Hansard debates

Anthony MARSH (Nepean) (17:12): I think we are meant to be talking about roads, but I am not sure what that contribution was. It was about 5 per cent about roads, but anyway. The condition of Victoria’s roads has become one of the most persistent concerns raised with me by constituents across Nepean. It is one of the most basic, fundamental things that people expect their government to be able to deliver. It has been raised with me by families, tradespeople, small business operators and older members of our community who rely on a safe road network to get about their daily lives each and every day. Their frustration is not just that potholes exist, it is that the same roads have been deteriorating for years. The same problems are repeatedly reported, and the response amounts to little more than a temporary repair, if anything at all.

After almost 12 years of this tired Labor government the Premier has now been forced to acknowledge that the condition of Victoria’s roads is not good enough. On that point there is no disagreement. As my colleague pointed out earlier, ‘not good enough’ may be the understatement of the decade. Premier Carroll cannot speak about the condition of the road network as though –

Paul Mercurio: On a point of order, Deputy Speaker, we have been talking quite a bit today about correct titles. I would just like to remind the member of Nepean to use correct titles.

The DEPUTY SPEAKER: The member is correct on titles. If we can take the names out of it, member for Nepean.

Anthony MARSH: I think the member for Hastings is a bit upset that we no longer get to have beers because we cannot drive on the roads to get to Hastings. You would think that they would want us to differentiate between former premiers and the current Premier, but I guess they realise the integrity bodies going forward will have no teeth and it will not make a difference. The Premier has recently inherited this problem, and the Premier was himself the Minister for Roads and Road Safety between 2020 and 2022. He has been a senior member of this Labor government throughout the period in which the conditions of our roads have been the worst that we have ever seen. When a government has been in office for almost 12 years, the condition of the assets it is responsible for maintaining is part of its record – it is actually its legacy. There comes a point in which responsibility cannot be shifted to weather or individual contractors, who they are meant to hold accountable, or to some newly discovered maintenance backlog. The buck stops with this Labor government and this save-the-furniture Premier.

This year the scale of the problem has become impossible to ignore. In August motorists on the Princes Freeway near Bunyip were left stranded after striking large potholes. Vehicles suffered damaged tyres and wheels. The following day motorists on the Calder Freeway near Gisborne were confronted with a similar scene. These are major arterial routes and freeways. People should reasonably expect them to be safe and properly maintained. Instead motorists are increasingly approaching damaged sections of road not knowing whether a patch of water is simply standing water or concealing a defect capable of writing off their vehicle and putting them at great risk. We saw the government’s response to that reality in question time just today. The Auditor-General has now laid out in black and white what has happened to Victoria’s roads. In 2021 39 per cent of the state road network was rated poor or very poor. By 2024 it was 48 per cent. Forty-eight per cent were poor or very poor. The gap between defects identified and defects actually fixed more than doubled between January 2025 and June this year. Yet when the Premier and the ministers were asked simple questions about those findings today, they refused to answer them – the same evasive response I have seen since I joined this place.

These are not just our numbers; these are the Victorian Auditor-General’s. Worse than that, today we saw that they sought to undermine the Auditor-General’s findings. If this government cannot even acknowledge the independent evidence about what has happened to our roads under its own watch, what hope is there that it will actually fix the problem? By the end of August the government was announcing that it intended to fix 500,000 potholes. That figure itself is an admission of the condition into which they have allowed our road network to fall. The Victorian road network did not reach this crisis point overnight. It was the cumulative consequence of maintenance deferred, resurfacing delayed and defects addressed reactively rather than before they became serious.

