A number of state and national agriculture figureheads have appeared on Flow's Country Viewpoint program this week to discuss the celebrations planned for National Agriculture Day and a host of issues currently impacting the industry.
Among them is the Victoria Farmers Federation President, Emma Germano, who phoned-in to the Country Viewpoint program to vent her frustration at the current state of important regional and rural roads in her home state.
Germano observed that the current roads crisis in outback Australia is multi-faceted and more than just a major inconvenience to freight drivers.
"I was out in country Victoria last week and the state of the roads, I mean we've got this increasing road fatality figure and whenever we hear about road fatalities, we never talk about the condition of the road at the same time, It's always driver fatigue or this reason, that reason, every other reason other than the state of the road," Germano said.
"We're certainly not looking in regional and rural Victoria and the rest of Australia, mind you, like we're living in a first world country with first world roads, it's actually quite dire out there, it's costing people their lives and we can keep talking about it and the longer we talk about it the bigger the problem is going to get.
With reference to the Grattan Institute's latest report on regional and rural roads in Australia released Monday, which cited that it will take a billion dollar commitment to fix Australia's roads crisis, Germano weighed in on the issue of local regional councils being ill-equipped to fix roads in their jurisdiction.
"We put incredible pressure on local councils to try and fix their roads and we know that they don't have the budget to do it, we know that they've got fewer and fewer ratepayers who are carrying a heavier and heavier burden all of the time, because there is just a simple inequity between metropolitan and regional Victoria and of course the rest of Australia, but in Victoria, they need to start doing something about it now," Germano said.
"We're not even talking about how do we future-proof the roads, how do we make our roads more productive, safer, different routes, that sort of thing, we're just talking about fixing up potholes and it certainly wasn't lost on me when I was driving on the Hamilton Highway last week - horrific, horrific road quality.
"Then there's a couple of poor council workers who are shoveling little bits of gravel into holes as if that's even, you know, it's not even a drop in the ocean, so the levels of government need to get together and actually work out a solution that's meaningful because it seems to me like it's going to get far worse before it gets better.
Germano also implied that the current road infrastructure is not suited to support modern-day technologies, such as agriculture vehicles which were built smaller historically.
"We've got these damaged roads because we've got large agricultural vehicles using them now that weren't necessarily as large historically as what they are now, we need to talk about how does rail assist with freight to get some of those vehicles off the road? So there's got to be a whole picture.
"We see a lot of money being spent on things that I know so many Australians would say is a complete waste and things like basic infrastructure is getting left behind, so they need to get with the program and they need to start funding the road, simply.
"They need to be having forward budget so that we can have planning around how you go about assigning contractors to the roads, so this ad hoc, you know, little bit of an announcement here and there when there's a budget announcement or when we go into an election, it's just simply not good enough.
"Regional Victorians deserve better and at the moment we're paying for it and it doesn't make the road any better when I have to pay to fix up my wheels or my tires or any of the other damage that happens, it's outrageous and I've been saying that we need to have a road rage campaign about the state of the roads in regional Victoria."
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