Darren Chester (Gippsland, National Party, Shadow Minister for Regional Education) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Against the backdrop of increasing road fatalities and trauma, it's just too easy for governments to point the finger at drivers when they should be building safer roads. Last year 1,253 people died on our roads in Australia, which is our worst result in five years, and Victoria hit a 15-year high of 296. The ripple effect throughout the community of a single life lost is felt by families, friends and the first responders who attend the often horrific scenes. We should be appalled by this entirely preventable loss of life and we should be demanding action from all levels of government to work in partnership with the experts and with road users to minimise deaths and injuries.

In 2018, two of Australia's most respected road trauma experts, Jeremy Woolley and John Crozier, tabled their recommendations following an independent inquiry into the National Road Safety Strategy. As minister for transport at the time I was determined to provide a national focus on saving lives on our roads, and I asked them to identify the key factors for and provide advice on how we could move towards a safe road transport system which minimises harm to all users, particularly our most vulnerable pedestrians and cyclists. Sadly, five years later, virtually none of their recommendations have been fully implemented, and we have lost our status as one of the world leaders in reducing road trauma. If there were an Olympics for road safety, Australia would not win a medal in 2024.

Even if we just implemented their first recommendation, to create strong national leadership by appointing a cabinet minister with specific multiagency responsibility to address the hidden epidemic of road trauma, including its impact on the health system, we would be in a better position than we are today. At least then we would have a minister who could actually be held responsible for the terrible results across Australia in 2023. In the absence of a responsible minister, road safety gets lost in the transport portfolio, and it's too easy for governments of all political stripes to just blame the drivers and focus on enforcement and education campaigns, when a more holistic response is required to address road safety in the nation.

Despite being warned that, if we continue on the same pathway, 12,000 Australians would die and road trauma would cost more than $300 billion over the next decade, state and federal ministers have failed to take responsibility for their own failures. Ministers routinely and lazily blame the behaviour of motorists when their governments are also failing to provide a safe road environment, particularly in regional Australia, where a disproportionate amount of trauma occurs. Governments won't even share data on the standard of their road networks, despite repeated requests from the Australian Automobile Association, our nation's peak organisation representing motoring clubs. The AAA correctly points out that, by making federal road funding contingent upon state provision of state-related data, the Commonwealth would then be able to hold the premiers to account. Data transparency would help to save lives. It would curb billions of dollars in waste. It would target funding towards safety outcomes and would deliver the funding integrity that road users want.

We are all expected to make sure our cars are roadworthy, but governments are failing to work together to provide car-worthy roads. Regional Victorians are enduring potholes, landslips and crumbling road shoulders, which all contribute to crashes and are a direct result of a lack of maintenance. There's an obsession with spending billions of dollars—and I'm talking about billions of dollars in the infrastructure budget—to save just a few minutes for commuters in the city, when we could be saving lives in our regional areas for a fraction of that cost. There have been ongoing cuts to regional road funding and a failure to maintain road services or invest more in life-saving road treatment outside the city right across my state. Even when the previous federal government put money on the table, we couldn't get the city focused Labor government in Victoria to actually undertake road safety projects, even when the Commonwealth was prepared to pay 80 per cent of the cost.

Across regional Victoria, there are high-risk sections of highways and arterial roads which have been the scenes of dozens of crashes, and nothing has been done to address the root cause, which is the condition of the road environment. Too often, a drug-free, sober driver can make one mistake and the poor road environment contributes to their death or life-changing injuries.

It is well accepted that road safety is all about a combination of factors, including safer vehicles, safer cars, safer speeds, good driver behaviour and the condition of the road environment. As motorists, we have to take responsibility for our actions on the roads, but we can't do it alone. Reducing road trauma requires national leadership and a willingness to admit that governments must do more in partnership with all road users to save lives and eliminate injuries. I thank the House.