As the locals would know, certain sections of the tarred freeway tend to fall apart every year, followed by maintenance work to (supposedly) fix these areas. What's happened for the past couple of years is that these big patches have been left unpainted (no marker lines).

What happens then is when fog sets in, people tend to follow the painted lines on the road to guide them. When they get to these unpainted sections, they get disorientated, and some people crash. This is generally when the powers that be tend to decide maybe they should paint some lines on the road. 

About two months ago, the freeway was resealed at the Bells Road interchange, leading up to and around a long sweeping bend. This is generally one of the foggiest sections of the Hume Freeway, since it sits at the very end of Lake Hume.

This section of road has still not been painted. It is just luck we have not had much in the way of rain yet, otherwise by now we would have fog, (and someone may not be with us any more). I am not sure who is responsible for these works these days. The RTA? I could contact them directly, but this does nothing in fixing their internal management problems. Please paint the road. 

I GOT to see Wagga city's CCTV at the weekend, what a great initiative.

Having previously seen the extensive Surfers Paradise CCTV I can see the great benefits but in Albury it appears the council ostriches still have their heads in the sand.

A million dollars to improve public safety and they cannot find it but they can find $10 million for an arts centre virtually no one uses. The Uiver, Cumberoona, MAMA, seems the only thing our council is good at is wasting money. Try spending our money where it will do good for the majority of ratepayers not the minority.

Much has been said about the great debate last Thursday night in Wangaratta, a great deal of which has obscured some truly remarkable exchanges between our candidates and the general public.

The first of which was early in the piece when Cathy McGowan was asked to confirm Sophie Mirabella had not pushed her during a visit by Coalition MP Ken Wyatt.

Cathy had said earlier on Prime News that the story, which had initially appeared in the Benalla Ensign, was a fabrication, but refused to say that again when asked by Paul Murray. Why? Cathy said she wanted to move past the incident, but if she really wanted to move past it, why not say that the story was made up and move on?

The second incident occurred at the end of the night when the wife of a truck driver raised a question for the candidates about the Road Safety Remuneration Tribunal. Sophie was praised by the grateful constituent for her work in abolishing the tribunal after giving the issue national political attention.

Cathy was asked why, when the voter had previously asked for assistance, that all she received in response was a generic letter of reply, a shopping list and a fridge magnet. In what can only be thought of as Cathy McGowan’s “let them eat cake moment”, the current member for Indi responded “I’m sorry you didn’t like the fridge magnet”.

This left the audience aghast at such flippancy; that Cathy McGowan had the arrogance to completely overlook the significance of the issue for local trucking families in Indi and around Australia. If this is only the start the campaign, there are certainly going to be interesting days ahead.