Opinion: Grim reality on future of state’s highway to hell

As someone who has driven the Bruce Highway consistently for five decades I can report it has never been better, writes Robert Schwarten.

As a regional driver travelling the Bruce Highway for more than 50 years I cannot recall any occasion where someone, somewhere hasn’t complained about its condition. Nor can I recall any government saying “bugger the Bruce”.

Fifty years ago there was plenty to complain about. The road toll was double what it is today. The cars were not optimum in safety. The “highway” was a puzzle of single-lane bridges, dirt sections, and no overtaking lanes.

Today I am constantly amused by drivers here in Rockhampton who in one breath say the government has “spent nothing, the Bruce has never been worse” and in the next whinge about being held up by constant roadworks on it. As someone who has driven that road consistently for five decades I can report it has never been better.

But the bottlenecks on the Sunshine Coast section now mean I stay in Gympie or elsewhere on the way down, as I have been held up for hours too frequently.

That is a reality of population growth in the southeast. It is just as bad – if not worse – on the Pacific Motorway to the Gold Coast, and it’s the main reason I would never live in that part of the world.

Yet I constantly hear regional mayors and other local “experts” claiming the southeast gets everything. They are fond of trotting out the line about coal royalties, but ignore the reality that the dense population in the southeast means that region is where the most income tax, stamp duty, GST and fuel excise is raised.

We lack the population to make toll roads work outside the southeast, but people often return from a European trip talking up the roads there – which are tolled.

I can only guess at the cost if a toll was put on the Bruce, but I do know that any government that introduced one would make the dodo look like a plentiful species.

The reality is that the Bruce Highway will never be “fixed” – unless our population decreases.

Governments will continue to pour billions into the highway, while the armchair experts will continue to belittle the traffic engineers.

I do not know why we bother paying such university-trained experts, given the keyboard and talkback radio callers who have all the answers – while at the same time begrudge paying tax of any kind to pay for the billions we continue to invest in the Bruce.

Robert Schwarten is a former state Labor minister