Wednesday, 12 August 2026

 Richard RIORDAN (Polwarth) (10:44): I rise today to do a bit of analysis of the 2025–26 financial and performance outcomes, one of the reports of PAEC. Not only this week but this month and this year one of the biggest issues right across Victoria, but particularly in regional Victoria, is the state of our roads. Of course every year we have the budget process, and we have the follow-up review of where we are going with the budget. I think it is not only important that the Parliament is fully cognisant of the lousy job this government is doing with roads but also an opportunity to put it very crystal clear to the community: if they are wanting to know why our roads are in such a bad way, the statistics and the lack of effort from this government in looking after our roads is really laid bare in these reports. I want to read just one comment that the committee made recently about that, and I will read it out. It was finding 50:

The Department of Transport and Planning’s justifications for modifying performance measure targets relating to scheduled works do not provide the public or Parliament with an adequate understanding of the basis for the change.

The changes they are referring to I will just read into Hansard because they are really quite stark as to why Victorians are expected now to drive around endlessly on goat tracks. If we look at the last six years of what we have done with our roads, it really lays bare what the problem is. Good road management requires surfaces of the road to be replaced and maintained in a 10-year cycle. That is what we used to do. In fact there are some 173,660 square kilometres of road surface in the state of Victoria, out in regional Victoria, and that amount has stayed fairly constant over the last six years, so it is very easy to compare apples with apples. Those apples we are referring to are that six years ago, with a budget of around $616 million, the Victorian government was able to resurface and manage around 7 per cent of our roads, so it was a bit under world’s best effort. It was a bit under what we used to be able to do when we drove around on real roads in Victoria at 10 per cent. They did 7 every year since, and this is why we have craters costing Victorians so much money with their cars and their communities in lost time, danger and accidents. The only winners in this are the crash repair people and the RACV.

In the last six years, we have gone from 7 per cent and then we dropped to 5 per cent. Can you believe that in the financial year 2023–24, 0.24 per cent of our road surfaces were redone. This is the year after COVID. You cannot blame COVID, you cannot blame floods, you cannot blame anything; it is just government incompetence. Not only that, they slashed some 30 per cent of the road budget in that year to what they had been doing – 0.24 per cent of road surfaces covered. When you put that much neglect in, people really start to suffer. They then went to 1.9 per cent and down again to 1.56 per cent, and this year they are estimating that they are going to do, on the biggest road blitz this government claims to have ever hit Victoria, just 1.65 per cent of our road surfaces. That is not me saying that; that is in the budget report. That is what this government is actually telling Victorians it is doing for our roads.

When you drive around the roads of Polwarth, when you drive around western Victoria hitting crater after crater, when you bust your rims, when you drive into a wire rope barrier on the side of the road or just off the road into a tree, whatever it is that has been caused, it is simply financial managerial neglect by this Labor state government that has caused our road surfaces over the last six years to be well under 2 per cent of the road coverage. We are not getting close to the 10 per cent of road surface management that this state requires in order to have safe, viable roads that keep the state moving. We desperately need a fresh start in Victoria. We need a fresh start so that we can put the focus back on roads and on road maintenance to keep Victorians safe and to help with the cost of living, because at the moment this government has again shown its inability to do that.