1 day ago
6
July 9, 2026 — 5:00am
If it is regional Victoria that finally delivers a change in state government, the 2026 election will be remembered as the Pothole Rebellion.
We live in complex, difficult times. The planet is warming, AI will soon be writing this column, and as we reach the business end of the World Cup, who among us truly understands the offside rule?
Yet, in towns and regional centres where a well-maintained ribbon of bitumen remains an essential connection between home and work and family and friends and school and healthcare and most other things, there is no more pressing problem than potholes.
As the saying made famous by Muhammad Ali goes, it isn’t the mountain ahead that wears you down, it’s the pebble in your shoe. Every blown tyre isn’t a calamity but walk into the front bar of any pub in any regional town, and see how long it takes for someone to start grumbling about the state of the roads.
A couple of nights ago at the Wodonga RSL, a bloke sidled up to my table and said by way of introduction that he’d spent $8000 this year on tyres and replacement rims for his Ford Ranger.
David Rice, a former sign writer, explained that’s the cost so far from the times he’s come a cropper on the Swiss-cheesed major highways that run between Wodonga and Melbourne, Shepparton and Yarrawonga.
"We're not talking back roads," he says.
Further along the Murray River at Cobram, local publican Adam Rudd likened a scene he recently witnessed on the Goulbourn Valley Highway to something out of movie.
It was a week ago, on a Thursday night, after it had been raining for two straight days in northern Victoria. Rudd was floating his horse back to Cobram after running it at the Kilmore trots, and says he must have passed dozens of stricken cars along a 50-kilometre stretch between Nagambie and Shepparton.
"All broken down, all smashed, because they had hit potholes," he says. The roadside that night was a procession of tow trucks and flashlights and swearing drivers getting drenched because they live in a state with Australia's most soluble roads.
In the office of the Yarrawonga Chronicle, editor Christine McKee says nothing sells like a story about a whopping great hole in the road. Every time it rains, local reporters scatter to gather yarns about broken rims and bent axles. “It is a genuine issue,” she says.
If you listen to any of the ABC's regional radio stations, you'll hear a steady stream of callers wanting to talk about potholes and road maintenance. If an entrepreneurial broadcaster started up a podcast dedicated to tales of radial grief, they'd have more material than Karl Stefanovic at a MAGA retreat.
National Party leader Danny O’Brien, who travels around Victoria with a tape measure and camera phone to document the most egregious blacktop booby traps for prosperity – and Instagram – was filming one lot of potholes last week outside Shepparton when, a little further down the road, he came across a distraught young woman whose P-plated Hyundai had been reduced to three wheels.
He helped her fix the flat while she tried to reach the prospective employer whose job interview she was likely to miss.
"People are over it," says O'Brien, whose electorate of Gippsland South is reporting the same frustration with the roads as northern Victoria.
"It is probably symbolic of the general neglect felt in regional Victoria. All this money is being wasted in Melbourne and we are not even getting decent roads."
David Rice puts it another way. “The roads are not about the roads. The roads are a symbol of the decay and decline of our lifestyle in country Victoria.”
This is where pothole politics is really starting to bite.
The state government can point to the $1.04 billion it has budgeted for road maintenance and repairs this year. Road experts can tell you the stress put on country highways from fully loaded B-double trucks.
These arguments only go so far when people in regional Victoria see the amount of money ploughed into the city-centric Big Build projects and leeched into the pockets of bikies and crooks mobbed up with the CFMEU.
It is all about the roads. It is also about so much more.
When you live outside of Melbourne, every pothole – the ones you pass harmlessly by, the ones you narrowly dodge and the ones you hit and send a jolt up your spine – is a reminder of every misspent dollar, mismanaged program and misaligned government priority.
They are the pockmarked emblem of regional anger now simmering at a level we haven’t seen in Victoria since the bush revolt of September 1999, when country voters called an abrupt halt to the Kennett government.
Regional seats abandoned the Coalition that day and some have never gone back. Jacinta Allan was first elected to parliament in what used to be the marginal seat of Bendigo East. A troika of rural independents put Labor into power and there they have stayed for 23 of the past 27 years.
I spent three days in northern Victoria this week following Opposition Leader Jess Wilson on a listening tour. There was not a town she visited where someone did not ask her a variant of the same question – what are you going to do to fix the roads?
Wilson doesn’t have an answer yet. She has some ideas but needs to figure out how to get more bitumen for our buck. “We can’t fix every pothole overnight,” she told the crowd at the Wodonga RSL.
The road to government has always run through regional Victoria. Right now, it is in a shocking state.
Chip Le Grand is state political editor.
The Opinion newsletter is a weekly wrap of views that will challenge, champion and inform your own. Sign up here.
