While slow progress is being made to upgrade the Western Highway by bypassing Beaufort and the last section to Ararat remains locked in a stalemate with indigenous protesters and one landholder, what of the rest of the vital western Victorian roadway? Member for Ballarat Catherine King turned her attention to the most used and fastest growing part of the road, where it enters Melbourne.
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The Western Highway is the major road corridor between Melbourne and Adelaide.
It is the second busiest National Highway in Australia in terms of freight movement.
It is the backbone of Western Victoria.
The link that the Western Highway provides between my electorate of Ballarat and Melbourne is integral to the continued population and economic growth of our regional communities.
For many residents of Bacchus Marsh and other towns at the eastern end of my electorate, the road constitutes their daily commute to work in Melbourne, while many of us use it to access Melbourne on a less regular basis.
However as population continues to boom in Melbourne's west the pace of travel on the road is only slowing. More than 60,000 vehicles travel along the Western Highway in each direction each day, spending increasing amounts of their time sitting still and going nowhere.
These delays will only grow worse into the future with the highway projected to accommodate 85,000 vehicles per day by 2021 and 113,000 by 2031.
The road as it is simply cannot cope.
The areas of the road which require work are clear to all of those who use it. From Melton to Caroline Springs your journey slows. The road simply wasn't built to cope with the volume of traffic that it carries now, let alone what it will be expected to carry into the future.
Required upgrades to the Western Highway would likely include new interchanges to service the Mountain West and Rockbank areas, as well as the addition of lines and removal of at grade access between Melton and Caroline Springs. While all these works would be in the neighbouring electorate of Gorton, they would offer significant benefits to individuals and businesses in my growing regional community, particularly commuters from Bacchus Marsh and beyond.
Over recent years, the communities along the Western Highway have unified together under the auspices of the Western Highway Action Committee to push for works which have significantly increased their quality of life.
The then-Labor government listened to the community, carrying out works that fixed Anthony's Cutting, built the Deer Park Bypass and began the important work of duplicating the highway through to Stawell.
I am pleased that the community is once again coming together to advocate for improvements to the highway, and I'm pleased to join with my colleagues the member for Gorton and Steve McGhie the state member for Melton. We all hear from our constituents continually about the troubles that they face along this stretch of road.
The government needs to stop ignoring our region and investigate the best way to move forward to ensure that our communities have the link to Melbourne befitting our rapidly growing population. It's an important economic development opportunity for our region, but it's also about quality of life and safety for our region.
It is time for the communities once again to unite to get improvements to the Western Highway.
This is an edited version of a speech Catherine King MP gave to Federal Parliament on August 1