This is also very evident in my electorate of Nepean. Our communities are heavily dependent on the road network. Public transport options are limited or non-existent, as the member for Hastings is well aware, across much of the peninsula. People rely on their cars to go to work, take children to school or reach medical services. The community has repeatedly raised the condition of Point Nepean Road, Boneo Road, Frankston-Flinders Road, Bittern-Dromana Road and the Mornington Peninsula Freeway, among others. Eastbourne Road in Rosebud is another example, and one I know particularly well. During the Nepean by-election I struck a pothole in Eastbourne Road and blew a tyre. When I took it for repair, I was informed that my rim was destroyed and I was faced with an unexpected bill of almost $3500. To put salt in the wound, when I was driving into Parliament just recently I struck another pothole in the dark and rain on Moorooduc Highway – another $1200 repair bill. These events were costly and inconvenient, but what bothered me most was that there was nothing unusual about my own experience. A damaged tyre or wheel can mean an unexpected bill of hundreds if not thousands of dollars. For a tradesperson or a small business owner, it can also mean lost work. For an older resident travelling to an appointment, it can mean being stranded on the side of the road. Those are costs borne by ordinary Victorians when basic maintenance is not done properly.

It was partly out of frustration that I launched Labor’s Road to Ruin in July. The concept was straightforward: a member of the public can identify a pothole, upload a photograph and have the location recorded. It began on the peninsula and has since expanded across Victoria. I did this myself because I wanted people to have a transparent way of recording what they were encountering on our roads. Then at the end of August, this copycat Premier announced that if re-elected, his government would establish a taxpayer-funded website allowing Victorians to photograph potholes, request repairs and track repairs – what a novel idea; I wonder where he read that. That announcement rather neatly illustrates the problem with this government’s approach. Victoria does not lack mechanisms where people can report road defects. The department already receives reports, other reporting platforms exist, and the Road to Ruin website is available statewide. In fact those opposite might like to know that residents in 33 Labor-held electorates have already used the Road to Ruin website to report potholes: Niddrie, Dandenong, Box Hill, Carrum, Macedon, Ivanhoe and Bentleigh, just to name a few. This is not a Nepean problem. It is not even a problem just in non-Labor-held seats. It is a problem across the entire state, including in their own backyard.

Speaking of potholes, I have also become somewhat of an expert in – or perhaps a victim of – the VicRoads reporting system myself. In the course of reporting potholes to the department, the VicRoads website has crashed more times than I care to remember. Three of those crashes occurred just in the last two sitting days while I was trying to report potholes on behalf of my residents, and I am very happy to table some photos and screenshots of that if the Parliament would like to see them.

Perhaps the government might like to investigate that, although according to the notice on the website, they have got their best people working on it. There you go. Perhaps the Premier has engaged some prisoners to run IT as well.

Before the Premier spends taxpayers money on building another pothole reporting website, perhaps he could get working on the one that they already have, because the issue is not that this tired Labor government does not know where the potholes are, the issue is whether the potholes are repaired properly, whether the underlying road is maintained and whether the same section is allowed to fail again. That is why I wrote to the Premier last week. I should note that I did receive a response from the Premier’s office. It acknowledged my email and informed me that I might get a response within eight to 10 weeks if I am lucky. I live in hope, Premier. The Premier had spoken publicly about respecting taxpayers money, so I asked him to disclose what the proposed new website would cost before the government committed taxpayer money to it. I also made a very simple offer: he could use the one I have already made. I would far rather see that money directed into the roads themselves, as I am sure all Victorians would. In my local electorate, it could be put into resurfacing Eastbourne Road, put into Boneo Road or put into Point Nepean Road, because the problem is not a digital one, it is a physical one, and it is one with this tired Labor government.

A website cannot restore failed roads, it cannot clear drainage and it cannot repair shoulders or resurface an arterial road. Those things require a government that treats road maintenance as a serious responsibility rather than an issue that they have only just rediscovered when the deterioration has become impossible to ignore or there is an election around the corner. For too long the approach has been excessively reactive. Anyone responsible for maintaining an asset understands that early intervention matters. Once water penetrates a failing surface, the pavement begins to break apart and drainage problems are left unresolved, the eventual repair becomes more difficult and more costly.

Road maintenance is not especially glamorous, and resurfacing does not attract the same attention as a new infrastructure project. But it is one of the essential disciplines of a competent government, and today’s Auditor-General’s report could not illustrate that more clearly. We are now seeing this tired Labor government, in an attempt to compensate for years of deterioration, make a sudden escalation in announcements. That is why the Liberals and Nationals have set out a different approach. We have committed $5 billion over four years to repair Victoria’s road network and restore a proper program of preventative maintenance.