By Deanne Jeffers
GROWING up, we learned an important saying: There’s no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothing, or the failure to plan for a wet or cold day.
Since reports that the State Government had installed electronic signs on major freeways in northern Victoria warning drivers of ‘Potholes ahead next 20km’, a second message has been added: “Storm damage. Drive Safely.”
The State Government has for years now maintained that bad weather is to blame for Victoria’s dilapidated roads, and not lack of investment or proper repairs, as it spruiks its “record investment” in road maintenance.
Pothole reports surged during the first week of July, with 997 reports made between June 30 and July 6 via Snap Send Solve, and 3,060 road damage reports sent in the last month compared to 2,100 in June 2025.
However, data shows that our roads were already broken long before winter arrived.
A staggering 15,514 pothole reports have been logged in the first half of 2026 alone, compared to 11,836 at the same time last year. To put that in perspective, the state has blown past the entirety of 2025, which closed out with 12,571 total reports and averaged 34.4 reports per day.
A spokesperson for the Department of Transport and Planning has said, “Maintenance crews are responding to reports of potholes along the Hume Freeway and Goulburn Valley Highway and will deliver repairs as necessary.”
They added that due to extended, extreme or above-average rainfall or flooding like parts of the state have recently experienced, “damage to our roads is inevitable.”
That may be true of any given storm, but it doesn’t explain why the network had no resilience left to absorb one, or the fact that anecdotal evidence shows that many of the impacted roads were damaged in the first place.
While the State Government maintains that it is spending “a record $1.04 billion to rebuild, repair and resurface roads across Victoria – with 70 per cent of the funds going to regional Victoria,” analysis shows that the Government is actually planning to do fewer pothole repairs and road resealing over this financial year.
Budget papers reveal that targets for targeted pavement patchwork and localised road structure repairs are being scaled back, with plans to patch just 74,000 square metres of Victoria’s regional road network in the 2026-27 financial year, down from 95,000 square metres the previous year.
This matches state budget analysis from the Opposition, with Shadow Roads Minister Danny O’Brien saying that the government’s own data shows deep road resurfacing and rehabilitation works collapsed by up to 75 per cent over the four years leading into 2026.
This severe reduction in deep resurfacing has meant roads quickly decay under intense rain, forcing councils and crews into endless, reactive patchwork rather than structural preventative maintenance.
Labor says it has “invested nearly $3 billion over the past three years – the largest sustained investment in road maintenance in Victoria’s history,” and yet, roads have never been worse.
One must ask the question: if so much money has been spent maintaining roads, why are wheels bending, tyres shredding, and drivers forced into a daily, nail-biting game of dodge-ems? Why is taxpayer money being spent on multiple electronic signs warning of 20 kilometres of potholes instead of fixing the bitumen beneath them?
If the government insists on blaming the weather, it must deliver an infrastructure strategy that can withstand it. We need roads that don’t instantly disintegrate when it rains, repairs that hold for longer than a few days, and a shift toward fully renewing entire sections of road instead of scattered, temporary patches.
How have potholes on Victorian roads impacted you? Send your story and photos to deanne.jeffers@sheppartonadviser.com.au or message The Shepparton Adviser on social media.
