SELINA GREEN, HOST: Well, very often I hear your concerns about the condition of regional roads, and sometimes it doesn’t feel like much – a little bit of rain, a little bit of wear and tear, and those roads start to crumble. What impact has all this recent severe weather across much of regional Australia had on the resilience of our roads? Well, the Standing Committee on Regional Development is going to assess this. It's launched an inquiry into the implications of severe weather events on the national, regional, rural and Remote network. MP Luke Gosling OAM is chair of the committee. Good morning to you.
LUKE GOSLING, MEMBER FOR SOLOMON: Hey, good morning, Selina. How are you?
GREEN: Very good. What are you wanting to hear and who are you wanting to hear from as part of this inquiry?
GOSLING: A whole range of people, road users, different levels of government that have responsibility for our road system. As all your listeners know, if you live in regional Australia – I'm up in Darwin – roads are really important to us to keep us connected to the rest of the country, let alone the rest of the Territory, and it’d be no different than in your neck of the woods and in so many regional parts of Australia. So anyone who's using roads, the submissions are open until the end of February and we want to hear not only how much our road system has been affected by the lot of rain that we've had, which is one of the things that kick-started the inquiry. But also we want to hear from experts about how we can both design roads better and what materials we can use in construction to mean that they're a bit more resilient to the inevitable future flooding that we'll see.
GREEN: Because what have you seen what's been highlighted, for example, by the recent floods across the country? It seems it hasn't taken too much for some of these roads to deteriorate or even crumble completely away.
GOSLING: Yeah, that's right. And, you know, it becomes dangerous Not only does it affect businesses, particularly if roads are cut, obviously, but just for the public to be using some of these roads. I mean, it's great if you own a tyre shop or a suspension shop because, you know, you hit some of these potholes and it just becomes pretty dangerous. And obviously, councils have got a massive task to try and keep these roads up to scratch, same with state and territory governments. So we want to see how the Federal Government and can assist. So looking at where the situation is currently, but also as I said just having a view to the future and trying wherever we can, using world's best practice, make our roads a bit more resilient for the inevitable floods of the future.
GREEN: At the moment where roads are being rebuilt or patched up, is it pretty much like for like is there a lot to learn and take on board about building these roads? Better to withstand more of a beating?
GOSLING: Yeah, there is a lot. It always comes down to cost, of course, but that's the reason for the inquiry is to look at, you know, you always learn off other jurisdictions, you learn off the experiences of different countries as well. But Australia is pretty good. We've got pretty good roads. But it's just because we're such a big place with a relatively low population, The Federal Government's just obviously very keen to work out how we can support different levels of government better, and we can do that by listening to road transport associations and so forth. I mean, those people that are out on our roads day and night getting goods around the country, we obviously want to hear from them and hear what thoughts that they've got about our road network. And then obviously the people who are on the leading edge of, you know, what type of materials can we use and what sort of design to give our roads a fighting chance.
GREEN: As you say, the expectation is there will be more severe weather events predicted in the future. So this is going to have some pretty serious implications for the country's regional road network.
GOSLING: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the floods aren't new. We also know that they're increasing in severity and frequency. So, yeah, this is pretty important. In fact, we were going to embark on another inquiry into in a different issue because my committee is on Regional Development, Infrastructure and Transport. But when we sat down together, it's a bipartisan group of people, so Coalition, crossbenches, and our Labor Federal Government, when we sat down to discuss issues, impacting the areas of the members of the committees areas and regional Australia generally. We thought that it doesn't get much more important than impacts on regional Australian infrastructure and transport as this line of inquiry. So really looking forward to kicking it off in the new year and hearing from experts and road user groups different levels of government, before we take the committee out to regional Australia to hear from people on the ground as well.
GREEN: All right. So people can keep an eye out for those dates, obviously, when you do the rounds, but there's an opportunity now if people would like to make submissions, that can happen.
GOSLING: Yeah, 100 per cent, submissions are open. If you just go to the Australian Parliament House website, go to House of Representatives Committees and look at Regional Development, Infrastructure and Transport. You're looking for “Resilient Roads”. In fact, right from the start you can probably put that in the search bar “Resilient Roads Inquiry” and yeah, people can look up Luke Gosling. I'm the MP up in Darwin, but we'll be travelling to all corners of the country to find out how we can help.
GREEN: Luke Gosling, thank you very much for your time this morning.
GOSLING: Yeah. Hey, thanks very much. Have a great day.
