BARRIER BLOWOUT: Wire ropes over budget, over-spruiked

FIRST with NEIL MITCHELL

There’s been a massive cost blowout of the state government’s roll-out of the controversial wire rope barriers.

And they’re not as effective as we were first told.

“To some extent, we were conned.”
“This was a sloppy, ill-conceived, expensive, disgraceful campaign to install these things.”
-Neil Mitchell

An auditor-general’s report has found not only is the roll-out running late, but it’s already $100 million over budget.

The report also found that while the barriers have saved lives and reduced crashes, its potential benefits have been overstated by VicRoads and the TAC.

Twelve of the 27 projects are running over budget.

At one stage, the average repair time for damaged barriers was 93 days, although that now down to 30.

Chief Regional Roads Officer Paul Northey admitted to Neil Mitchell that mistakes have been made.

Click PLAY to hear Neil Mitchell try to get to the bottom of why we were fed the wrong information