Tuesday, 25 August 2026

 Sarah MANSFIELD (Western Victoria) (22:13): (2723) My adjournment matter is for the Minister for Roads and Road Safety, and the action I seek is for the minister to reverse the extraordinary decision to respond to Victoria’s crumbling roads by selling off more of the state’s maintenance capacity. Victoria’s roads are in a poor state, particularly in regional Victoria, and as a regional MP I spend a lot of time travelling on them. I know how difficult it can be driving on roads covered in potholes. I spent the last few days travelling across western Victoria. I have been to Colac, Warrnambool and Melton, and no matter whether I took the main highways or the back roads, every road was riddled with potholes. Potholes damage cars. They cause crashes, they make long regional journeys more stressful and tiring and they certainly do not fix themselves. Reports found a 28 per cent increase in potholes across Victoria in the last year, and in some areas such as Warrnambool reports were that they had increased by 149 per cent.

We have a pothole problem, and this government’s response is to privatise capacity to fix them. SprayLine has been part of Victoria’s public road maintenance system for decades. The government’s argument is that this work can be provided by the private sector, but the issue is not whether private contractors can do the work. The issue is, when you remove the public option, you become dependent on private contractors and the prices they charge, and you lose the skilled workforce as well as the equipment. That matters because Victoria has a huge road network and there will always be more maintenance work than there is money available to do it. We should know from decades of privatisation experiments gone wrong that it is expensive and hard to rebuild public capacity once you have sold it off. Further, privatising road maintenance does not deal with the broader system change that we need to prevent it in the first place. As I have previously said in this place, fixing regional roads is a lot like health care: for a long-term fix you have to try and prevent the issue in the first place. Firstly, we know more vehicles mean more wear and tear, heavier vehicles cause significantly more damage, and this government has spent decades thinking more road infrastructure is a fix while neglecting regional rail infrastructure. It is really quite simple: more roads plus more cars and freight mean more potholes; more passenger and freight rail mean less money spent on building roads and less potholes.

We also need to consider climate resilience. The Environment and Planning Committee’s climate resilience inquiry recommended supporting betterment when infrastructure is rebuilt and funding local government to deliver climate-resilient designs. The lesson is practical: when a road repeatedly fails, rebuilding it to exactly the same standard can simply lock in the next repair bill. Betterment should be standard practice, but privatising road maintenance will take us in the wrong direction, because there is no incentive for a private company whose business is filling potholes to prevent them. Victorians are sick of this Labor government selling off its responsibilities and leaving them to pick up the bill for the consequences, and I would urge the minister to reverse this backward decision.