MINISTERIAL STATEMENTS – NATIONAL ROAD SAFETY STRATEGY
June 27, 2012
Mr CHESTER (Gippsland) (10:29): I do appreciate the opportunity to speak in response to the Parliamentary Secretary for Infrastructure and Transport’s report on progress in relation to the National Road Safety Strategy, and I recognise that it is quite an unusual occurrence for a parliamentary secretary to make a ministerial statement and I do congratulate her and recognise her passion on this issue and her determination to achieve positive results across Australia.
Road safety is an issue of critical importance to all members in this place, but I would suggest it is particularly an issue of great significance to regional MPs—primarily because we do tend to drive longer distances on an annual basis. We often travel on a poorer standard of road, and tragically it is our friends and our family members and our colleagues who are overrepresented in accident statistics. Road issues are very close to the heart of all regional MPs. We depend heavily on our road networks to link our regions and to help break down our isolation, but we need a good, safe road network to travel on because roads are the arteries of community life and economic activity in regional Australia.
Unfortunately, I imagine that everyone in this place and those listening today have been touched either directly or indirectly by road trauma. Last year almost 1,300 people died on Australian roads and 30,000 were hospitalised. There is no question that we have some made enormous progress since the bad old days of the 1970s. But we have a long way to go, and we need to commit ourselves to working in partnership with all jurisdictions and to accept our shared responsibility as legislators, as road users and as parents to do the best we can to reduce road trauma.
The burden of road trauma is carried for life. There is the ongoing care which is required for people who have acquired serious injuries. There is a loss of quality of life for those individuals. There are major costs in the loss of productivity for the injured individuals but also for those who care for them. So there are some very compelling social and economic reasons to improve our road safety outcomes. That is why I welcome the National Road Safety Strategy. I believe it is a good document, but it is only as good as the commitment it receives from all stakeholders to the implementation of the key strategies that it outlines, some of which the parliamentary secretary referred to during her statement.
At the heart of the National Road Safety Strategy is its vision that no person should be killed or seriously injured on Australia’s roads. I welcome that vision because it directly tackles the proposition that deaths and injuries on our roads are inevitable. The document presents almost 60 specific items for priority attention and acknowledges that many of the severe accidents we experience in our communities are preventable. It is a good document, but it is not without its shortcomings, and I think there is room for improvement, as you would expect in a document of this nature.
I turn to the substance of the parliamentary secretary’s report on the progress of implementation. There is now a recognition that road safety is not all about enforcement measures and improving driver behaviour. I think that is a very welcome change, which we have seen perhaps over the past decade. We need a more holistic approach which revolves around the so-called safe system principles of safe roads, safe speeds, safe vehicles and safe people. That means we need to train drivers and other roads users to be as safe as possible and to factor safety into their everyday lives. We need to continue to invest in improved safety within vehicles and to legislate, if necessary, to introduce proven safety measures. We need to ensure that speed limits are set appropriately for the accident risk of a section of road and that drivers appreciate the importance of complying with those limits. We also need to provide the safest possible road environment so that one mistake by a driver does not necessarily end in death or serious injury.
There have been numerous reports in recent years which have indicated that the great gains in reducing road trauma will come from improving the safety of the road environment rather than having a focus, as was the case in the 1980s and 1990s, on improved driver behaviour and improved enforcement measures. I recognise that it is a complex equation and that primary responsibility does rest with other jurisdictions, but I think there is a strong role for our federal government. I welcome this opportunity to speak on the strategy and the parliamentary secretary’s report on progress. When we are dealing with human error, we are never going to have a perfect system. But that should not dampen our enthusiasm or limit our resolve for effective action in the future.
I do take on the issue of road funding in the context of the most recent federal budget. I have some concerns. The budget papers revealed that the estimated expenditure on road transport would reduce this year from the previous year. That is an issue of concern when we are talking about ways to invest in improved road safety across the board and to adopt the safer road principles that the National Road Safety Strategy promotes. On the positive side, I note the current government’s commitment to continue with the Roads to Recovery program. I think that that program has been incredibly successful across regional Australia. I have found it to be very well received by local councils in my travels. The point is well made within the National Road Safety Strategy document that many of the accidents and much of the trauma which occurs throughout Australia occurs on local roads, and any effort we can make to assist local councils with their infrastructure shortfalls would be welcomed.
The Nationals and the Liberals have always been supportive of measures targeted at improving road safety, such as reintroducing the discontinued Black Spot programs and introducing the Roads to Recovery program in March 2001 I give credit to the current government, which has continued that program in a bipartisan way. I believe that there is going to be more pressure on us at a federal level to invest more in Roads to Recovery in the future as local government grapples with the infrastructure shortfall.
I believe that the Nationals and Liberals in coalition came up with a good policy—our $600 million bridges renewal program—during the previous election campaign in 2010 and that the government could have a close look at it. There are an estimated 30,000 bridges in decay throughout regional Australia. I believe that local councils will never have the wherewithal to maintain them, let alone upgrade them or replace them as they approach the end of their useful life. That is a challenge we have in the infrastructure network. We need to have a plan to help our regional communities rebuild those bridges to ensure productivity and keep communities connected. If we do not fix those bridges and do not provide access for these regional communities, we are forcing people to take longer routes and to detour around roads that may not be quite as safe. We all know that fatigue is an issue in road safety. I think the bridges which link some of our road networks are as critical a component as the roads themselves. I would encourage the government to take this fact on board and to consider it closely in its future budget deliberations. It is a good program that was put forward by the Liberals and Nationals, and hopefully we will have the chance to implement it in the future.
