Zoe McKenzie (Flinders, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Mental Health) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

As we get closer to the end of the year, that summertime feeling descends upon the Mornington Peninsula with, at first, delicate discomfort about our roads and traffic, which, by 27 December, becomes abject panic.

But this year has been made so much worse by inaction and incompetence from the Victorian state Labor government. Let us start with the Peninsula Link debacle. A planned closure for major works meant that all southbound lanes of Peninsula Link towards Rosebud were closed between Bungower Road and the Moorooduc Highway from 28 September to a scheduled 29 October. Whilst this led to a huge bank-up of traffic on the old roads heading south, we endured, counting down the days until 29 October, only to find that, when we reached the unofficial launch date of the holiday season—that is, the cup day long weekend—the road was still shut down.

As I drove up to the city on Sunday to get my flight to Canberra, I saw kilometres of traffic banked up all the way heading southward. On Monday, I wasn't surprised to receive tens of emails from local businesses, reporting both mad and missing visitors on one of the most important business weekends of the year. The closure has been extended for another two weeks until 15 November, running perilously close to the next bumper business season on the southern Mornington Peninsula—schoolies week.

This is the Victorian Labor playbook in action: delays, mismanagement and wrong priorities. Rather than upgrading the crumbling local roads that people use every single day, Labor was busy resurfacing one of the better roads on the peninsula, and shutting it down completely to do so for weeks. Ask locals and they'll tell you the real problem isn't the smoothness of the Peninsula Link. It's the potholes that make local driving dangerous, breaking axles and punching punctures in people's tyres. This has largely resulted from the state government's 93 per cent reduction in patching works and a 14 per cent reduction in road resealing and rehabilitation budgets.

But nowhere is Labor's neglect more deadly than at the intersection of the Nepean Highway and Uralla Road in Mount Martha. This single intersection has seen over 30 serious accidents since 2012. Eighteen thousand vehicles travel along the Nepean Highway in Mount Martha every single day. The coalition committed to fixing this intersection back in 2019, and, six years later, drivers entering or exiting Uralla Road are still taking their lives into their own hands. After years of persistent advocacy by me and, indeed, my predecessor, the nearby Forest Drive intersection finally got its upgrade—again, funded by the federal coalition. The contrast makes the inaction on Uralla Road even more idiotic—indeed, callous. How many more accidents will it take before the Labor government actually delivers? Every time the government delays, the risk persists.

And it's not just the highways. In Moorooduc, parents are living through a traffic management nightmare right outside the local primary school. A local parent, Cass, told me there are four separate roadwork projects, all taking place simultaneously, within a few hundred metres of the school, and the result is gridlock in a 40 kilometre zone. Parents are late to pick up their kids, drivers are becoming aggressive, and there have been multiple near misses and several minor collisions. Local police are now stationed at the site during pick-up times—not for speeding, but just to stop traffic chaos from breaking out. That's not policing; it's babysitting the government's horror mismanagement.

To top it off, our council recently flagged an intention to lower speed limits along Point Nepean Road between Dromana and Rye to between 40 and 50 kilometres an hour. We learnt this week, of course, that lowering speed limits is one of Labor's mad ideas to limit carbon emissions, according to the department of infrastructure's own consultation. But this proposed change will add many wasted minutes to the daily commute up and down the peninsula.

Residents are right to be frustrated—indeed, furious. The southern Mornington Peninsula is now like a battle of Galaga, with ever-changing speed limits, potholes, narrow and dangerous bike lanes, and constant roadworks. Labor's answer is always the bandaid solution of slowing everybody down. If the roads are unsafe, fix the roads. Don't penalise drivers who are trying to get to work or school or the shops on roads that have been neglected for years.

The pattern is clear. Under Victorian Labor, the Mornington Peninsula's roads are getting worse, not better. The Allan Labor government likes to boast about record infrastructure spending but, if you drive down the roads in my area, you'll be forgiven for asking, 'Where has that money gone?' because, on the ground, it sure doesn't look like it's being spent at home.

The people of the peninsula deserve better. We deserve a government that understands that road safety isn't a slogan; it's about safe intersections, well-timed works and well-maintained roads. But, right now, every single driver on the Mornington Peninsula can see the same thing: Labor has lost sight of the basics, and it's a disgrace.