The Victorian Greens say that Labor’s sell off of VicRoads has led to Victoria’s pothole crisis and that VicRoads should be brought back into public hands.
Former VicRoads engineers have told the ABC that Victoria’s roads went from some of the best maintained in Australia to some of the worst after road construction and maintenance was privatised, with public expertise lost, costs rising and less money going towards actual repairs.
Their warnings come after the Victorian Auditor-General found around 48 per cent of Victoria’s state roads were in poor or very poor condition and would require $3 billion a year to maintain the state’s roads. Both Labor and the Liberals have fallen short of committing the funding required to fix Victoria’s roads.
The Greens say that both Labor and the Liberals have run rampant privatisation agendas, selling off essential services that we all rely on and VicRoads is a case in point example of how that delivers worse outcomes for Victorians who end up paying for it later.
The Liberals began outsourcing road maintenance under Jeff Kennett, while the Andrews Labor Government later entered a $7.9 billion, 40-year private joint venture over VicRoads registration and licensing services and has continued outsourcing public road maintenance capacity.
The Greens say essential services like our roads services should be run for the public good, not outsourced to private companies whose business model depends on extracting a profit from taxpayer money.
As stated by the Deputy Leader of the Victorian Greens, Dr Sarah Mansfield:
“VicRoads is a perfect example of the privatisation lie that both Labor and the Liberals have been spinning for years – sell off our public services, tell us they’ll get better because of it, and then leave Victorians paying more for worse outcomes.
“Instead of treating roads as an essential public service, Labor and the Liberals have turned them into another opportunity for corporations to make a profit.
“Just weeks ago, Labor sold off even more of Victoria’s road maintenance – despite the fact that this is what’s led to our roads being in this state in the first place.
“The state of our roads are only getting worse with climate change – more floods, extreme heat and severe weather, putting our roads under even more pressure than ever.
“We should be rebuilding road maintenance in public hands, with the workers, skills and equipment to maintain our roads properly, and rebuilding damaged roads stronger and more resilient, instead of paying private companies to patch the same problems over and over again.
“Instead Labor’s digging in with more privatisation and no amount of pre-election blitzing from both Labor or the Liberals is going to undo the mess they created when they sold off our public services in the first place. We need to bring VicRoads back into public hands.”
