Emma KEALY (Lowan) (15:40): I rise today to speak on the Transport Legislation Amendment (Vehicle Sharing Scheme Safety and Standards) Bill 2025. Given everybody seems to be telling their e-scooter stories, about how they are used in various cities around the world and in Australia, I think that I really should make a point in this debate to actually announce that I am an early adopter of scooters. Before there were e-scooters, there were scooters, and back when I lived in Alice Springs, my dear darling father managed to pull out a small petrol one – it was actually on a little lawnmower engine. It was over 20 years ago now. I was scooting around the streets of Alice Springs between my house and the hospital where I worked in pathology, and it was a lot of fun. It was potentially quite dangerous at the time. There were certainly no rules around how scooters were used at that point in time. The biggest questions were if it was too great of an engine size to be ridden on the footpath or had to be ridden on the road, and did you need a licence to be able to ride it? Fortunately I had a licence, so that was not the reason –
Wayne Farnham: Did you take it to the pub?
Emma KEALY: No. I take up the interjection, which I know is unparliamentary of me, but the member for Narracan has asked: did I take the scooter to the pub? No, I did not. But I did use it, and it was incredibly useful. It was a great form of transport, and that is a reason that we have now seen batteries developed over that time and we now have the evolution of e-scooters. They are a fabulous way to get around. They are an enormous amount of fun. I think that Brisbane does it best. I like the way that they manage the e-scooters, in that they are always visible in the streets and around the parklands and along the promenade there. The e-scooter companies have an obligation to keep the scooters neat and tidy on the side. They are always lined up very beautifully. They are not in the road at all, and they are not lying down on their side. They are managed very, very well and they always have a full charge when you are looking to take one or to hire one. I think that there is possibly an opportunity here for Victoria to take a leaf out of Brisbane and Queensland’s book when it comes to the management of scooters in particular. There are some elements that I would like to build upon around the theme that I think that this is a good piece of legislation. I think that e-scooters are a great form of
transportation for many, many reasons, as was well covered off by the member for Bulleen, but I think there are some concerns that need to come through as well. We still have some safety concerns around risks for e-scooter riders and for the broader community, whether they are pedestrians or whether they are fellow road users, not just in Melbourne but around the state, and there might be some missed opportunities in terms of the scope of this legislation where the government could have gone further, and also around structurally how we make sure that our roads are safe and fit for purpose for scooter riders. I would first like to touch on that exact point, which is around road safety. There are a number of amendments within this legislation which go back to the road rules and also the relevant Road Safety Act 1986. For our cars, we know that they need to have a roadworthy certificate. Our cars must be roadworthy to go on the roads. However, our roads do not need to be car worthy. Unfortunately, across vast areas of this state, in all corners of the state, our roads simply are not up to scratch. We see more and more potholes, we see crumbling edges and we see rutting of roads, which is where the tyre marks carve out a section of the highway in particular.
If you want an example of that, travel to Horsham, my hometown, where I live, the largest community in my electorate of Lowan, and have a look at the intersection of Baillie Street and McPherson Street. This has got an area which is terribly rutted. It is on the Western Highway, which is the main highway between Adelaide and Melbourne. It is in fact the second busiest highway in Australia. There were some works undertaken a matter of weeks ago in relation to removing some of the dangerous rutting at the traffic light at the intersection of Baillie Street and McPherson Street. And you would not believe it – only a couple of weeks later we are seeing those ruts come back into play. This is something that is not a surprise for the contractors that we used. In fact they were speaking to local businesspeople. They actually took the labelling off their vehicles when they were fixing that road. They knew that the road was going to fall apart because they had not been given enough money from the Allan Labor government to fix that intersection properly and make that road safe. The scope of works that was issued to them, they knew, was not up to the standard that would be able to handle the heavy vehicle traffic that turns at that corner. This is a concern, and it is something that we hear time and time again. We are simply seeing perpetual cuts to the road asset management budget. We are heading up to another budget this year, and it does greatly concern me that we will see yet another round of funding cuts for road asset management. VicRoads do the best that they can with the money that they have got. They simply cannot make money out of thin air.
They can only do the roads and fix the potholes and fix the crumbling edges with the budget they are given. Labor perpetually takes money out of the country Victorian areas, out of some of those regional road areas, and puts it into that great, big burrow, that great big hole in the eastern suburbs of Melbourne. We do not get it out in the country. In fact most of Melbourne does not see much of that money. It is essential that we make sure that we have safe roads, because we know that safer country roads will save country lives. Speaking of the roads budget, the road resurfacing spend is down 82 per cent in Victoria. Ninety-one per cent of roads are in poor or very poor condition; this is according to the government’s own survey. We hear in our offices so many times from people who have got either flat tyres or, getting even further, rims cracked or smashed altogether, and we hear of terrible accidents that can be directly attributed to the condition of the roads. In fact recently I heard of a situation where there was an incident – a truck crash on the Western Highway. Officially it is set down as a medical incident on the part of the driver, but that medical incident was that he drove through a pothole that was so significant that he hit his head on the steering wheel, and it rendered him unconscious. That is what the real cause of the accident was. It was the poor condition of the road. The Western Highway continues to miss out on funding. We were supposed to see that road duplicated in full down to at least Stawell back in 2016. We still have not seen the appropriate level of funding from the Allan Labor government in Victoria delivered to that project. The sad consequence of that is that we see so many accidents, and there was yet another fatality only a couple of weeks ago. This road must be fixed. There are too many lives being lost. It is a matter of priority for any government, state or federal. No matter what colour you are, just fix that road. It is just too dangerous, and I have seen too many people involved in accidents along that section.
As I mentioned earlier, I feel that there is a missed opportunity in relation to the management of escooters. The member for Bulleen spoke about docking stations, which would be very useful because you could charge the scooters at the same time. We do need to look at the enhanced management of scooters. Whether it is e-bikes or e-scooters, I see too many of them in the streets of Melbourne that are on footpaths and even on roads or lying out in our beautiful parklands. We need to put a greater onus on the operators of these e-scooter and e-bike businesses so that they take responsibility for keeping their assets in good order, so they are not thrown in the Yarra, not lying around our beautiful parks, not on footpaths and not on roadways. They need to make sure that they are in places which are convenient to pedestrians or potential e-scooter or e-bike users but are also nice and neat and do not pose a risk to the community, to other pedestrians, to other e-scooter and e-bike users and to people who are in vehicles. My third point is around how this is more cost shifting to local government. One of the greatest costshifting issues that our local governments have got at the moment is that they do not know how on earth they are going to be able to manage this new great big volunteers tax that the government is busy putting on farmers across our state. It is up to local government to work out how this money will be managed. It is an enormous amount of money that will be coming in. In fact it is over $100 million each and every year that will be taken from country Victoria and plugged into Melbourne core government services.
Councils in my region have flagged that they are very, very concerned that they will be the ones who will be left to manage which volunteers’ residences will then receive this potential for a section of their tax to be reduced or rebated. There is concern, and I received a message only earlier today from a volunteer saying they do not even think Labor will deliver on this promise that there will be any relief at all for volunteers around this tax, because we have seen time and time again that Labor cannot manage money, and it is consistently Victorians that have to pay the price. Whether it is through their pockets – paying more taxes – whether it is about driving on terrible roads or whether it is about substandard health services, Labor always makes Victorians pay the price.