On a March morning in 2025, floodwater over the Seymour River closed the Bruce Highway between Cardwell and Ingham, and the Ollera Creek Bridge north of Townsville — a structure trucks and buses had crossed for decades — collapsed under the same weather system (TMR, Tropical Cyclone Alfred and North Queensland flood updates, Jan–Apr 2025). For the freight operators, families and health workers who depend on the highway as the only sealed road linking North Queensland to the south-east, the closure was not really an inconvenience so much as a reminder of an old fact: Queensland's most important road is also its most exposed. A load of produce bound for Brisbane markets sat behind the water for days. A patient booked for specialist treatment in Townsville rang ahead to say the trip was off. None of this made national news for long. On the Bruce, it barely counts as unusual.
The Bruce Highway is Queensland's spine: 1,673 kilometres of National Highway 1 running from Brisbane to Cairns, carrying the state's north-south freight task, its tourist traffic and, for long stretches, the only way in or out of towns with no rail or air alternative (Australian Government/TMR, Bruce Highway Targeted Safety Program announcement, Jan-2025). It is also, on the state's own numbers, one of the most dangerous and flood-prone roads in the country. What the Crisafulli government inherited when it took office in October 2024, and what it has done with it since, is the subject of this analysis.
What the Crisafulli government did
The LNP was elected on 26 October 2024 and David Crisafulli was sworn in as Premier on 28 October, after a campaign that leaned heavily on a promise to "fix the Bruce" (Governor of Queensland, swearing-in announcement, 28-Oct-2024). That promise had been sharpened by a 2023 federal decision to move new National Partnership road projects away from the historical 80:20 Commonwealth-state funding split toward 50:50 — a change that fell harder on Queensland than on most states, because it has one very long, very expensive national highway and comparatively few big-city motorways to offset it (Australian Government, Infrastructure Investment Program Independent Strategic Review, 2023). Within three months of forming government, the Crisafulli Government announced it had secured a reversion to 80:20 funding for the Bruce Highway specifically, inside a new $9 billion Bruce Highway Targeted Safety Program split $7.2 billion Commonwealth to $1.8 billion state, announced jointly on 6 January 2025.
The government's first budget, handed down in June 2025, allocated $412 million for Bruce Highway works in 2025-26 as the opening instalment of that $9 billion program, sitting inside a broader four-year, $42 billion Queensland Transport and Roads Investment Program and a stated $116.8 billion decade-long infrastructure pipeline (Queensland Budget 2025-26, Budget Paper No. 3; Queensland Government ministerial statement, Jun-2025). The safety program's stated target is a minimum three-out-of-five AusRAP star rating across the corridor, with completion scheduled for 2030 (Queensland Audit Office, Major projects 2025).
The strongest case
No government could have built this road cheaply, or finished it by now
Put the scale of the problem honestly, because it is genuinely large. The Bruce Highway is 1,673 kilometres long — roughly the road distance from Brisbane to Adelaide — and it grew over a century as a chain of local roads stitched together, rather than being planned from the outset as a single national corridor (TMR, Bruce Highway Vision and Action Plans). Much of that length crosses flood plains, river deltas and cyclone-exposed coastal country between Gympie and Cairns, so lifting it to a consistent, flood-immune, dual-carriageway standard means hundreds of separate bridge, floodway and interchange projects, each needing its own land acquisition, environmental approval and construction crew, in a state with a shallow and already-stretched civil construction workforce. Queensland's own auditor estimates a shortfall of around 18,200 construction workers over the next eight years across the state's entire capital pipeline — a shortage the Bruce Highway program must compete for against hospitals, schools and the 2032 Olympic build (Queensland Audit Office, Major projects 2025).
The corridor also serves a small, dispersed population relative to its length. Outside Brisbane, the Sunshine Coast, Mackay, Townsville and Cairns, much of the route carries modest daily traffic for a road of national-highway status, which is part of why it was never duplicated in full the way busier corridors such as the Pacific Highway or the Hume Highway eventually were. Since 2013, successive state and federal governments of both colours have already put more than $10 billion into the corridor (approx.; TMR, Bruce Highway Upgrade Program updates, 2017-2019), and the current $9 billion program is the single largest tranche yet committed to it. A highway this long, this exposed to weather and this thin in population for much of its length was never going to be finished inside one term of government, whoever was holding office.
The evidence
Queensland's own road-toll data sets the scale of the safety problem the highway sits inside. Provisional figures put the 2024 state road toll at roughly 302-303 deaths, the worst year for road trauma since 2009 and about 26 more than the 2023 toll of 274 — an increase of roughly 9 per cent (Queensland Government road safety statistics and ministerial statement, Jan-2025). Over the preceding five years the toll moved unevenly — 220 in 2019, 278 in 2020, 275 in 2021, 297 in 2022, 274 in 2023 — but it stayed well above pre-pandemic levels throughout, before the 2024 spike (TMR, weekly and annual road crash reports, 2019-2024).
