South Coast MP Shelley Hancock has vowed to pursue more funding for increase upgrades to the road. She said the highway was the region’s “only lifeline”. 

“It is our only lifeline, it is our freight, our tourist corridor, everything comes along the Princes Highway,” she said on social media. 

Part of the state’s recent spend on highway includes $10 million for safety upgrades between Nowra and Batemans Bay, including a roundabout at the Island Point Road intersection.

Mrs Hancock said the funding was a “long time coming”. 

“We want to thank the FIX IT NOW campaign and Fairfax Media [editor] John Hanscombe, who really spearheaded that campaign. All of these things are coming together,” she said. 

“[The funding] has been a long time coming, it really has. The Princes Highway has been forgotten for a long long time and we [the state government] have invested into it heavily.”  

Calling on the federal government to also allocate funding to the highway, Mrs Hancock said in the past seven and a half years, she had been “really great improvements” to the highway in her electorate. 

“We are going to see lots of things happening on the Princes Highway,” she said. 

“Until we can duplicate some of sections, we really want to upgrade it.”