Australian Polity, October 2014 issue   Born and bred on the land, I have had a great deal of time to unpack the issue of regional road funding, and road and rail funding more generally.

I had time to consider the issue again on the recent Pollie Pedal, in which we covered more than 1000km of regional NSW roads.

In my electorate of Hume, the Barton Highway between Yass and Canberra is of grave concern. Understandably, the community asks, if we pay our fuel taxes, why can’t we see funding to fix roads in our area?

Meanwhile, our Government has committed to delivering massive infrastructure investment, $50 billion by the end of the decade, the equivalent of eight Snowy River Schemes. Tony Abbott rightly wants to be remembered as an infrastructure Prime Minister and he understands the importance of this investment to creating jobs and driving productivity, particularly as the mining investment boom slows.

This new infrastructure will drive $125 billion of spending across the continent and support the next wave of national prosperity.

We have made significant commitments to additional road and rail funding in the recent budget - $3.7 billion on major roads and highways under the Infrastructure Growth Package, $2.9 billion over 10 years on major road upgrades in western Sydney alone. Of particular importance, we are providing incentives for the States to recycle assets – privatising assets they currently own and reinvesting the proceeds in new roads.

Whilst these are important and constructive policies, we will need to go further to fill the huge infrastructure gap we face. This gap has been estimated at anywhere between $455 billion and $700 billion, almost half of the whole national GDP for one year.

The solution to all of this is remarkably simple - we need a user pays system that guarantees money will go back to the owners of the roads. Remember that almost all infrastructure is now user pays, with payments going back to the infrastructure owner - water, electricity, telecommunications, rail.  Why not extend this to roads?

We already have the key elements of a user pays system, paid through our fuel prices. Whether you drive a truck or a car, every one of us pays a certain amount of excise per litre of fuel we purchase.

However, the current system has two major problems.

First, the money collected in fuel excise (and registration fees) doesn’t go directly back to the roads – and it should. We have started to change this in the latest Budget, by hypothecating the increases in the excise, but this is just the beginning. At the moment the owner of the road is not directly paid for their role in building and maintaining the road, whether that’s the local council or the State Government or even the Federal Government. I think we should be doing that. To me, this is the single most important principle we should be talking about here.

The second issue is how that user charge should work. Should it be based on every litre of fuel we buy, or should it be based on the distance we travel or the weight and size of our vehicle? Should we charge more at peak hours in our capital cities, when extra vehicles, particularly trucks, have a big impact on congestion?

Some argue that this would be a new tax for regional Australia and that regional Australia will be paying for it all. Deloitte has done a piece of research quite recently that shows, if we did this right, it would be better for regional areas, not worse.

We all know how much money is going into investment in roads in the cities and it’s all about reducing congestion. If those charges were set so they were higher in the cities to reflect the congestion that’s happening there, Deloitte argues you’d see charges in rural areas dropping, not increasing.

There is no problem with accessibility of technology for this to work well. All you need is GPS tracking and we’ve got that already.

The truckies are correct to say that there are some fairness issues to work through, but the sooner regional politicians, regional leaders and regional communities understand all of this, the more it can be shaped into a form that’s to their interest.

We all agree the current system has not delivered the results we need. We’ve had enough of the fact that at every Budget, someone says we should be charging fuel excise on farmers and miners. I’ve got news for those people – the farmers and miners typically don’t use the roads. Why should they have to pay?

I had time to think on the Pollie Pedal. And as well as being for a great cause (we raised over $700,000 for Carers Australia), seven days straight on a pushbike gave me time to look at the roads.

There’s some ordinary stretches on those long legs around Moree, Bingara, Gunnedah and Coonabarabran, as there are in many regional areas including my electorate. And as we rode over the Blue Mountains into Western Sydney it was clear to me that the roads into and within the capital cities also desperately need extra investment.

Great reforms are often remarkably simple and seem obvious after they are implemented. The benefits are not always apparent up front, but are clear in hindsight. I am sure that in twenty years’ time, a genuine user pays system for our roads will be seen as one such reform.