ONE of the key aims of the Murray Basin Rail project was to remove up to 20,000 trucks from Victorian roads.
But the botched project, which was meant to be completed by 2018 but still hasn’t seen the completion of stage 2, has achieved the exact opposite.
On the Sunraysia Highway alone, north bound truck traffic hasn’t reduced, rather it has tripled in volume from 2009 to 2020, in a report recently released in the Weekly Times.
The result is a crumbling country road system that is literally falling apart.
Bumpy highways are being hammered by heavy freight day and night, with potholes and damaged shoulders where trucks move over to let other vehicles through.
Signs warning drivers to reduce speed for rough surfaces litter journeys in and out of Sunraysia, in every direction. Indeed, the Victorian Government is considering reducing speeds to 80km/h on some country roads, rather than spend money on what has now become an extraordinarily expensive problem to fix.
The Weekly Times report said that Department of Transport data showed the number of trucks travelled on Victorian country roads had risen by 600 million kilometres in 2009 to reach 2.8 billion kilometres in 2020.
The need to get more freight onto rail has never been greater.
Yet the Victorian Government has abandoned delivering the full standardisation and upgrade of the Murray Basin Rail Project. The cost of the project has already blown out from $440 million to $794.4 million, yet remains half built.
Last December, Sunraysia Daily spoke to Rail Freight Alliance boss Reid Mather exactly 12 months after the state government refused to co-contribute $5 million for planning, following a $200.2 million fund injection from the Commonwealth Government on December 16, 2020.
Mr Mather said that the Victorian Government needed to “stop taking Victorians as fools” and get the job done.
“We are actually sick of the spin,” he said at the time. “It (the Murray Basin Rail) is not better, it is worse than before you (the Victorian Government) started and it was meant to be completed by 2018. At end of 2021, you still haven’t completed stage 2.
“You can spin it any way you like but that is the scope of the project. To take Victorians as fools is pretty reprehensible.”
Victorians Nationals leader Peter Walsh said due to the government’s refusal to get the project “back on track”, growers in north-west Victoria had endured another year with a crumbling, inefficient freight rail network.
Mildura councillor and Rail Freight Alliance chair Glenn Milne said “trains are still going at snail’s pace”.
“The amount of money spent on it and we still have a system that detours via Ararat and Geelong before it gets to Melbourne,” he said. “In this day and age, you would think you could get a service that runs straight through.”
People in country Victoria see the billions getting thrown at transport projects in Melbourne, many of which have seen massive cost blowouts, and shake their heads at the inequity of it all.
Freight on rail is still crawling, truck numbers have tripled to regions like Sunraysia, and with no passenger rail to Mildura, all of us have no choice but to get in our cars and head down south on a crumbling road system.
It’s been a long time since Transport Minister Jacinta Allan has been to Mildura.
Maybe she should take a drive.
