FIX THIS MENACE
■ Last Tuesday, April 8, was the day that our emergency services workers had been dreading. A 50-year-old woman lost her life when her sedan and a truck collided on Yan Yean Road. CFA volunteers, police, SES and paramedics have been attending increasingly serious motor vehicle crashes on this road all too regularly.
The impasse on funding responsibility for the upgrade of Yan Yean Road must end now. A bipartisan pact is urgently needed to transfer funding responsibility from cash-strapped Nillumbik shire to the state government.
Those of us who use this increasingly congested and hazardous road each day know that it operates and functions as an arterial road – not a feeder road and definitely not a local road.
Yan Yean Road was programmed to become a state responsibility between Kurrak and Bridge Inn roads as the population grew. Late last year, without consultation with the community, Nillumbik or Whittlesea councils, Yan Yean Road was taken off the pending arterial road list, condemned to remain a designated local road for many years to come.
Now is the time to ensure that this tragic death is the last. I call on the state government, together with both local councils, to unite in strong agreement with me and the whole community that Yan Yean Road be declared a state arterial road immediately and then funds be allocated to fix this fatal menace.
DANIELLE GREEN, YAN YEAN MP
COALITION BACKS HEALTH
■ The Victorian Labor opposition has been making a lot of noise about funding cuts to Victoria’s hospitals.
Opposition leader Daniel Andrews should be embarrassed because the figures he is quoting are the cuts that the Rudd and Gillard governments wanted to make to our hospitals. It was the Victorian Coalition government that fought these Labor cuts. The Coalition government is investing a record $14.3 billion in our health system. We are also spending more than $4.5 billion on health infrastructure.
The federal Labor government cut funding to Northern Health by $13.5 million, whereas the Coalition increased Northern Health funding to $70.1 million.
We have put on an additional 465 paramedics across Victoria, including 193 more across metropolitan Melbourne, and increased funding for Ambulance Victoria to a record $662 million – an increase of almost $100 million on Labor’s last budget.
CRAIG ONDARCHIE, NORTHERN METROPOLITAN MP
