Zoe McKenzie (Flinders, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak about the Albanese government's now 198-day infrastructure review and its potentially devastating impact on my electorate of Flinders. Over recent weeks we've heard the infrastructure minister demonise $120 billion worth of infrastructure funded by the coalition government, most of which is just waiting for lazy, incompetent and broke state governments like mine to do their part of the job.

Over the weekend I raised the urgent need for safety improvements along the Nepean Highway with the infrastructure minister. It didn't ring any bells at the time, although she was confident that it was in a spreadsheet somewhere, so today I want to jog the minister's memory. Along the Nepean Highway there are two treacherous intersections: Uralla Road and Forest Drive. Over 10 years there have been serious crashes at both intersections every year, sometimes twice a year. Eighty-six-year-old Bruce William Bone was killed in a head-on crash there in 2014, and three people were seriously injured.

The safety works were fully funded by the coalition and the works were scheduled to commence in 2021, 2022 and 2023, but planning stopped a few months ago when VicRoads was informed that the federal government's funding might be cut. A local resident who lives on the corner of Uralla Road and Nepean Highway came to tell me about the crashes he hears monthly, sometimes weekly—the crunch of metal, the silence. He's often the first there to attend, to render assistance and to call an ambulance. From here on in, every injury at that corner sits at the government's feet.