09/09/2026
Victoria’s roads are deteriorating — but the real scandal is that the system was telling government this was happening while the public was still being shown “successful” performance targets.
The Auditor-General has found that around 48% of Victoria’s state road network was in poor or very poor condition in 2024, up from 39% in 2021. At the same time, defects were accumulating faster than they were being repaired.
The Department of Transport and Planning had already warned government that funding was insufficient to maintain or improve the network, forcing it to focus increasingly on reactive and safety-critical repairs rather than preventative maintenance.
Its own business case estimated it would cost more than $3 billion a year to maintain road pavement condition at existing levels while replacing age-expired assets.
Yet annual road asset management funding had been sitting at roughly $900 million to $1 billion.
Then comes the number that should concern every Victorian taxpayer.
The road pavement asset renewal ratio averaged just 0.16 between 2022–23 and 2024–25 — a strong indication that renewal investment was nowhere near keeping pace with depreciation.
And while all this was happening, the Department was publicly reporting against 15 road maintenance targets.
VAGO found those targets did not provide meaningful insight into the real condition of the road network.
One example says it all.
The Department reported that 95.3% of regional roads met its roughness standard.
But the road condition survey found 50.38% of regional roads were poor or very poor in terms of remaining useful life.
Different measures, yes — but that is exactly the problem.
What does “meeting the target” actually mean if the underlying asset continues to deteriorate?
Worse still, VAGO found there is no government-endorsed target for what an “acceptable” road network condition should even be.
The performance measures are based on available funding rather than on a clearly defined service standard for Victorian road users.
This is not just a pothole problem.
It is an accountability problem.
If government knows the network is deteriorating, knows funding is insufficient, knows preventative maintenance is being sacrificed, and still reports performance against targets that do not meaningfully reflect road condition, then the public is not being given a clear picture of what is really happening.
People First believes accountability should happen before the money is gone and before the infrastructure fails — not years later in an Auditor-General’s report.
The question is simple:
How can a government claim success against road maintenance targets when its own department says funding is insufficient, almost half the network is poor or very poor, and the Auditor-General says the targets themselves do not meaningfully show whether the roads are actually being maintained?
That is the conversation Victorians should be having.
https://www.audit.vic.gov.au/report/maintaining-state-roads?utm_source=Victorian+Auditor-General%27s+Office&utm_campaign=329e98098a-maintaining-state-roads-gen&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_-db5512e40f-746733525&ct=t(maintaining-state-roads-gen)
