Thursday, 6 March 2025

 Evan MULHOLLAND (Northern Metropolitan) (17:57): (1492) My adjournment is directed towards the Minister for Transport Infrastructure, and the action I seek is for the minister to finish the planning and get underway stage 2 of the Mickleham Road duplication in my electorate. As the minister is aware, I stand up almost every day while I am in this chamber and speak about traffic issues in the north, and the northern end of Mickleham Road is a good example of that when you have got a government that literally has fast-tracked and improved a brand new 8000-home precinct structure plan in the Craigieburn West PSP but provided no infrastructure to be able to deal with that traffic. They are not learning from the mistakes of places like Kalkallo or places like Beveridge and going, ‘Hey, let’s put in the infrastructure before people actually move in.’ They are repeating all of the same mistakes. The communities around Mickleham Road, particularly around Greenvale, have been expanding rapidly, and there simply is not the infrastructure to support them. I am pleased that, thanks to my advocacy and interventions, we have recently had a win in Greenvale, with the developer Pask Group, Hume City Council and the state government, finally, after a VCAT mediation, agreeing to approve the Providence neighbourhood activity centre, which will allow residents of the Providence estate to have a supermarket and a shopping centre. It has been a long, drawn-out process of over 10 years to make this happen.

We had a situation where this state government wanted supermarket trucks to go through a suburban street, and even when it was modelled that supermarket trucks would go through roundabouts and go down narrow suburban streets, they still did not want another intersection on Mickleham Road. Despite there being plenty of intersections further down and plenty of intersections on Somerton Road and Cooper Street as well, they just did not want one there, which would have denied residents a supermarket. This is a massively growing area, but unfortunately the government is good at building estates but not good at turning those estates into communities.

I particularly want to thank the Greenvale Residents Association and its president Tamara Nolan for her outstanding advocacy. Thanks to Mayor Jarrod Bell, Cr Jim Overend and particularly former mayor of Hume Joseph Haweil for their advocacy and cooperation in helping achieve this outcome for the northern suburbs that Labor MPs and the state government were not able to do. This is a great result for my community in Greenvale.