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

This is a section of the Mallacoota-Genoa Road. I picked it up on the weekend, and I brought it with me here to parliament this week, because I wanted to prove a point. Our roads in Victoria are falling apart, and the state Labor Party is doing nothing about it. Now notice the white line on this bit of road. It's important to acknowledge that, because that means that the side of the road has fallen off. You now have a small cliff. If people towing boats, towing caravans, drop a wheel over the side, they are in peril of losing their lives. This crumbling road has no shoulders. It's dangerous and is putting the lives of locals and visitors at risk.

Worse than that is that more than four years ago, in May 2021, I secured $10 million from the previous federal government, as part of the Black Spots Program, to upgrade this road—the only access road between Mallacoota and Genoa—and we are still waiting, more than four years later, for the Victorian government to spend a single dollar on the actual road. How can it be possible that it takes more than four years to spend the $10 million provided by the Commonwealth to upgrade the highest priority project in the Mallacoota-Genoa area? It's incompetence on a grand scale. Lives are being put at risk. The road is falling apart. I plead with Victorian government: just fix the bloody road.

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