Victoria’s tourism bodies have tried many slogans, none of them particularly memorable, to try and entice visitors across the Murray River and into darkest Wokistan. I’ve got a new one for them: ‘Victoria! It’s like Africa without the dysentery!’
If that doesn’t work, then they can always try marketing it as the must-see destination for parkour enthusiasts with an adrenaline fixation. After all, why bother with boring old somersaults off park benches, when you can get the unbeatable adrenaline rush of dodging machete gangs? Liven up your next parkrun by jogging past a ‘Pro-Palestine’ demonstration wearing a kippah and carrying a ‘Free Goat’ sign.
Abseilers can get their extreme sport fix, too, by rappelling into potholes to rescue stranded families.
And if you think that’s just a cheap shot, ask this Victorian motorist.
Rachel Welsh’s car was cruising up the Hume Freeway, packed with five teenagers, when she felt a massive jolt and her tyre popped.
“I’ve never encountered a pothole like this in my life,” Welsh said of the crater that she estimates was a metre wide and stretched across the entire left-hand lane
At least she had plenty of company when she pulled up in a hurry.
“There was one person pulled over behind us who changed their tyre and moved on, then there was another [motorist] who pulled over in front of us immediately afterwards, and then a van came in behind us, all of which had their tyres popped,” Welsh said.
After she saw a fourth vehicle pull over, Welsh called police: “There was going to be an accident.”
Police allegedly responded by installing pothole bins.
This is what passes for road maintenance in Jacinta Allan’s Victoria, where the government can quietly funnel $15 billion to criminal gangs disguising themselves as a ‘construction union’, but can’t keep the roads driveable. The state’s crumbling network has become both a safety hazard and a cost-of-living nightmare for motorists facing constant repairs. Regional drivers are fed up. The Victorian Farmers Federation last week launched a campaign urging people to document and report the hazards, calling the roads “the worst they have ever been”.
“Many are literally falling apart and some are straight-up death traps,” [VFF president Ryan Milgate] said.
With the state election less than five months away, the coalition has unveiled a $5 billion election pledge to eliminate one million potholes. They promise a 25 per cent boost to the road maintenance budget, a new division inside the Department of Transport and Planning to oversee the ‘bitumen blitz’, plus money for drain clearing, grass slashing and graffiti removal. They also want a review of construction standards and maintenance contracts to force some accountability on the department and its contractors.
Opposition Leader Jess Wilson put it plainly while touring the state.
“Drivers shouldn’t be the ones footing the bill for blown tyres, cracked rims and worse because Jacinta Allan and Labor cannot get the basics right,” Wilson said.
Nationals leader Danny O’Brien, who stopped to help a P-plater with a damaged tyre on the Goulburn Valley Highway, was even blunter. The roads have become “goat tracks”. Regional Victoria, home to a quarter of the state’s population, receives less than 12 per cent of infrastructure spending. Labor’s own budget papers show they are actually patching fewer square metres of regional road this year than last, despite the spin about moving to ‘longer-lasting’ fixes.
Labor is ignoring the regions at their peril and forgetting their own history. When the Bracks Labor government unseated Jeff Kennett just two terms after the unmitigated disaster of the Cain/Kirner years, it did so with the help of regional Victoria. One of its most devastating campaign ads, running only on rural TV, showed a split screen with a gushing tap labelled ‘Melbourne’ and a slow drip labelled ‘Country Victoria’.
So when the tourism marketing geniuses next gather to brainstorm slogans, they might as well stop pretending. Victoria under Labor isn’t a destination: it’s a warning. The roads are so bad that ordinary driving now qualifies as an extreme sport.
