Janet Rice (Victoria, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I also want to speak on the government's response to the Rural and Regional Affairs and Transport References Committee inquiry into road safety, which I was part of. It seems like it was quite a long time ago. Given that it's taken that long to get a response from the government, it makes me realise just how seriously—not!—they take the issue of road safety. And here it is, at 4 o'clock on the last sitting day of this session, and suddenly it's just landed. I haven't yet even had a chance to look at the government's response, but I'm pretty sure—and certainly from what Senator Sterle said about some key recommendations from the RRAT inquiry having just been 'noted'—that there's nothing to change the business-as-usual approach to road safety, which has been the ongoing situation and which just has to stop.

We had the RRAT inquiry and the government then had an inquiry into road safety, with some eminent road safety experts chairing that inquiry, that put some really powerful recommendations to government. They said that there needs to be a change in the whole approach, that it's just not good enough to keep on doing the same measures over and over again to try to minimise accidents, to try to improve road safety; there's got to be a complete holistic look at how we eliminate the issues of lack of safe conditions on our roads so that we do not continue to have hundreds of people die on our roads, and thousands, tens of thousands, of people who are severely injured and suffer lifetime consequences from road accidents.

One of the recommendations from the government inquiry was that we should be spending $3 billion a year on road safety, if we are going to be serious about it. That's the context in which to put the government's announcement earlier this week—yes, it's great that there's a commitment to spend half a billion on road safety a year, but it's not going to cut it. It's just not going to be enough to really change the situation so we don't continue to have the deaths. As Senator Sterle said, these aren't just statistics. Every one of the people who dies on our roads, or is severely injured, is a human being. It is the massive consequences and the massive costs for them, their families and their friends, ongoing for their whole lives. This is something that we Australians, and this government—all of us here—need to seriously look at and say that there needs to be a change. It's not good enough just to say, 'Alright, it's going to take us a year to respond to the road safety inquiry. Alright, we're just going to have another inquiry.' We had the government's inquiry last year, and now we've got the joint standing committee having yet another inquiry. To me, you have inquiry after inquiry after inquiry when you have no commitment to actually do something serious.

Certainly, I commit the Greens to working collaboratively with the government and the opposition to work out how we can get the serious action that is required to eliminate deaths on our roads, to eliminate those accidents. Finally, I particularly want to call out the most vulnerable road users, who are not being considered, who are just being swept away. They are pedestrians and cyclists, who are being killed on our roads at a rate much higher than the proportion of road users that they are. That's because the conditions are just not safe for them. In the case of cycling, we do not have cycling infrastructure that enables people to have the freedom to ride safely. Particularly in these times, we know of the benefits from encouraging more people to ride. In the current context, it means that we won't have the huge crushes on public transport, which are of concern under the COVID pandemic. We've got people that want to ride. We've had almost three times the number of people cycling over the last three months than previously. And how do we get those people to keep riding? They've got to feel safe. They've got to have the money put in to invest in bike infrastructure so that they will feel safe. We have been calling for a number of years that we need to be spending a billion dollars over the forward estimates on cycling infrastructure. Yet this government refuses to even acknowledge that there's a role for government in funding cycling infrastructure. Every time I've raised it in estimates, I just get stonewalled. If we had a government serious about taking action on road safety, investing in that infrastructure is incredibly important. They are the sorts of measures that we need to be seeing from this government if we're going to seriously be tackling the issue of road safety.