Darren Chester (Gippsland, National Party, Shadow Minister for Veterans’ Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

I take this opportunity to update the House on efforts to build a better and safer Princes Highway through the electorate of Gippsland. These are efforts which, sadly, for much of the journey have been resisted by the state Labor government, which has dragged its heels on every major project we've sought to undertake on the highway. Sadly, there's also been no new funding for the highway from the Albanese government in 3½ years. But, on the positive side, we have seen the full duplication between Traralgon and Sale completed over the last 12 months, which means the next major project on the highway through my electorate is the bypass of Traralgon.

We now have 15 intersections with roundabouts or traffic lights in Traralgon, and it takes somewhere between 15 to 20 minutes to get through the town on a good day. During long weekends or peak holiday periods, it's much worse than that. Providing a bypass would reduce congestion for locals, improve the safety and productivity of the road, increase the liveability for the local community and also help to boost the visitor economy by bringing the rest of Gippsland closer to the south-east Melbourne growth markets by reducing travel times. These are well-recognised social, economic and environmental benefits that could be achieved in building this bypass.

We've so far seen a state government refusing to engage with the community, the local council and the transport sector to progress this project. At the last election, to try and get this project moving, the coalition announced that it would provide $5 million to accelerate the planning for this project. Obviously we didn't win the election, so that promise awaits some sort of matching contribution hopefully from the Labor Party here in Canberra or perhaps the state government itself. We need to accelerate the design and costing work because we know it's going to take at least five or six years to build the thing once we actually get the project moving. We want to see some money on the table to get this project accelerated in the interest of improving safety, obviously, for locals but also for the travelling public.

Now, what we need to understand is, in the past, 80 per cent of the funding for the highway works in Gippsland has come from the federal government. But this government, the Albanese government, has slashed that to 50 per cent. So instead of providing 80-20 funding for regional road projects the Albanese government, because it couldn't care less about regional road projects, has slashed that to 50-50, which means that the state government has no incentive whatsoever to try and accelerate regional projects. We've written repeatedly to the Andrews and Allan Labor governments and tried to get them on board with this project, which has been talked about for the best part of 30 years. Now that the duplication work is done, the next major road transport project east of Melbourne is clearly the Traralgon bypass. Now, I've written to the state minister and received a response that they can't progress this project until they know what the final rehabilitated form of the Loy Yang mine looks like. That is complete bulldust. The mine will be stable. We need to get on with the job of doing the design and consultation work to build the bypass as soon as possible in the interests of safety and productivity in my community.

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