South Road Upgrades

Mr PENGILLY (Finniss) (14:50): My question is to the Minister for Transport and Infrastructure. Can the minister advise the house of any plans to create a dual carriageway from Seaford to Sellicks Beach along the Main South Road corridor?

The Hon. S.C. MULLIGHAN (Lee—Minister for Transport and Infrastructure, Minister for Housing and Urban Development) (14:51): I thank the member for Finniss for his question. It has been a concern for residents who use that southern part of South Road about the condition of the road and certainly the number of representations I have had from the member for Mawson, as well as from the member for Kaurna in particular, have highlighted the number of people who have approached them directly as being active local members who constantly raise these matters with me as the Minister for Transport.

We have had transport department staff go out and liaise with the council. We have also asked them to go and meet with some of the residents who have been concerned about it. In fact, as a result of the member for Mawson raising this issue with me, we have even had a couple of the department's engineers meet with a couple of retired council engineers to talk about one of the main problems with this part of Main South Road, and that's that there are some variable types of soil which underpin that road, in particular some reactive clays which, due to wet weather and then dry weather and so on, cause the undulations to form over time.

Certainly, the member for Mawson has made it clear to me that I need to be thinking about and the department needs to be thinking about some further works on top of the nearly $10 million we are spending on the Malpas Road intersection upgrade—where of course there have been quite a significant number of road accidents, including casualty crashes—and what else we can do. The member's question to me was: are we investigating dual carriageway? I can't, with my hand on my heart, say whether that particular solution is being investigated, but are we investigating solutions for the problem of that particular road? As a result of the strong advocacy of the member for Mawson, we absolutely are.