00:00The potholes Dale Pointer is looking out for are a bit bigger than average.
00:16If I put my foot in there, you can see that's ankle deep.
00:19But they're a fact of life around Nulliwil in North West Victoria, where his children
00:25travel on the school bus every day.
00:27You're continually worrying if it's 70 tonne trucks coming the other way and these deteriorating
00:32roads, you know.
00:34It's not a question of if, it's probably a question of when.
00:38Those trucks will flock here soon when the Balogueshye's grain crops are ready for harvest.
00:44But the roads they rattle down are in a state of disrepair, three years after the 2022 floods
00:51took their toll.
00:52It's now 2024, the flood was in 2022.
00:55If we had the support, this would be done and dusted now.
01:00Hundreds of millions of dollars in disaster funding was pledged by the state and federal
01:05governments in the aftermath.
01:07But to date, the Balogueshye has only received a fraction of the money it needs for repairs.
01:13They're not listening, we've spoken with ministers, we've had our local member raise it in parliament,
01:18but here we are still chasing the money.
01:20Nothing's done about it until there is a severe tragedy.
01:23And I mean, if that's, that's too late.
01:26But it's not just remote rural roads that are dangerous in regional Victoria.
01:33Yeah, this is part of the death stretch as people refer to it.
01:37David Gregg lives next to the Western Highway at Buanga, about an hour west of Ballarat.
01:43It's the main freight route connecting Melbourne and Adelaide, but locals say it's a death trap.
01:49There are fatal accidents on this stretch behind me every few months.
01:52When the page goes off, you're like, oh, I'm not another one.
01:56Locals' fears were realised in May, when three people died in a five-car accident here on the Western Highway at Armstrong.
02:05In safety ratings published by Aust Roads last month, this stretch of the highway was given a one-star rating out of five.
02:13A score that's all too common on regional Victorian roads.
02:17The statistics paint a disturbing picture of an obvious divide between metropolitan and regional arterial roads.
02:25While Melbourne has a handful with a quality rating of one, regional Victoria is covered by a web of major roads with the lowest possible score.
02:35Certainly when you're talking about the burden of deaths and serious injuries, that's in the rural and regional areas.
02:43Ingrid Johnston says Australia's rural roads need urgent attention.
02:48So if you take a one-star road and you turn it into a two-star road, you've just halved the fatalities and serious injuries on that road.
02:57But in a state riddled with debt and pushing ahead with multi-billion dollar road projects in the city, finding the money for country roads isn't easy.
03:07The duplication of the Western Highway started in 2013, but five years ago it was halted due to legal action over its proposed route.
03:19That action was resolved last year, but the project remains mothballed.
03:24Jacinta Allen deserves to give us some answers of if the money's there, when it's going to be started and why it's being held off on for so long.
03:32A state government spokesperson couldn't confirm a date for the project to resume.
03:38It's a real concern. As they say, country people die on country roads. That's why.
03:43A call for action. Charlotte Wilkes, ABC News.
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