How were misleading videos and images circulated; access to planning documents under FOI have been denied. We believe a commissioned report skips impacts on the planned route, with deficient data, and exaggerates these impacts on the alternative route, with a much wider than needed disturbance width.

Why did VicRoads not acknowledge the reports sent to them by the lawyer for our community conservation group Keep Original Route Supporters Inc? It appears MRP has put more effort into hiding problems than fixing them.

Even so, a Ballarat conservation group applauds MRP and favours the planned route in a recent opinion piece (May 16). The piece does not tally up the route's overall impact. It focuses instead on the avoided high quality roadside vegetation and, from new tree avoidances, an alleged cultural win for Eastern Maar Aboriginal group.

But even with the alternative route's high quality highway-side vegetation, and the valuable vegetation in the cleared powerline easement where the alternative route could mostly go, the area of vegetation loss from the two routes, quality-adjusted, is nearly equal. The overall and irreplaceable losses are far less on the alternative route if designed adequately. We have provided the government with more accurate independent experts' reports to assess the overall least-impact route. The reports underpin a Victorian Supreme Court case, so far unheard, to challenge the standard of environmental assessment used to select a route.

The planned route now has a "vastly improved road design", we read. The plans do reveal the significant scope available to engineers to improve any route when the all-critical design effort is forthcoming.

But the design work is "lipstick on a pig", because the effort has been applied to the wrong route: it has major environmental handicaps.

Deviating from the highway, especially through hilly land, locks in the impact of a big new landscape-splintering barrier, four new lanes not two, and new local access arrangements.

To outweigh this, the deviation would need to be shorter or flatter (it's neither), avoid more precious natural and cultural assets, or have lower impact long term. It does none of these. It hits 4.3 hectares of previously unreported federally protected grassy woodland, four times more large old trees, eight-fold more rare Golden Sun Moth habitat. It devastates a Djap Wurrung landscape, as documented by independent reporter to the federal government, Susan Phillips. Major earthworks make the route far more emissions intensive.

Victorians and Australians have major transitions to make, and shifting a route should not be taking so much time and effort. With thousands of supporters, our group urges the Andrews government to require MRP to follow the process needed to use well intentioned design effort on a better route, capturing all design and placement benefits, now and long term.

Unless people are working effectively to "... oppose duplication ... in the vicinity of Langi Ghiran" as the Western Highway Conservation Group claims, then realistically they are working for MRP's more destructive route.

Neil R Marriott, Chair, Keep Original Route Supporters Inc.