholes the size of half the side of the road and shoulders that are crumbling. We would not tolerate this on the Monash Freeway, we would not tolerate it on the Tullamarine Freeway, yet we are happy to tolerate it on country highways. Is that really fair and equitable? I thought equality in Victoria was non-negotiable. Well, it actually is negotiable when we talk about roads and those users of our roads. It is certainly not equitable treatment that country people feel, and we deserve decent roads. We deserve to get home safely and we deserve to get our product to market safely. Schoolkids deserve to travel on buses that are on safe roads. It should be non-negotiable, but every single day people have to negotiate their way through potholes and different levels of traffic management strategies, which mind you have not actually been doing anything. It is just not fair, so, Minister, fix the roads.