Second Reading
Danny O’BRIEN (Gippsland South) (10:52): I am pleased to rise to speak on the Roads and Ports Legislation Amendment (Road Safety and Other Matters) Bill 2025 and join with my colleague the member for South-West Coast in presenting the opposition’s position on this bill, which goes across both the ports and freight and roads and road safety portfolios. I will leave the port aspects of this bill to the member for South-West Coast, who has already outlined her views and our views on that, and will focus more particularly on the road aspects of it and road safety aspects of it.
There are a number of amendments, and it is an omnibus bill that goes to a number of issues. Indeed the first parts, amendments to the Road Safety Act 1986, are really a matter for the Minister for Police and the Shadow Minister for Police and Corrections. There are three main issues there. The bill increases the period under which police can initiate proceedings for a summary offence related to a hit-and-run incident from 12 months to two years to give police more time to conclude investigations into those hit-and-run incidents that are of a more minor nature. I note indictable offences where a person is killed or seriously injured are unchanged by this legislation; there is no limit on the statute of limitations in that respect.
The bill allows for additional professionals to be approved for taking blood samples in the case of drink- and drug-driving cases, which is an attempt to make it easier for police to process those people who are recorded as drinking and driving or taking drugs and driving, and also provides for the Chief Commissioner of Police to authorise unsworn Victoria Police employees to sign off on infringement notices for offences detected by road safety cameras. The intent is to free up sworn officers from this rather administrative task, and while we do not oppose this in principle or in practice, we do note the comments of the Police Association Victoria, who have indicated that they would prefer that this continued to be undertaken by sworn officers. In fact there are some 800 currently on WorkCover leave, and many of those could potentially be used to do those desk jobs where they may be able to return to work and do lighter duties such as something like this.
There are other aspects, though: the Road Management Act 2004 amendments. The first is that the bill expands the regulation-making powers so that regulations can specify the responsible road authority for certain types of infrastructure that form part of the road, and the example given in the second-reading speech is of a bridge that goes over a railway line. The road that the bridge forms part of may in fact be a local council road, but in certain circumstances it might be more appropriate that VicTrack maintain that particular bridge given it forms part of their infrastructure. Again, we have no issue with that.
I often get, as the shadow minister for roads and indeed as a local member, questions about how there is an issue with roads because no-one knows who owns them and all levels of government handball to each other. It is actually quite straightforward more often than not, other than in some of the circumstances I just outlined. We know that Victoria has 23,000 kilometres of road that it is responsible for. I will get the figure wrong, but I think it is 180,000-odd kilometres of road that local councils are responsible for, and the federal government is not responsible for any roads. They do fund many of our highways and freeways in conjunction with the state government, but they are not federal government roads. In broad terms it is quite clear who is responsible for our roads. Indeed VicRoads has a map that you can look at, and you can zoom in on certain areas to be clear as to whether it is a road managed by the Department of Transport and Planning and VicRoads or whether it is a local council road. But that regulation-making power will be appropriate in circumstances. There are sometimes fuzzy areas, particularly when it comes to highways through towns, whether in the suburbs or in regional Victoria, where there is a dividing line effectively as the gutter of the road – council on one side, VicRoads on the other – and this regulation-making power will give some flexibility to make clear who is responsible for certain infrastructure around the roads.
The area that we do have some concern about, though, in this legislation is the reforms for the consent-for-works process. There is a process under the Road Management Act to get consent for works on roads from the appropriate road authority. This is in respect of virtually anything. If it is a utility having to dig up a road to address a sewer or a gas main or underground power cables, they need to go to the road authority, whether that is VicRoads or local council or others, including toll road operators, to get consent for those works. But there are plenty of other examples as well. There are developers who might be developing a new housing estate or a commercial or industrial estate that need to put in an intersection, and as a result they will need approval to work on the road to build that intersection into the new estate, for example. What the government is doing under this legislation is allowing road authorities to stop the clock on applications for consent. For example, if they ask the applicant to put in more information, they stop the clock on the timing of how long they have got.
There is also what is called ‘deemed consent’ in particular, and this legislation removes deemed consent in relation to freeways. That is, if you make an application and the authority does not provide a response within the requisite time, whether it is 30 days or whatever it might be, you have consent – consent is deemed to have been given. This amendment removes that, and I am very concerned about this provision. In the bill briefing with the government and in questions that we provided, there has been no evidence given of why this change is needed. It seems to us on this side that it is simply a mechanism for the department to say, ‘Look, stuff’s too hard. We want to just keep pushing it off.’ That is a concern for us in many aspects if it means that improvements to or maintenance of roads might be delayed but more particularly if it holds up activities that are crucial to our roads, or more particularly to other developments near our roads. Most particularly at the moment this is housing developments.
We have sought advice from a number of agencies, including the Victorian Transport Association and the Urban Development Institute of Australia, and they have raised concerns about exactly that – that this would be more red tape, making things more difficult and slowing things down. That is exactly what we want to avoid happening. As a result, we will be looking to move an amendment to this particular clause when it comes up in the other place to knock it out, because we do not think there is any justification for it. Looking at the Road Management Act, there is already quite a clear process for consent to be applied for and for safety and the protection of infrastructure to be maintained under the existing processes in that act. We do not think that this is justified, and indeed not only that, we think it actually will slow down development, particularly when it comes to housing, and that is a concern at this time. So we will move an amendment in the other place to that effect and ensure that this is not just creating more red tape unnecessarily.
I think the broader question of the roads is one that we have had a lot to say about. Despite the government’s claims about record funding, what we are actually seeing is less activity on our roads – less actual fixing of the roads. In respect of the area of major patching that the government’s own performance measures show, we are seeing a 93 per cent reduction in what they are planning to do. They actually did not meet their targets last year. They missed them by 50 per cent in getting major patching done. Instead of saying, ‘We’ll go back next year and do more,’ they are actually doing less. So it is going from a million square metres to 70,000 square metres. The government will say, ‘That’s because we’ve fixed all the roads after the floods, and now we’re going back to doing rehabilitation and resurfacing.’ If you go across to the next page in the performance measures, the reality is that those targets are also reducing. The government has barely made 3 million square metres when four or five years ago they were doing 15 million square metres of roadworks. That is a disgrace, and it is why our roads are in such an appalling position.