Electors are owed answers

MAYBE I’m like a broken record, but four serious issues face the southeast in the lead up to the Saturday 25 November State election.
They are noise barriers along the Monash Freeway at Beaconsfield and the Clyde Road Enterprise Avenue intersection at Berwick, retention for public use of Education Department land at Timbarra, Berwick, and a bus service to Casey Hospital from all points.
They are all long overdue for completion, particularly in the high growth environment within the Shire of Cardinia and City of Casey.
A secondary college at Timbarra was promised as a lure to sell homes in the governmentowned estate, but never built.
Timbarra residents were dudded in the highest order on this.
The bus service, it is fair to say, is well started for the Beaconsfield and Berwick regions, with an announcement this month that the bus from those areas would now call at the hospital.
But little has been said about the coastal villages Grantville, Lang Lang through Kooweerup, Tooradin and Blind Bight to Cranbourne.
What about people in those areas remote from adequate bus and train services needing to visit the hospital?
Politics caused work on Clyde Road to be started midway along the route to Five Ways, leaving the Berwick end languishing in a traffic gridlock.
But most of all Beaconsfield residents living along the Monash Freeway have been treated by both Liberal and Labor governments in a way that seems to me inexplicable.
There must be some underlying reason for the fact that these residents have not been given protective noise barriers along that section of freeway.
I am convinced the residents who have fought long and hard for the barriers have given up the battle and the government is off the hook, but the situation is still unacceptable.
Why?
We are seeing barriers going up along new sections of freeway.
And in the case of the Bass Highway from the Gurdies to Grantville, a mere duplicated road, state of the art noise barriers are being built.
On one section it would probably have been cheaper for VicRoads to buy the house being protected.
No wonder Beaconsfield residents are upset, angry, and disillusioned.
Several years ago, lack of attention to the Bass Highway, and the Nobbies fiasco at Phillip Island, were probably the two issues mostly responsible for the Kennett Government losing office.
No wonder the Bass Highway is now getting plenty of attention.
The sad aspects of noise barriers at Beaconsfield are that the job was put in no man’s land when the goal posts were shifted to create new rules about how they would be financed.
Narre Warren South MP Dale Wilson promised on several occasions that the barriers would be built, but nothing has been done.
Residents have good reason to ask for a full and proper explanation of why instead of being ignored.