The ALP has argued upgrading the highway should be funded from a NSW Treasury grown fat on stamp duty from the property boom and the sale of public assets.

Some readers may agree, but Fairfax Media’s FIX IT NOW campaign begs to differ – editors from up and down the coast know this is too important a task to fall on one tier of government.

We want the federal government to deliver 80 per cent of the funds needed to fix this crucial highway that runs through three states – NSW, Victoria and South Australia.

If it was good enough for the federal and state government to reach such a funding agreement for a safer Pacific Highway – it is certainly good enough for those of us relying on the goat track otherwise known as the Princes Highway.

It is a road of national importance and requires national action. It is a road that has had fatal consequences for too many. The costs of this remaining a partisan argument are too high.

No-one who has been directly affected by crashes on our substandard regional roads is arguing. We are staring down the barrel of another tourist season.

In November 2014, speaking to local Fairfax Media, the NRMA called the highway “a death trap”, but said there were easy improvements that would save lives: wire dividers and three-lanes on the worst sections. 

Then-Eden-Monaro Coalition MP Peter Hendy slammed the motoring lobby group as “alarmist” for “the sort of over-the-top talk that threatens our tourist trade in the run up to the holidays”.

Tell that to the families of the young German woman who died on January 7, 2017, in a head-on at Tilba, and the other tourists injured in that crash.

Both sides of federal politics need to put down the cudgels on this one and get behind saving lives. 

Mr Constance’s speech did not come out of the blue. In 2005 he lobbied for a Coronial inquest into the highway, after “too many tragedies”. In 2011, he and his family were involved in a frightening crash on another of our substandard roads.