Wednesday, 3 December 2025

 Joe McCRACKEN (Western Victoria) (19:25): (2199) My adjournment matter is for the Minister for Planning, and it concerns the Ballarat North growth zone. This is a zone which is slated to have 5000 new homes in coming years, and at this point in time there is not the enabling infrastructure to make it a livable area. Anyone that knows that part of the world well will know that currently there are two overpasses over the Western Highway to access that zone, one on Gillies Road and one on Creswick Road. They are very important arterial roads to access those areas. Planning documents that I have seen show that there will need to be a third crossing over the Western Highway to enable good traffic flow and not have gridlock in that particular area. This matter was raised with the Ballarat City Council at their last planning meeting, which from memory I think was on 12 November. They raised a number of significant concerns to the state. Traffic management and the gridlock was one, but there were other concerns about drainage and appropriate infrastructure and public transport. There is a train line that goes right through that area. What I am led to believe is that a lot of the concerns that have been raised to the state have been responded to, but not in an adequate way to address a lot of the key growth issues that are going to transpire over the coming years.

The action that I seek from the minister is an explanation about how she intends to address these issues, because it is just not good enough to say that two crossings over the Western Highway are sufficient. If you want gridlock, that is fine, but it does not cut it for the 5000-plus homes, potentially 10,000 to 15,000 extra residents, in the City of Ballarat that are going to have to go through this. It is already quite congested at the moment, and this is pre growth. I can only imagine what it is going to be like when those stages of growth start to happen. The action that I seek from the minister is to detail how she intends to deal with those challenges to ensure that the people of Ballarat are not going to be left in gridlock in the future, because that would be unacceptable.