Thursday, 15 May 2025

Donnybrook Road, Kalkallo

Wendy LOVELL (Northern Victoria) (01:54): (1632) My adjournment matter is for the Minister for Roads and Road Safety, and the action that I seek is for the minister to guarantee funding for the duplication of Donnybrook Road, the C723, in the 2025–26 state budget and prioritise the construction work on this project. I have spoken many times before about Donnybrook Road, and I will keep speaking about it until real action is taken.

Donnybrook Road is one of the most congested roads in all of suburban Melbourne, and the local residents who travel on the road every day to get to work or drop the kids at school have completely lost all patience with the state Labor government. The road is chronically congested because it is a single-lane country road, but Labor decided to sign off on building tens of thousands of new homes on either side of the road before duplicating it or putting in the necessary infrastructure. Labor did not duplicate the road, they did not build continuous footpaths so people could walk or bike ride to the train station, they did not install bus bays or schedule more bus services and they did not put in enough car parking for all the people who want to catch the train. So everyone is forced to drive on this single-lane former farm track and flyover, which was never designed to handle the current volume of traffic, let alone the exceptional growth that the government is targeting for the area. The road is a perfect example of a classic Labor planning failure. The government signed off on massive housing developments to get their hands on property taxes but did not invest in infrastructure needed to support the growth.

Contrast the horrible traffic conditions on the eastern side of the freeway planned under Labor with the western side of the freeway in Merrifield, where there is a magnificent four-lane road separated by a wide median strip. That is because the western side of Donnybrook Road was duplicated under the watch of the Liberal Party when Matthew Guy was the planning minister, who signed a development contribution agreement to ensure that developers duplicated the road to handle future traffic.

Just before the federal election the Minister for Transport Infrastructure Gabrielle Williams stood next to the Prime Minister as he announced a $125 million investment to, as he said, ‘transform the roundabout at Donnybrook Road and Mitchell Street’, not to duplicate Donnybrook Road, which is the single most important infrastructure project needed in that area – not to duplicate the road but to transform a roundabout that the Victorian government just upgraded at the end of 2023. The Prime Minister also announced they would duplicate the bridge over the Merri Creek but would not commit to duplicating the single-lane bridge over the Hume Freeway, which is actually desperately needed because it is a chronic bottleneck. It is the problem. This government must commit to this project.