Shoulder Sealing

The Hon. G.G. BROCK (Frome) (14:51): My question is to the Minister for Transport and Infrastructure. Can the minister advise the house if the Blyth Plains Road shoulder sealing project, which was mentioned in the last sitting of parliament, will be started in April? Has this been tendered? When was it tendered out? How was it tendered? Who is the successful tenderer?

The Hon. S.K. KNOLL (Schubert—Minister for Transport, Infrastructure and Local Government, Minister for Planning) (14:51): I am more than happy to take the substance of that question on notice, given that it's one that I don't have to hand at the moment, except to say that this work was procured as part of our extended shoulder sealing program. There is normally a budget of around $11 million a year. We increased that last year to add an extra $26 million to that program.

We know that shoulder sealing is something that saves lives and reduces by up to 40 per cent the number of deaths and serious injuries on roads that have been shoulder sealed. We have something like 10,000 kilometres of road that would need to be shoulder sealed across our network and, to have every road that needs it shoulder sealed, we are working down that list in priority order as quickly as we can.

Blyth Plains was a project that we were happily able to bring forward this year because of the increased amount of money that we have. There are myriad contracting models out there at the moment and, quite clearly, at the moment, a lot of what we are trying to do is to make sure we can bring forward work as much as possible and utilise existing contracting mechanisms to be able to do that. I am more than happy to look into this case to see what information I have.