The Bruce Highway carries a disproportionate share of that trauma. RACQ's analysis of TMR crash data using the Australian Road Assessment Program (AusRAP) methodology found the highway's average Fatal-and-Serious-Injury crash rate running three to five times higher than equivalent rural sections of the Hume and Pacific Highways, and placed all five of Queensland's highest-risk crash sites on the Bruce (RACQ analysis of AusRAP/TMR data, 2024 — secondary source). Independent estimates drawing on TMR crash data and cited by road-safety and legal-sector commentary put deaths on the highway itself at roughly 40 in a recent 12-month period, and at around 129 fatal crashes causing about 149 deaths across the five years 2018-2022 (approx.; secondary analysis of TMR crash data — the state's headline toll is not published broken out by individual highway). Much of the cause is structural rather than purely behavioural: 1,398 kilometres of the highway between Gympie and Cairns remains single-lane and undivided, and significant lengths still carry only a two-star AusRAP safety rating out of five (RACQ analysis of AusRAP data, 2024).
The critique
Three problems sit inside the numbers above, and none of them is really about the size of the highway. The first is timing. The 2023 federal decision to move new road funding to a 50:50 split landed in the middle of a program the state and the outgoing Palaszczuk/Miles Labor government had already been planning on the assumption of 80:20 — contracts, land acquisitions and staging schedules built around one cost-share ratio do not survive a mid-program change to another without delay, and the roughly two years it took to negotiate a reversion, from the 2023 review to the January 2025 announcement, is time a highway with a rising death toll did not have.
The second is delivery risk that predates and outlasts any single funding fight. The Queensland Audit Office's Major projects 2025 report — examining the state's largest infrastructure works, including Bruce Highway upgrades — found no cost blowout yet on the new Targeted Safety Program, because it is too early in its life, but it did find one directly on the corridor: the Rockhampton Ring Road, a bypass explicitly intended to improve the town's flood immunity, saw its budget rise from an earlier estimate of around $1.1 billion to close to $2 billion, driven by rising construction costs (Queensland Audit Office, Major projects 2025). The same report's warning of an 18,200-worker construction shortfall over the next eight years is not an abstract risk for a program that has committed to a 2030 completion date and must now compete for labour with the 2032 Olympic build (Queensland Audit Office, Major projects 2025).
The third is the gap between "safety" and "flood immunity." The $9 billion program now under way is explicitly a safety program — its target is a minimum three-star AusRAP rating, not full duplication or comprehensive flood-proofing of the corridor. That is a defensible sequencing choice given the death toll, but it means the closures that periodically cut North Queensland off from the rest of the state — Cardwell to Ingham in early 2025, the loss of the Ollera Creek Bridge, and the shorter closures that recur most wet seasons — are not squarely addressed by the current program, and will keep recurring on roughly the same timetable as the weather that causes them (TMR, Cyclone Alfred and North Queensland flood updates, Jan–Apr 2025). A three-star safety rating reduces the chance of a head-on crash. It does not stop a river cutting the highway in half.
A highway can be made safer and still be closed by the next flood. Queensland has spent a decade proving both things can be true at once.
None of this is unique to the Crisafulli government, and fairness requires saying so plainly. The single-lane sections, the two-star ratings and the flood-prone alignment were inherited from a century of incremental construction and from Labor governments — state and federal — that also under-delivered against the scale of the problem while it was theirs to fix. What is fairly attributable to the current government is narrower: whether it presses the $9 billion program to its 2030 target despite the workforce constraint its own auditor has flagged, whether the restored 80:20 split is used to bring forward flood-immunity work and not only safety work, and whether "fixing the Bruce" becomes a standing, funded commitment rather than a first-term slogan that fades once the next election is behind it.
The risk to the future
A funding truce, not a settlement
The 80:20 split secured in January 2025 is a negotiated agreement, not a legislated permanent arrangement, and it was won only after the Commonwealth had already shown, in 2023, that it was willing to shift the ratio once its own budget came under pressure (Australian Government, Infrastructure Investment Program Independent Strategic Review, 2023). Nothing structurally prevents a future Commonwealth government — of either party, facing its own deficit pressure — from reopening that ratio again once the current $9 billion tranche is spent, which would leave Queensland facing the same choice it faced in 2023: fund the gap itself, slow the program, or accept sections of the highway staying at their current safety rating for longer.
The deeper risk is that a program built to reach a three-star safety rating by 2030 is being asked to outrun a rising road toll, a climate trend toward more frequent and more intense wet-season flooding, and a construction workforce the state's own auditor says is short by thousands of workers, all at once. If any one of those pressures — funding, weather or labour — outpaces the program's 2030 timetable, the corridor that carries most of the state's north-south freight and the only sealed road link for large parts of North Queensland will stay exposed for longer than either government currently says it will.