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House of Assembly - Fifty-Fifth Parliament, First Session (55-1)
2025-03-06 Daily Xml
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Sturt Highway

Mrs HURN (Schubert) (15:35): I rise to speak on something that is really important in my local community. You would appreciate that being a regional member of parliament there are many locals who focus on road safety. We need to make sure we have quality roads but we also need to make sure that they are safe roads. One road at the moment that is causing a lot of concern in my local community is the Sturt Highway.

The issue that I am about to outline was in The Leader newspaper this week. I would like to give a shout-out to The Leader: just recently they were awarded the Best Newspaper in the country for 2024. A big shout-out for them and in particular for covering such an important story in our local Barossa community.

To paint a picture of the situation that I am concerned about: it is the Sturt Highway, an extremely busy national highway. It is the main link between Sydney and Adelaide which sees up to 10,000 vehicles—primarily heavy vehicles—on a very particular stretch between Barossa Valley Way and Stockwell Road. This stretch of the Sturt Highway is only one direction each way, there are no overtaking lanes and it is 110 km/h. It is extremely concerning for not just families who are living along this road but the really critical businesses that are living off of the Sturt Highway, whose workers are really concerned about their safety.

They have reported multiple near misses. They have reported actual accidents largely caused by the fact that these trucks and cars are going at 110 km/h. We potentially have drivers who are inattentive, or they might simply just not notice the fact that there is a car in front of them indicating to go into their place of work and they cannot brake quickly enough. People are really frightened. In fact, I was on site only a couple of weeks ago speaking with dozens and dozens of local workers and people who are living on this stretch. They are saying that something just has to be done to improve this road safety situation.

We have workers from Ultimate Engineering and Maintenance Services, we have Suber Oak, we have Wems Engineering, Filmer Delivery and, of course, the local families who are all living along there. Workers were telling me that they honestly feel as though they are rolling the dice and playing Russian roulette with their life every single time they are driving to work. That is just not something that we should be seeing anywhere across South Australia.

I have written to the former police minister about this on numerous occasions. I have written to the new police minister about this, urging him to get boots on the ground in my community and see this firsthand. What I do find, and certainly this is the approach that I take as a local member of parliament, is that you have to get boots on the ground yourself to actually see how dangerous a situation is. It is so easy for people to sit in Adelaide and pop it into Google and just make the assumption that there is no problem, but you need to get out there and see it for yourself, to speak with workers who are going into their businesses every single day worried about their lives. You simply cannot ignore these road safety concerns.

What I would love to see is (a) for the minister to come and get boots on the ground, but (b) I think there needs to be a really short, sharp review to look at all types of things that could potentially alleviate some of these concerns, whether it is looking at turning lanes into these businesses that I have mentioned, whether it is just extending the 80 kilometres speed sign just by a few hundred metres so that people can have that peace of mind, even if it is just putting in some additional signage about turning vehicles. But one thing I know is that something has to be done to improve this situation. It is so critical.

These businesses have started a petition. It is something that I am supporting very much so as the local member of parliament, and I am looking forward to tabling that in this place and helping them to get the signatories for that petition to show the government that it is really, really important. I think when regional members of parliament particularly bring road safety concerns to this place, we are not mucking around. Something needs to be done, and I am standing with these businesses that are not just bringing it to my attention but urging the government to act. We need a short, sharp review just to get on top of these issues that we are seeing on the Sturt Highway. I would like to thank The Leader newspaper for bringing this to the community's attention.

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