Darren Chester (Gippsland, National Party, Shadow Minister for Regional Education) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

If you fix country roads, you will save country lives. There are too many people killed and injured on our regional road network, and Gippsland motorists right now are being robbed of life-saving road upgrades because state and federal government bureaucrats are failing to do their jobs. Now we have the minister threatening to take money away from our region.

We're expected in Victoria to drive roadworthy cars, but the Premier, Dan Andrews, has failed to provide car-worthy roads. He doesn't even spend the money when it's provided by the federal government for life-saving road projects. The arterial road network owned by the state government is falling apart, and it's costing lives right across our state.

To make it worse, we've had tens of millions of dollars in federal government funding from the previous federal government allocated to our region, but a failure to fast-track the design process has meant that roadworks often don't start until years after the commitment is actually made. Now we have Minister Catherine King threatening, in a review that she announced last week, to withdraw money from projects that haven't started, so in essence we have communities which are at risk of being punished by the federal Labor government because the state Labor government has failed to do its job and deliver the road safety projects that we've funded. Minister King needs to understand that saving lives through investment in better arterial roads and highways is a job for all levels of government. Our message to Minister King is that your review, underway right now, must quarantine road safety projects from any cuts, because if you fix country roads you will save country lives.