Following last week’s article Funding cuts costing lives, regarding the condition of the Cann Valley Highway the State Government has responded.
Federal Member for Gippsland, Darren Chester, said locals and visitors are risking being killed or seriously injured on the stretch of highway between Cann River and the NSW border due to a lack of investment from the State Government.
“We won’t take lectures from Darren Chester who was part of former Federal Liberal National Governments that gutted Victoria of infrastructure funding,” a State Government spokesperson said.
“We’re investing a record $964 million into maintaining our roads in this year alone – far exceeding the yearly average of $493 million under the previous Victorian Liberal National Government.
“Regional Victorians will remember the last time the Victorian Nationals were in government, they closed regional rail lines and hospitals – they were part of a state government that called regional Victoria the ‘toenails of the state’.”
According to the State Government what were previously considered once-in-a-generation flood and extreme weather events are now commonplace, bringing record rainfall and inflicting unprecedented damage on our roads.
In response to this it says recent maintenance programs have been focused on rebuilding and strengthening hundreds of roads damaged by floods and extreme rainfall.
The State Government provided the following background:
– Simply resurfacing these roads is not enough to repair them completely they need to be rebuilt from the ground up to avoid further degradation.
– Resurfacing replaces the surface layers of the road to both protect the pavement from water damage and fix any surface defects – it does not fix the root cause of potholes and pavement deterioration below the surface.
– Resurfacing is the least intensive form of road maintenance and is just one element of the broader program- these performance measures do not capture the primary focus of last year’s program, which was major patching.
– As a result, resurfacing targets were lower during the last financial year and efforts focused on critical repairs to strengthen roads impacted by flooding.
– Now that strengthening works are complete, resurfacing levels will significantly increase during the upcoming maintenance season, in addition to ongoing repairs to flood-damaged roads.
– Maintenance experts from the Department of Transport and Planning are now finalising a program of works for the upcoming maintenance season – with the majority of works to be delivered in regional Victoria.
– The State Government is investing $6.6 billion into the maintenance of road assets over 10 years, as part of a multi-year funding approach which means it can plan long-term and deliver works strategically across the state.
