Wednesday, 22 March 2023

Murray Valley Highway

Peter WALSH (Murray Plains) (19:05): (113) My adjournment matter is for the Minister for Roads and Road Safety and is on behalf of the many constituents who suffered when the Murray Valley Highway continued to be closed after the peak of the October 2022 floods had passed, with a few inches of water remaining over the highway at the Wandella Creek bridge north of Kerang. This meant that the major transport route between Kerang and Swan Hill was closed for weeks longer than was necessary and the local district was thrown into chaos. School buses could not get students to school, and people could not get to work without driving hundreds of kilometres extra every day.

The action I seek is to have the minister instruct Regional Roads Victoria to install box culverts in the floodway of the Murray Valley Highway immediately north of the Wandella Creek bridge, adjacent to Reedy Lake. This would mean that the highway would only have to be closed during the peak of the flood, connectivity between Kerang and Swan Hill would be reinstated quicker and school students would be able to get to school rather than having to miss weeks of school. It would mean residents would be able to access medical services and, importantly, ambulances would be able to travel between Swan Hill and Kerang, or on to Bendigo as is sometimes the case, rather than having long detours. The unnecessary length of time the Murray Valley Highway was closed caused a sustained economic downturn in Kerang as people could not travel into town to shop or access services and opted to spend their money in Swan Hill rather than face the long haul the detour entailed.

One Kerang family who work in Swan Hill told me the closure forced them to make a 6-hour round trip to Swan Hill every day if they were going to go to work. It made going to work cost prohibitive and basically stopped the woman and her husband from working the entire time the highway was closed, with no financial compensation, for what was basically a few inches of water over the road. This family and many others like them were not just upset and angry, they were highly stressed. The woman in the family told me the fear of losing their jobs added further to their stress and anxiety. That was compounded, they told me, by the total lack of communication as to when the highway would reopen – and, no, a few posts on a departmental Facebook page is not communication; it just does not cut the mustard. I will not go into detail about the number of complaints about the mail that could not get through. As I said earlier, the school bus was not allowed through, and in the end many frustrated families simply opted to keep their children at home – all because of a few inches of slow-moving water over the road that was not dangerous at all. Fortunately after several weeks common sense prevailed and there was a small levy put in place to stop the water going over the road and it was reopened to traffic, but weeks later than it should have been.

In future the disruption to Kerang and Lake Charm district residents and the closure of major transport in northern Victoria could be averted forever with the installation of box culverts to let the water flow under the road instead of over it. I urge the minister to listen to the concerns of these communities and urgently have this issue resolved by having box culverts installed in the floodway on the Murray Valley Highway north of the Wandella Creek bridge.