Recent flooding in outback South Australia has exposed a lack of funding for road maintenance and the pressure on local councils to fund major repairs. Heavy rain across the north of the state in late February and early March cut off many outback towns with floodwaters cutting off roads.
With the waters receding, local government agencies are assessing the damage and counting the cost of repairs, which they will largely have to fund themselves.
Flinders Ranges Council chief executive Sean Holden told the ABC that council faced a bill of between $7 million and $10 million to fix the damaged roads, a sum greater than the council’s annual budget.
Holden said that even if council spent its entire budget it would only be able to seal 7 kilometres of the nearly 1300 kilometres in its area.
The Local Government Association of South Australia says that the state receives the lowest level of federal road funding per capita and per kilometre of any state or territory.
South Australia accounts for around 12% of the national road network and 7% of the population, but only receives around 5.5% of federal road funding.
Heather Holmes-Ross, the president of the LGASA, told the ABC this was the result of a “historical miscalculation” by the federal government.
“But we’re not interested why it happened,” she said.
“We’re interested in how it will be addressed.”
Holmes-Ross said that South Australia had received supplementary road funding from the federal government, equivalent to $20 million for 9 years, but some years these funds had not come through.
“For example, in 2014, the Abbott Government decided not to fund that so for three years there was no additional top up,” she said.
Funding was re-instated in the 2017-2018 federal budget, but the current three year extension to the state’s supplementary road funding is due to end on June 30.
While state and federal governments had released disaster funding for the nine local government areas, including the Flinders Ranges, Holmes-Ross said this kind of funding for road repairs was a “false economy.”
“Perhaps if South Australia were getting their fair share of federal funding we wouldn’t be in the position we are now,” she said.
Nationally, it is estimated that regional councils need a collective $500 million to get bush roads up to an acceptable standard.
