Broken state of Victoria’s roads long blamed on floods — but how much recovery work really got done?
The Allan government slashed road works by 90 per cent to accomodate flood recovery last finanical year. Now, it can be revealed the “very little” amount repaired with the $250m blowout.
Victoria
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The Allan government repaired just 750,000sq m of flood-damaged roads last financial year, despite spending $250m more than budgeted to accommodate the maintenance works.
The Herald Sun in November reported the Department of Transport had cut road works by 90 per cent across the state in 2023-24 so that maintenance crews could focus efforts on strengthening roads damaged by floods.
It meant just one million sqm of road was repaired under regular works (resurfacing or rehabilitation) in 2023-24, compared to 10 million sqm the year prior, and 12.9 million sqm in 2021-22.
Defending the cuts to regular road maintenance, an Allan government spokesperson previously said: “A significant portion of the state’s 2023-24 planned road maintenance program was directed towards asphalt patching, in response to what data told us the network needed at that point in time.”
But a Herald Sun investigation into the budget diversion has uncovered that at least $250m was used to repair just 750,912 sqm of flood-damaged roads last financial year.
This is on top of the $441m budgeted, used to repair one million sqm of road across the state.
Meanwhile in 2021-22, the government repaired nearly 13 times the amount of road (12.9m sqm), but managed to spend tens of millions less on the maintenance works ($617.4m).
The works completed last year under the Allan government’s flood recovery maintenance blitz were:
- 518,873 sqm of major patching statewide
- 232,039 sqm of larger scale rehabilitation projects across 25 projects
- fixing a bridge in Redesdale
- work at 30+ landslip sites
When asked how the Allan government justified the mammoth maintenance cuts against its output and expenditure, a spokesperson said: “There has been no cut to road maintenance – there was a focus on strengthening roads that were damaged by extreme rainfall and flood.”
“Calling additional investment a blowout is wrong, we invested an additional $250m in 2023/24 to deliver more works on the most flood-damaged roads,” they said.
“We completed an additional 518,000 sqm of major patching in 2023/24 to strengthen roads affected by flooding and extreme rainfall, as well as vital repairs at more than 30 individual landslip sites across the state.”
Shadow minister for roads and road safety Danny O’Brien, who had previously accused the government of “fudging the figures” in its reporting, has called on the government to provide a detailed breakdown of the current year’s spending on the back of the fresh figures.
“These figures put a lie to the government’s claims that our roads are so bad because they’ve been focused on flood repairs, because they’ve done very little on fixing up flood damage,” he said.
“Labor is more interested in spin and blaming the weather than actually fixing the goat tracks that it calls our roads.
“This again brings into question the claim Labor is spending a record amount on road maintenance this year — the evidence Victorians see on our roads every day would suggest otherwise.”
It comes after the Herald Sun revealed that Victorian road crews were filling almost 700 potholes a day across the crumbling road network.
The Allan government has claimed that resurfacing and rehabilitation levels had significantly increased this year now strengthening works were complete.
This year, the government has committed $964m to repair the state’s broken roads, with 75 per cent of that to go to roads in regional Victoria.
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