This Just In: Victoria Is Pouring a Billion-Dollar Budget Into Fixing Roads Across the State
Victoria's state government has sworn to fix road safety issues across the state, with its largest funding boost for maintenance yet.
In the last four years, extreme weather and poor maintenance have created many reasons for Victorian drivers to complain about road conditions. Good news then, as the Victorian State Government has announced it will commit a budget of $1.04 billion to fixing up the state's many roads. According to Premier Jacinta Allan, it's enough to fix over 200,000 potholes and 200,000 graffiti tags across the state, with a 70 percent majority of the funds going to regional roads.
Of that budget, certain amounts are reserved for specific goals. For example, $36.9 million will be put towards weed and grass control, graffiti removal and rubbish cleanup on the ten busiest freeways in the state (Monash Freeway, Princes Freeway West, Western Freeway, West Gate Freeway, Hume Freeway, Calder Freeway, Western Ring Road, South Gippsland Freeway, Mornington Peninsula Freeway and Tullamarine Freeway).
The funding adds $64 million onto 2025's roads budget, which has seen crews repair 187,000 potholes, 31,000 signs and millions of metres of grass. It's also a point of contention between governments, with Shadow Roads Minister Danny O'Brien saying the funding increase offers "no real change" beyond the maintenance that is expected from a sitting government.
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Frustrations with road conditions are loudest in regional Victoria, where flooding events have led to rapid deterioration and, in turn, increased accidents. In 2023, road fatalities spiked to a frequency not seen since 2016. Premier Jacinta Allan explained, "As a result of the extreme heavy weather and flooding events that occurred across 2022, 2023 and 2024, that has created some real challenges on our road network."
According to the ABC, one of the worst-hit areas in the floods, Buloke Shire, only received 20 percent of the $78 million 2025 budget to fix its 5,300 kilometres of roads, and the one-star safety-rated Western Highway 'death stretch' — that has seen over 170 fatalities since 2015 — is stuck in a multimillion-dollar limbo around route changes, let alone maintenance.
Critics won't be distracted by the funding boost, though. The Victorian Farmers Association remarked that the extra funding isn't more than "a band-aid on a broken leg," and Victorian opposition leader Jess Wilson filmed herself performing road maintenance last month (see above), before calling the extra funds a "billion-dollar admission of failure" from the Allan Government.
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