The parliamentary secretary referred to another practical measure which I am very supportive of—the commitment to build more rest areas. In the previous election our policy was to work in partnership with other jurisdictions to build 500 rest areas at an estimated cost of $300 million over 10 years. I think that, if we are going to go down the path of enforcing more regulations on professional drivers—the heavy vehicle drivers—in our community, then we have to provide decent and safe facilities for them to take the appropriate breaks. Heavy vehicles are overrepresented in road accident statistics, and improving the rest areas is an important strategy. We will pursue that with vigour if we have the opportunity in the future. There is a link between heavy vehicle users and recreational vehicles, and it is causing problems for our tourism industry. It is a substantial issue in many regional communities that large recreational vehicles do not have anywhere to park in our towns. I think that, if we can work in a constructive way with the heavy vehicle sector in providing rest areas which are appropriate for their needs, we may be able to come up with a design which alleviates some of the pressure on recreational vehicles as well.
As the parliamentary secretary indicated, there is a lot of support within the community for the Australian Automobile Association and Rotary International improved driver safety training program through the Keys to Drive initiative, which has the bipartisan support of the House. Like the government, we remain committed to working with ANCAP and to programs such as the installation of seat belts in regional school buses to improve safety for some of our youngest road users. These are good initiatives, and I do congratulate the parliamentary secretary for continuing to work in that direction.
Road safety is a very complex equation, and I fear that future reductions in the road toll will be hard for us to achieve. I do not want to sound pessimistic on a day when we are talking about 10-year strategy, but I would argue that some of the easy gains—if you could call them that—in the reduction of road trauma have already been made. We are seeing them in the introduction of the compulsory wearing of seatbelts, in drink-drive legislation and in improved enforcement of speed limits. So I suggest that some of the easier gains have already been made and that what we will see from now may well be incremental improvements rather than dramatic improvements.
Australia has been a world leader in the past—and the parliamentary secretary touched on this—with our legislation and some of the enforcement measures which have been aimed at reducing the road toll. They have been very successful over a period of 40 years. But there is growing evidence to suggest that we are falling behind the rest of the world, and there are opportunities for us to lift our game and to learn from the international experience and to see what measures we can bring from other countries to Australia. Keep in mind that there are some unique conditions which we endure in Australia and which other parts of the world do not endure. I think there are opportunities for us not only to learn from other parts of the world but also to encourage innovation and research here within Australia.
In short, my argument is that there is room for improvement within Australia. We can make more gains, and we should not give up in that regard. There is a need for eternal vigilance on the issue of road safety, and we need to be willing to pursue policy reforms where they are available to us and to, wherever possible, pursue them in a bipartisan manner. As I said from the outset, I think that members on both sides recognise the critical importance of road safety initiatives and the economic benefits that come from improvements as well as the obvious social benefits of reduced trauma.
There are a couple of improvements I will suggest in the short amount of time I have left. I express some disappointment with the National Road Safety Strategy in its failure to fully explore the opportunities and the safety benefits which exist from getting more heavy vehicles off the road and onto rail. I think it is a bit of a shortcoming of the strategy. As we talk about adopting a more holistic approach to the issue of road safety more generally, I think it is reasonable to expect that such a strategy have a more holistic approach to the transport task itself.
I will give a classic example. Last week I had the opportunity to visit Parkes, where there was a Melbourne-to-Brisbane inland rail symposium undertaken. Part of the case for building that long overdue link are the improvements in road safety that will flow from the project. Reducing the number of heavy vehicles interacting with passenger vehicles on the highways—in this case, primarily the Newell Highway—and in towns along the route can deliver a very large safety dividend. I think that there is an opportunity for this document in the future to consider what the opportunities are, given that heavy vehicles are overrepresented in our road accident statistics and given the push that is on to build projects such as the inland rail project and to link those in and reap the safety dividend. That is one area of improvement which we can perhaps look at in our overall safety strategy.
I am also particularly interested—and the parliamentary secretary touched on this as well—to see how we can focus more of our energy and our research and development on the question of how we get more young people into the safest possible car. My experience probably would not be very different to those of other members in that when I turned 18 I bought the car that I could afford, and, if it kept running for a year or two, you were happy. We have matured as a nation since then, and we recognise that having 18-year-olds getting around in old bangers is not necessarily the safest way to approach our road safety issues.
I recognise that affordability is an issue here, but there is compelling evidence that improvements in vehicle safety contribute significantly to road trauma reduction. Our problem is that the Australian fleet has an average age of around 10 years, which means that any advancements we see today in the safety technology of our vehicles will take a long time to flow through the fleet and improve safety for all those road users who may purchase a second-hand vehicle in the future.
There is something of an irony in this, in that by the time that we as adults can afford to buy a new and undoubtedly a safer car, we are probably already safer drivers because we have those years of experience and probably a reduced propensity to take risks. Our challenge is to get new vehicles, with their safety benefits, into the hands of young drivers, who are vastly over-represented in accident statistics. I would like to think that we can be innovative about this. Perhaps we can link assistance to the car industry in the future to a scheme that provides incentives for young drivers to purchase new vehicles. The government and the banking industry may be able to develop a system of interest rate subsidies to help drivers under the age of 25 purchase a new car for personal use. Perhaps there could be an opportunity for parents who assist their children in purchasing their first car to access some sort of program to support them in their efforts to get their loved ones into the safest vehicle they can afford.
In conclusion I acknowledge the great work that has already been done by legislators across various jurisdictions, by our researchers, by emergency services personnel—who are at the front line of this issue—by our medical professionals, by community groups and by individuals who are passionate about road safety. I include the parliamentary secretary in that final category. Australia has come a long way, but we do have a long way to go. Every loss of life in a car accident is a tragic event, and we must commit ourselves in this place to continue working towards the vision that no person should be killed or seriously injured on Australia’s roads.