Opinion: Abandoning the country

Country people are accustomed to adjusting their driving to suit road conditions in rural areas.

We don’t expect the local dirt road to be glass smooth and we don’t drive at 100km/h on those dirt roads.

But we do expect our freeways to be suitable for driving at 100 to 110km/h.

While rural roads are in decline, the same can’t be said of metropolitan freeways.

Any regular driver visiting Melbourne will notice that the road surface improves in places like the Ring Rd.

So, pardon our surprise if we feel that we are being singled out in the country.

The Department of Transport has told us they are “putting together a program of maintenance” and that $1 billion has been set aside.

And also: “Thanks to new technology and reforms that we’ve made to the way road maintenance is delivered across Victoria, we now have access to more data about the condition of our roads than ever before.”

So, we need a data collection program to tell us the condition of the roads?

We don’t need more programs and more promises about how it will get better.

We’ve had those before.

What we need is a bunch of workers, with trucks and loads of bitumen, actually doing the job.

And they don’t need a program to find the potholes.

The roads between our towns and cities are littered with them.

If our cabinet ministers can’t find the potholes, send them from Spring St for a drive.

No chauffeurs.

The apparent casual abandonment of rural roads is cause for alarm for another reason.

The poor state of the road pavements are easily identifiable.

Drivers can easily see and measure the size and depth of a pothole.

If the State Government treats country people with such demonstrable neglect in the most obvious of places, what is happening in our education system and our hospitals?

What kind of neglects are occurring in funding services which cannot so easily be seen or measured?

This aspect of rural neglect is the most worrying.