If you’ve had the misfortune to visit Victoria in the last decade or so, you’ll already know just how bad the roads are. Or, to put it another way: just how little actual road there is amongst all the potholes. Even the nation’s major transport link, the Hume Freeway between Melbourne and Sydney, is so bad south of the Murray River that just one pothole can claim multiple vehicles in a single day.
In case you were inclined to doubt your lyin’ eyes (and your sore arse), it’s now official:
A new report from Victoria’s auditor-general has found almost half of Victoria’s road network is in poor condition and is crumbling faster than the government can repair it.
The report, tabled in parliament this morning, examined more than 23,000 kilometres of state roads and found that about 48 per cent of the network was in poor or very poor condition in 2024 compared to 39 per cent in 2021.
Meanwhile, the Labor government that funnels billions in kickbacks to criminal gangs and unions (which is a tautology) can’t scrape up a lazy billion to fix the state’s crumbling roads.
Newly appointed Roads Minister Paul Hamer said the government accepted that the roads were not good enough, promising the government would fix the way it deals with roads if re-elected.
“I didn’t need a report to tell me the condition of our roads in Victoria need to be improved,” Mr Hamer said.
Just don’t expect Labor to actually do anything about it. At the moment, the roads are falling apart faster than they can even be repaired.
The report also highlighted that Victoria has a large and growing road maintenance backlog where the network is deteriorating faster than the pace of repairs.
Based on defect job records, which include potholes or hazards such as structural failure, the gap between the number of defects identified and the number of defects rectified more than doubled between January 2025 and June 2026.
Spring Street’s contempt for anyone beyond the tram tracks continues, undiminished. State roads make up only 15 per cent of the network by length but carry most of the traffic and freight. Around 82 per cent of state roads are in regional Victoria. That’s where the neglect is most obvious and most dangerous.
The Loddon Mallee region recorded the highest proportion of roads as being in poor or very poor condition, with 69.1 per cent of the region’s state roads receiving the rating.
Hume sits at 57 per cent, the Grampians at 48.6. The auditor-general notes more than a third of state roads have five years or less of useful life left before they become unsafe without speed or load restrictions. RACV recorded 112,000 tyre punctures last year. The worst pothole counts are all regional: Towong, Moyne and Mornington Peninsula.
Oddly, none of those are Labor-voting areas, either.
Perhaps the Labor government could fix a few more roads if it dipped into the funds it gets from dodgy construction contractors in the pockets of the CFMEU.
On the same day the auditor-general tabled his roads report, Taskforce Hawk was kicking in doors in Victoria and Queensland and finding a rogues’ gallery of Labor party donors.
Premier Ben Carroll is refusing to hand back donations to Labor from Big Build subcontractors after major cross-border police raids over allegations $25,000 in NRL tickets and corporate hospitality was offered to secure CFMEU backing.
Top Up Labour and BK Labour, both Big Build labour-hire firms, donated to Victorian Labor’s 2022 campaign and another big donor had none other than Mick Gatto on its payroll. The CFMEU, according to sources, was directing where to drop off the brown paper bags. Just coincidentally, no doubt, the same companies reaped hundreds of millions of taxpayer-dollars from Labor government-run projects. BK later pleaded guilty to financial crime charges. Top Up’s owners were arrested and questioned over alleged corrupting benefits to Queensland CFMEU officials.
In a statement, a state government spokesperson declined to say why Carroll would not return the donations but highlighted his role in calling a royal commission into the building industry. A Labor Party spokesperson said: “The donations in question were made years prior to these allegations being made.”
So, as long as they weren’t caught yet, it’s all sweet in Labor-run Victoria.
This is the same government that tells regional Victorians there simply isn’t enough cash for bitumen. Billions for the Big Build and its union-connected contractors. Billions more in ‘record investment’ that somehow never quite reaches the Hume or the Murray Valley Highway. A royal commission into the building industry is promised, of course… but only after the donations have already been banked and spent.
Meanwhile, the money keeps on flowing to the mates who can deliver votes and industrial peace in Melbourne. Everyone else can dodge the craters.
