Seond Reading
Danny O’BRIEN (Gippsland South) (12:46): If anyone takes a point of order on me on anything that I am talking about when you can talk about the growling grass frog, you are all warned. The only thing that is endangered on that side is the member for Point Cook, because I am sure that he will be looking for a new career in 2026.
Steve Dimopoulos interjected.
Danny O’BRIEN: Yes, but you protected the growling grass frog, Minister. That is obviously why people still vote for you.
I am pleased to rise on the Statute Law Repeals Bill 2024. We get these opportunities once or twice a term – maybe a bit more often than that, sometimes once a year – and despite what might have been said in the Leader of the Opposition’s contribution and the many points of order taken, it is a very, very, very, very broad or very, very narrow bill, whichever way you want to look at it. It does cover a number of bills, and anyone who is speaking on it who considers taking a point of order should think about how they are going to speak on the one page of points that this bill literally is. Not surprisingly, I want to mostly refer to item 6, which repeals section 95B and section 95C of the Road Safety Act 1986. It is pertinent that we are talking about 95B and 95C, because as we heard yesterday in the chamber, under this government road maintenance fell by 95 per cent in the 2023–24 year. That is not my figure. That is nothing that I am suggesting; that is in the Department of Transport and Planning annual report. That was the figure for regional Victoria, which has the vast bulk of the road network, but equally the metropolitan figures were very much similar. That is in a situation where we are already facing an absolute crisis on our roads throughout regional Victoria and indeed throughout metropolitan areas.
I was sitting in here one day a few months ago when the member for Malvern, the member for Rowville, the member for Nepean and the member for Narracan – three out of four are virtually metropolitan MPs, some of them inner-city MPs – raised concerns about potholes. It is not just a regional issue anymore, because this government has abandoned proper maintenance on the roads. They like to talk about what happened 10 years ago, but they do not mention things like the fact that last year’s road maintenance output budget was actually less than it was under the former coalition government 10 years ago, which is an extraordinary figure given the growth in the population and the needs in that time. As a result we have got a road network in our state that is in just appalling condition.
I do not really need to convince members opposite or anyone else. Anyone who drives on our roads will see it every day, and as I said, it is not just on country roads. Coming in on the Princes Highway at Pakenham, on the dual-lane freeway, parts of the road are breaking up and there are potholes there – on a freeway, which is just an indictment. It is no surprise that there was a survey done for the government last year by the National Transport Research Organisation looking at the state of the roads. It focused on about 8000 kilometres of roads out of the 23,000 kilometres in the state that are state-owned roads and found that 91 per cent of them were in poor or very poor condition.
Surprisingly enough, the government and the minister are challenging that contention, saying that is not what the survey says. I have seen a slide from the National Transport Research Organisation presented to an industry conference that says exactly that. The government says, ‘No, no, no, that’s not what it says.’ I say to the minister and to the department, ‘If that’s not what it says, release the entire report to the public.’ What is the answer I get to that? ‘Ah, it’s very complex, Mr O’Brien. It’s very detailed. It’s a lot of data.’ They will not give it to me. Anyway, I assume we will get it under freedom of information at some stage, probably after a long fight in VCAT, as is usually the case. Nonetheless, we do not necessarily need the survey data to tell us what we already know, and that is that our roads are in an appalling condition. The budget in the current financial year is still 16 per cent less than it was four years ago. We have got ongoing damage to vehicles. In the last couple of years around 2000 people have lodged claims for compensation for damage to their vehicles, and given that there is a threshold for that compensation of around $1640, I think it is, this year – it is indexed each year – very few if any of those people actually get access to that compensation, notwithstanding that they might be dealing with cracked rims or broken struts or whatever.
The trucking industry in particular – obviously their trucks are on the road all the time – tell me repeatedly that the cost of maintenance and repairs is going through the roof for them. I was with the member for Shepparton last year with a trucking company at Tatura talking about an increase of around 30 per cent each month on the maintenance bill, purely due to the state of the roads. We will also hear from the government on this, ‘Well, that’s because we’ve had floods. It’s been wet, Mr O’Brien. Don’t you understand we had this rain and there were floods in 2022?’ Yes, of course there were floods in 2022; we have had a couple of wet years. But that should not mean that you do not continue to maintain the roads. By all means, no matter what the minister says, there was not 100 per cent, not even 50 per cent, coverage of floods across the roads, particularly in the south-west – and in most of Gippsland we certainly did not have floods to that degree – and the south-west of the state is the most appalling. We just cannot have a situation where the state accepts that, because it has been wet, that road is going to be terrible. The Romans had wet years. The Romans had a lot of wet years. I was doing a little bit of research before.
Steve Dimopoulos interjected.
Danny O’BRIEN: I was thinking a lot that I was sounding just like the member for Essendon, and it is about to get worse. I did this bit of research, and I found that one of the very first roads that was constructed was Via Appia in 312 BC. For the minister at the table – the member for Essendon will know this for sure – Via Appia is still in use today, 2330 years later. It is still in use today. I found on a website called engineeringrome.org that when bicycling down Via Appia its smooth paving stones have worn away into a bumpy and difficult road to travel on. That is terrible. But after 2300 years you might expect that the road has got a bit worse for wear. In Victoria we cannot do it for about two months, let alone 2000 years, before the road is cracking up.
In fact it was relevant to the Minister for Transport Infrastructure, because I recently put a question on notice to him about the long-delayed duplication of the Princes Highway between Traralgon and Sale. There is a section there where about half a dozen patches have been put on. When I am talking patches, some of them are over 100 metres long, and this is a brand new road. It was only opened at the start of 2023 and already it has got massive patches on it. This is the response I got from the minister – because I asked him, ‘Who’s paying for this? Is it the taxpayer? Is the Victorian taxpayer having to pay for this, or does the contractor actually have to remediate that as part of the terms of the contract?’ He did not answer my question of course, but he said that technical experts are looking at it and trying to find out what caused this failure of the road and whether any local environmental conditions may have contributed. That particular stretch of road has been a road for over 100 years, so if there were any environmental conditions we should have known what they were and we should have planned for them, but the Romans would have done it better, you would have to say. So in answer to an interjection from before – ‘What have the Romans ever done for us?’ – they taught us how to do roads better, but under this government we are actually not getting it.
Steve Dimopoulos interjected.
Danny O’BRIEN: No, I have been working on that for about 15½ minutes, Minister. We asked the question yesterday – in fact, Acting Speaker Addison, you will be disappointed to hear this – about a crew from Ballarat that has had to go 2500 kilometres to Far North Queensland to do work because they simply have not got the work in Victoria. We know that SprayLine, the government’s own agency – which is on the chopping block for sale, by the way – had to go for tenders in South Australia last year. We have got the whole charade of what was Regional Roads Victoria, which was set up in Ballarat and is gone now because no-one cares about the roads anymore in this government. This is a debacle, our roads, but on this bill I have no issues and I look forward to seeing it pass.