A respected Ballarat motorcycle club president has died after his bike reportedly struck a pothole on the Western Highway, intensifying scrutiny of Victoria’s deteriorating road network just days after the state’s auditor-general found almost half of state roads were in poor or very poor condition.
Emergency services were called to the Western Highway at Trawalla, west of Ballarat, shortly before 1 pm on Sunday after reports that a motorcycle had struck a pothole and the rider lost control.
The 71-year-old Ballarat man died at the scene.
Victoria Police said the precise circumstances surrounding the crash had not yet been established and would be investigated. Motorists with information or dashcam footage have been urged to contact Crime Stoppers.
Media reports have identified the rider as Peter “Tiki” Mason, president of Ballarat’s Eureka Social Riders motorcycle club.
Mr Mason was a well-known figure in the region’s riding community and had led Eureka Social Riders since the club was established in 2018.
Friends have remembered him as someone who went out of his way to help other riders and create a welcoming environment within the motorcycle community.
Long-time friend Barrie Trubie told the Herald Sun that Mr Mason was particularly supportive of female riders who had struggled to find a riding group where they felt comfortable.
Others remembered him as a talented spray painter and airbrush artist, a devoted family man and someone proud of his Māori heritage.
His son Frank said he was still struggling to comprehend his father’s death.
Mr Mason leaves behind his wife, son and grandchildren.
His death has also triggered anger within Victoria’s motorcycling community over the condition of major regional roads.
Victorian Motorcycle Council chairman Rob Salvatore said riders were increasingly concerned about potholes, particularly because hazards can be difficult for motorcyclists to avoid in wet conditions or at night.
“There’s a lot of anger about a needless fatality,” he said.
“The roads just absolutely need to get better.”
The crash occurred only four days after the Victorian Auditor-General’s Office released a damning assessment of the state’s road maintenance system.
The September 9 report found the overall condition of Victoria’s state road network was deteriorating, with about 48 per cent of state roads rated poor or very poor in 2024, compared with 39 per cent in 2021.
The audit examined more than 23,000 kilometres of state-managed roads and concluded maintenance needs were accumulating faster than repairs could be completed.
The audit also found the gap between defects recorded and defects repaired more than doubled between January 2025 and June 2026.
In January 2025, about 80,000 defects had been identified and approximately 60,000 had been rectified.
By June 2026, more than 225,000 defects had been identified compared with about 180,000 repaired.
The Department of Transport and Planning had advised the government that funding levels were insufficient to maintain or improve the network and that maintenance was increasingly being directed towards reactive and safety-critical work rather than preventative maintenance.
The department’s own 2026-27 business case estimated it would cost more than $3 billion a year to maintain road pavement at existing conditions while replacing assets that had reached the end of their useful life.
Before the government’s most recent pothole announcement, road asset management funding for 2026-27 stood at $1.04 billion.
The Carroll government subsequently announced another $352 million, taking total road asset management funding for the year to about $1.39 billion.
Premier Ben Carroll announced the additional funding on August 30, promising to double the number of potholes repaired this year from 250,000 to 500,000 by the end of January.
Carroll acknowledged publicly that the condition of Victoria’s roads was “not good enough”.
“This is absolutely where Victorians want to see their money spent — it is my priority,” he said when announcing the package.
The government said crews would target major arterial roads including the Western Highway, Calder Highway, Princes Highway and Geelong Ring Road, as well as regional routes.
The additional $352 million is partly being funded by delaying several level crossing removal projects.
Labor has also proposed bringing more road maintenance expertise back under direct government control and, if re-elected, using minimum-security prisoners and offenders on community orders for roadside maintenance tasks such as mowing, weed removal and litter collection, allowing qualified road crews to concentrate on repairs.
The Coalition has accused Labor of allowing the road network to deteriorate during its years in government.
Opposition Leader Jess Wilson has promised $5 billion over four years for road maintenance if the Liberals and Nationals win the November election, including a pledge to eliminate up to one million potholes.
The Coalition has also promised to establish Better Roads Victoria as a dedicated division within the Department of Transport and Planning and restore technical road-maintenance expertise.
Shadow Roads Minister Danny O’Brien has described Labor’s recent pothole funding announcement as a pre-election response to years of underinvestment.
After the fatal crash, the Opposition again argued that deteriorating roads had become a safety issue rather than simply a question of driver comfort or vehicle damage.
Carroll’s government has pointed to severe weather, ageing infrastructure, increasing traffic and freight movements as contributors to the deterioration.
The auditor-general also identified those factors, including major flooding in 2022, rising maintenance costs, increasing population and demand, a growing road network and historical underinvestment.
But the report concluded that the maintenance backlog was continuing to grow and that investment was not keeping pace with deterioration.
It also found accumulated impairment in the value of the state’s road assets exceeded $1.34 billion between 2020-21 and 2024-25, another indication that the road network was ageing faster than it was being renewed.
Former VicRoads employees have separately argued that decades of outsourcing and privatisation also contributed to the deterioration.
Former workers told the ABC that Victoria had lost internal expertise and that private maintenance arrangements meant available funding did not stretch as far as it once did.
One former VicRoads employee said he had watched the state’s roads deteriorate from being among Australia’s best maintained to some of the worst during his career.
The debate is particularly acute in regional Victoria, where motorists have repeatedly complained of large potholes, damaged tyres and stretches of highway requiring drivers to weave around road defects.
For motorcyclists, the consequences can be considerably more serious because striking a pothole or making a sudden evasive manoeuvre can cause a rider to lose control.
Police have not yet made a final determination that the pothole caused Mr Mason’s death, and investigators are continuing to establish the sequence of events.
However, the fact the fatal crash followed reports that his motorcycle struck a pothole has transformed Victoria’s road maintenance debate from an election argument about budgets and infrastructure into a tragedy involving one of Ballarat’s best-known motorcyclists.
The Western Highway is one of Victoria’s key road corridors linking Melbourne with Ballarat and western Victoria.
The state and federal governments recently announced major investment in the Western Freeway closer to Melbourne, including a $550 million Victorian contribution to upgrades between Melton and Caroline Springs, on top of a $1 billion Commonwealth commitment.
That project, however, is focused well east of the Trawalla section where Sunday’s fatal crash occurred.
For Mr Mason’s friends, the political arguments are secondary to the loss of a man they describe as a mentor, artist, family man and leader within Ballarat’s riding community.
Tributes have continued to flow since news of his death emerged.
His death now leaves investigators to establish exactly what happened on the Western Highway — while placing renewed pressure on both sides of Victorian politics to explain how they intend to make the state’s deteriorating roads safer before another serious crash occurs.
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