Pat Conaghan (Cowper, National Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Social Services) | Hansard source

I'm pleased to rise to speak on this motion in relation to road safety—in particular, the collection of road safety data to improve our roads and systems. I speak quite often about my time in the police force: 12 years. They were immensely enjoyable years. But some of the toughest times and one of the toughest things I had to do—and I remember every single occasion when I had to do it—is knocking on the door in the middle of the night and telling a mum, a dad, a sister or a brother that their family member was dead. It's absolutely crushing. You can't imagine the grief—the sheer, raw grief—a family member experiences when you deliver that message. And right now that message is being delivered every single day three to four times a day. A police officer is walking up to somebody's front door, knocking on that door and telling that family member, that loved family member, that someone has died due to road trauma.

When I got into this place, I was determined to try and do something to improve the figures—the 1,300 or more lives that are being lost on our roads every year. It was an absolute honour to be the chair of the road safety committee when we were in government. We held many inquiries, and I was fortunate enough to go to Sweden for the third international road safety conference. The common thread throughout all of the inquiries through the international conference was the importance of collecting road safety data and sharing that data. It struck me as quite bizarre that the states and territories are protective of their own data and don't share it with each other or the federal government and federal agencies. What is the point of clinging onto data that could change or save someone's life or save somebody from being injured? Because that data is not shared for that information to come through, we on all levels of government—the federal government, state government, local governments—can't use that data to identify the places where people are being killed, identify what the problems are that are leading to people being killed or seriously injured.

Two years ago this Labor government—I'm not going to be political; we need to be bipartisan—committed to working with the states and territories to collect that data to share with everyone. We need hospitals to do this. We need police to do this. We need ambulance to do this as well. We need a central database to share with each other to improve outcomes and to save lives.

In my electorate alone, road deaths are five times higher than in metropolitan cities per capita. We know that 70 per cent of deaths on the road occur in regional and rural areas. That data is critical, and I urge this government to compel the states and the territories to share that data, to work with the federal government to have it there so that we can make informed changes and so that we can use taxpayers' money—it's not government money; it's taxpayers' money—to improve the roadways and the systems to look after our young lives, mums and dads, and tradies going to work. I call on the government to do this today. We have to demand and agree to consistently provide crash data, road data and enforcement data. Until we do, nothing will change.

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