However, it does not spell the end of the campaign - not the beginning of the end or, indeed, the end of the beginning. Having secured this promise to start work on bringing this vital road up to scratch, FIX IT NOW turns its attention to NSW Labor, which has been largely mute on highway funding.

FIX IT NOW has said from the outset the highway should be above politics. Yet on Wednesday the best we could extract from Ryan Park, the man who would be treasurer, was a childish potshot rubbishing the almost billion-dollar commitment.

There was no talk of matching the pledge, just a stock-standard political spray.

Mr Park also took aim at the government's record. This is surprising. We assume he has driven down the Princes Highway to Nowra, and has surely have seen what has been achieved in eight years. The duplication is visible from space.

Rather than sniping, Mr Park would be better served by coming up with a commitment to match the Coalition pledge. 

The people who travel the highway at great risk don't care what colour flag is flying over  the NSW parliament, they just want the job done. 

They want to know when they set out each morning, they will make it home at the end of the day - not be caught in a crash when someone drifts into their lane on a narrow section of road with no shoulders.

So FIX IT NOW invites Mr Park to come travel the highway with us to stand at the spots where clusters of young people have died.

We invite him to hear the stories of widows who have lost husbands because the highway has no room for error, to sit with the mothers still grieving for children lost on the highway. 

We invite him to spend time with the emergency services people - many of them volunteers - who race out to attend these accidents, so many of which wouldn't have been so devastating had the highway been duplicated.

We invite him to sit with the ordinary folk who've been first on the scene and pulled the victims out of the wrecks, people who are haunted for the rest of their days by what they've seen. 

We invite him to drop the tit-for-tat and commit to fixing the bloody highway.

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