Federal funding share plunges to fifty percent as Tasmania remote road upgrade hits deadlock

Australia's federal government adjusted the traditional road infrastructure funding ratio at the end of 2023 from an eighty-twenty federal-state split to a fifty-fifty arrangement, a policy shift that is now pushing the upgrade debate over St Marys Pass on Tasmania's east coast into a funding quagmire. According to ABC News, the winding, six-kilometre stretch of old road connecting the town of St Marys to the coast has become the latest flashpoint.

Scamander resident and former Burnie mayor Sandra French has been commuting to Launceston for eight years. She told ABC News that heavy trucks are growing larger and heavier, while falling rocks and landslides on the hilltop are becoming increasingly frequent. "One day I was going up the hill and stones were rolling down behind me, I called the police and they had to come down and clear it," she said, recalling a near-miss with a truck: "That huge truck came around the corner too close to my car, I put my hands over my face thinking 'he's going to hit me' — fortunately he didn't." She wants trucks to have a separate route: "These trucks are still running on secondary roads built for bullock carts."

At the end of 2022, a major landslide shut the narrow stretch, wedged between forest and cliff face, for three months, severely disrupting emergency access, freight movements and peak-season tourist traffic. According to ABC News, an options evaluation report released this month by Building Tasmania found that the seven upgrade proposals range in cost from 50 million to 2.7 billion Australian dollars. The lowest-cost option, dubbed the "purple route" — incremental upgrades along the existing road — is budgeted at roughly 50 million to 70 million Australian dollars and was assessed by the agency as "achieving the best balance between cost, deliverability, environmental benefit and community support."

The core dispute, however, lies in the funding arrangement. ABC News noted that the federal government has set aside 10 million Australian dollars for the project, but the final funding plan for the full project has yet to be clearly stated. Tasmanian Infrastructure Minister Kerry Vincent has all but ruled out the one-billion and 2.7-billion-dollar options, arguing that upgrading the existing road is "the most sensible" approach. Yet he delivered a scathing critique of the new federal policy: "The Australian government's proposal of fifty-fifty cost-sharing is a major departure from established practice and amounts to palming off the people of Tasmania's remote regions."

Break O'Day mayor Mick Tucker has warned against settling for "Band-Aid" repairs. "This road not only carries our supplies but is the principal evacuation route in medical emergencies," he told ABC News. "If St Marys Pass can't function properly, and an ambulance can't get a patient to hospital in time, we are gambling with people's lives." He acknowledged that neither the federal nor the state government is "exactly flush," but stressed that the fifty-to-seventy-million-dollar purple-route option "sounds like a big number, but in the grand scheme of things it isn't much."

According to ABC News, in most of the proposals assessed by Building Tasmania, more than fifty percent of the road length is "highly susceptible" to landslides. The sole exception is the 2.7-billion-dollar "red route," which uses the existing Upper Scamander road and brings the susceptible proportion down to twenty-five percent.

The shift from eighty-twenty to fifty-fifty cost-sharing effectively transfers the responsibility for remote-area infrastructure from the federal purse to the state. On Tasmania's east coast, this means that the discussion over upgrading or rebuilding St Marys Pass will continue against an unfilled funding gap, while residents still have to negotiate each day the bends that even visitors describe as "terrifying."