Potholes, Privatisation, and the Cost of Deferred Maintenance

A motorcyclist died on the Western Highway this week after hitting a pothole. I read that headline on Tuesday morning with my coffee and just sat with it for a minute before I could go back to my emails. Not because it’s shocking in the sense of being unprecedented, sadly it isn’t, but because it’s the kind of death that feels entirely preventable and entirely predictable at the same time. Someone rode to work, or to see family, or just for the hell of it, and a hole in the road killed them.

The Western Highway connects Melbourne to the whole of Western Victoria and on to Adelaide. People have been complaining about its state for years. Under a thread about the story, someone linked a page documenting fatalities on that stretch going back a long way. Deer strikes, blown tyres, now potholes. It reads like a slow-motion indictment of something.

The bit that got me thinking harder was a separate but related story running the same day: Labor has had twelve years in office and is only now talking about a “pothole blitz”, which one commenter rightly called too little, too late. There’s a real tension here I want to sit with rather than resolve neatly, because I don’t think it resolves neatly. On one hand, regional road funding genuinely has been squeezed while money went into Melbourne’s rail projects, and some of those rail projects (the Metro Tunnel, level crossing removals) are genuinely good infrastructure that this state needed. On the other hand, you can’t build your way to a liveable city while somebody’s mum is choosing not to drive to Ballarat because the highway has become the automotive equivalent of the moon’s surface. Both things are true. Victoria’s balance sheet is a mess, interest alone is running to eight billion a year according to one figure doing the rounds, and yet the answer to “we don’t have enough money” can’t be “so we stopped maintaining the roads that keep the state’s other regions connected and alive.”

Then there’s privatisation, which came up constantly in the discussion and which I’ve gone back and forth on for years, without much confidence in my own conclusion. Road maintenance contracts were privatised, VicRoads’ oversight capacity got hollowed out at the same time, and now there’s nobody minding the shop to check whether contractors are doing what they’re paid to do. I’m generally sceptical of the reflexive “privatisation bad” take, mostly because I think the world is more complicated than slogans allow. But road maintenance specifically seems like exactly the sort of thing where the profit motive and the public interest point in opposite directions: a private contractor’s incentive is to do the minimum that satisfies the contract, not to keep a highway safe for motorcyclists in perpetuity. Telstra came up in the same conversation, as an example of an asset handed over with no meaningful competition and no improvement to show for it two decades on. I don’t think every privatisation is a disaster. I do think this particular category, essential infrastructure with poor competitive pressure, has a genuinely bad track record, and I’m no longer inclined to give it the benefit of the doubt.

I don’t ride a motorbike, never have, my wife would divorce me on principle, but I drive out that way a couple of times a year to see family near Ararat, and I’ve felt some of those potholes myself, the sudden thud that makes you check your mirrors and hope nobody was tailgating. It’s a genuinely unsettling feeling, hitting something you didn’t see, on a road you’re doing 100 on. I can’t imagine what it does to a bike.

There’s also something in the SUV and ute conversation worth pulling out. Someone made the point that a Ford Ranger weighs half a tonne more than the Commodores it’s replaced, and that heavier vehicles cause exponentially more road wear, not linearly more. It’s a small thing that connects to a much bigger one: we’ve collectively decided, as a culture, that we want bigger cars, and nobody’s really costed what that decision does to the roads underneath them, or who ends up paying for the repair. That’s not really Labor’s fault or the Coalition’s fault. That one’s on all of us, in a diffuse and unsatisfying way that doesn’t fit neatly into an election slogan.

None of this brings back the person who died this week, and I don’t have a tidy way to end on that. What I do think is that “pothole populism”, as the article called it, is at least better than nothing, even if it’s arriving embarrassingly late and for the wrong reasons. A government finally noticing regional roads exist because an election’s coming is still a government noticing. I’d rather they’d noticed a decade ago. I’d rather nobody had died for it to become a priority. But I’ll take the blitz over the silence, and I’ll keep checking my mirrors on the way to Ararat either way.