woberto Report This Comment
Date: September 14, 2026 08:43AM

She actually said "THE MOST primitive race" which is of course a fact.
Where's that butt-hurt form...

quasi Report This Comment
Date: September 14, 2026 09:04AM

I've been watching 9news Melbourne and I knew this would be your pick, woberto. I'm wondering though, are Florida man and Victoria man interchangeable?

woberto Report This Comment
Date: September 14, 2026 09:09AM

pulse is Melbourne man with a metrosexual twist.
I am a New South Welshman with a bogan twist, which is why I am now a Territorian.
Bogans in general are the closest to Florida Man. But a Territorian Bogan is EXACTLY Florida Man.
And they start 'em young up here...
[www.abc.net.au]

quasi Report This Comment
Date: September 15, 2026 10:04AM

Yeah, you're a Florida man. Moved closer to the equator from where you were born bringing your crazy with you and the hotter climate exacerbated the crazy. Typical recipe for a Florida man.

pulse Report This Comment
Date: September 15, 2026 10:29AM

Whereas us Melbournites appreciate high quality coffee, dressing in black (the Melbourne uniform), arts, sports, hookers and the finer things in life.

quasi Report This Comment
Date: September 15, 2026 01:17PM

How about the never ending controversies around the suburban rail loop? First world problems.

pulse Report This Comment
Date: September 15, 2026 02:35PM

It'll never get built.

It's not really controversial. It's a good idea, I'd like for it to be real; but at nearly $220Bn all up (SRL east, north and west combined (current estimates without inflation over the next 20 years of construction)), it will never happen.

Given we've just finished another rail tunnel which was 50% over budget and years late, and a road tunnel that was 100% over budget and even more years late, we clearly can't price this stuff for shit.

Greater Melbourne has a population around 5.5 million people. That's $40,000 per person. It just won't happen.

quasi Report This Comment
Date: September 15, 2026 09:41PM

Watch out for the potholes on the state roads, then, they're killers.

woberto Report This Comment
Date: September 16, 2026 02:33AM

The hardest part about filling a pothole is determining who is going to pay for it.

Australian Federal Roads, State Roads and Council Roads are always confusing.
Federal Roads get paid for out of the fuel excise which stands at about $0.53 per liter.
States get maybe 2 cents of that and they all have different agreements.
Councils get rates from homeowners and Council's run bistromathics so go figure.
And then there are privately built toll-roads... don't get me started.

pulse Report This Comment
Date: September 16, 2026 11:09AM

The pothole issue is both real and a bit blown out of proportion.

Yeah, there's potholes. There's always potholes. The Western Highway where the guy died is a bit shit; it gets thumped all day, every day by massive trucks driving from Melbourne to Adelaide and on to Perth (Melbourne has Australia's largest/busiest shipping port); but it also doesn't have the traffic volume (on a dual carriageway each direction highway) to pour billions of dollars into. There's just more important stuff to spend that money on, especially as while we now have the most populace state, we also have by far and away the highest amount of debt thanks to 2 decades of financial mismanagement.

To put it into perspective;
Victoria has a population roughly rivalling Tennessee and Massachusetts.
Tennessee has approx 150,000km of roads according to interwebs.
Massachusetts has approx 58,550km.
Victoria has more than 200,000km.

So we have between 1/3 more and ~4 times more road distance per capita of those 2 US states. While Australia is a rich country, relatively speaking, it's also fucking huge. Victoria is our 2nd smallest state, and smallest mainland one. The biggest city gets the lions share of the budget; the regional cities are also fairly well catered for. But the sparse stretches of nothing get.. well, nothing.

Population wise, of the ~7.2 million in the state:
Melbourne: ~5,500,000+
Geelong: ~214,000
Ballarat: ~111,000
Bendigo: ~103,000
Mildura: ~53,000
Shepparton: ~53,000
Wodonga: ~37,000
Warrnambool: ~33,000
Traralgon: ~29,000

That's around 6.2 million in the 9 largest centres (and a large centre is 29K people); leaving 1 million for the rest of the state. We have a lot of rural towns, villages, farm land etc.

The roads in Melbourne are pretty good. The roads in Geelong are pretty good, etc. But yeah; the roads on some of the inter-city links are a bit shit, where there's thousands of km of single and dual carriageway roads to maintain, hundreds of km from any meaningful population centre (so it's hard to get workers there) and with a road maintenance budget of around a billion dollars a year... it's just hard to keep on top of things (especially when you can't close these roads down for maintenance as there's no alternate route that's not hundreds of km longer).

As I said; the money goes to the most important bits first. And those are the population centres. And, as wob said, there's 3 different responsible bodies to fund and repair them, so it also depends entirely on whos jurisdiction it is.

quasi Report This Comment
Date: September 16, 2026 10:50PM

There's a road like that whhich runs practically right past my house. It's a two lane road through sparsely populated country that sees heavy truck usage crossing the state east to west and large tipper trucks hauling fill dirt from several miles east of me to the west coast for construction. It's always beaten to hell. Several years ago the poor rural county neighboring mine just didn't have the budget to maintain it at all and shut down their section of it for a couple of years.