Alex Gallacher (SA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to make a contribution in senators' statements on my favourite topic: road safety. I just want to give a little bit of a history lesson to those on the other side about some of the promises they've made and some of the commitments they've made which they haven't fulfilled. Basically, to set the scene, the Australian federal government is responsible for regulating safety standards for new vehicles and for allocating infrastructure resources, including safety across all our national highway and local road networks. We see these through the Australian Design Rules; leading the National Road Safety Strategy 2011–2020; infrastructure needs, including Roads to Recovery and black spot funding; programs such as Keys2Drive; and funding for ANCAP et cetera.

In 2013 the coalition released their policy to improve road safety. It was a promising document, highlighting the avoidable economic cost of road accidents and deaths. This was underpinned by the Bureau of Infrastructure, Transport and Regional Economics statistics for the year 2006. You may wonder why I'm using these stats. Well, in 2006, 12 years ago, the annual cost of road safety was $27 billion. The social cost was $17.85 billion, or 1.7 per cent of GDP. The estimated human losses were approximately $2.4 million per fatality, and the losses for hospitalised injury were approximately $214,000 per injury. Twelve years ago those figures were published by the then Bureau of Transport Economics.

We would like to note that that the coalition's policy document said:

The Coalition will promote collaboration and coordination of:

We still do not have nationally available data for the number of hospitalised injuries in our country. We do not have a figure. They're estimates. The document continues:

We hand out billions of dollars in this parliament for roads, without a proper graded system tying the investment to outcomes in road safety. It concludes:

We have simply had a great policy brought to this place in 2013, and we're going to go through and see what's happened to it. The coalition followed on with the policy by having a report from the Department of Infrastructure and Regional Development. They released their Research report 140, conducted by BITRE in 2014, and some of the key take-outs were abundantly evidence based and clear. There were four priorities: infrastructure, safer intersections, distraction from mobile phones and autonomous braking technology. Mobile devices, more broadly, may have been a factor in seven per cent of all crashes in 2013. Seven per cent of all crashes was 83 deaths and 2,300 hospitalised injuries. On autonomous braking technology, the department found that, even without mandating AEB, the technology is expected to save 1,200 lives and prevent 54,000 hospitalised injuries by 2033. But they modelled a hypothetical scenario to bring AEB forward to all light vehicles by 2018. In that scenario, another 597 deaths and 24,100 hospitalised injuries would have been added to that cumulative list by simply mandating, in 2018, that all light vehicles must have autonomous emergency braking systems. They also found in this very important study that the unit cost, which was around $200, is expected to reduce significantly if it is fitted to all light vehicles.

So we move on very quickly, without any of this good work being put into practice, to the last election. At the last election you could not find a document in the coalition platform that had 'road safety policy' as its heading. We could not find their road safety policy at the last election. Since 2013, the portfolio has bounced around from the Hon. Warren Truss to the Hon. Jamie Briggs—who remembers young Mr Briggs?—the Hon. Darren Chester, the Hon. Barnaby Joyce and the Hon. Michael McCormack. Very clearly it was a policy position, underpinned by great research work, with absolute economic imperatives and social imperatives: reduced hospitalisation costs and reduced deaths, literally saving an additional 600 Australian lives. What did we get out of that policy? Zero. At the last election, you couldn't find it. You couldn't find a reiteration of it. You couldn't find another report to replace it. You found nothing, no action whatsoever.

What's happened in the meantime? The US has sought agreement with all the leading car manufacturers to have autonomous braking technology as a standard feature by 2022. In Europe, AEB is mandatory in all heavy vehicles, and they're contemplating making it so for all light vehicles from March 2018. In Korea, AEB—autonomous emergency braking—technology and lane departure warning systems will be mandatory by January 2019. These are really simple, evidence based solutions to an absolutely critical problem. I'm not decrying people's competence or diligence; I'm just pointing out the obvious: a great road safety platform, underpinned by clinical research, showing the way forward, about which nothing got done. Did the urgent overtake the important? Did the urgency of their daily lives overtake a very important prerogative, which was to set in train what the evidence was saying: make autonomous braking technology and lane keep assist mandatory and save 600 lives and 24,000 hospitalisations?

We don't manufacture motor vehicles in Australia anymore, so what are we doing? Why aren't we making it mandatory for all vehicles that come into this country to have the highest quality safety features, as are being adopted in almost all parts of the world? If the manufacturers in Thailand make a million cars and they want to send them to the United States, guess what? They'll make them with AEB, as it's mandatory—as they will if they want to send them to the European Union or to Korea. Australia is the only place, an island of inconsistency, where we're not going to make mandatory a technology that would save 600 Australian lives and 24,000 hospitalised injuries and would be an enormous kicker to the bottom line. If we're not spending that money with people in hospital or people being killed or emergency service vehicles being deployed—all of the resources we've got—it comes back to the economy. It's an absolute no-brainer.

We seem to have a policy black hole here. This is not new work. The other side actually got their act together and had a policy in 2013, which has slipped through their fingers, to the detriment of the Australian travelling public. We've had the CEO of Toll transport—which, incidentally, probably employs more people in Asia than in Australia—writing to the federal government and other stakeholders and exhorting them to have a national platform on road safety. What was the response? Apparently he said on the Ray Hadley show the other day that he didn't get a response. The federal government just did not respond. They literally did not respond to an enormous company which has a vested interest in making roads safe every day. Its CEO wrote to various stakeholders. The New South Wales police responded to him, the New South Wales government responded to him, but the federal government was deafeningly silent.

What this says is that they started off with a policy, they didn't bother applying it after due diligence was undertaken, and we've ended up now, five years later, with nothing to look forward to—only 600 more deaths and 24,100 more hospitalised injuries—from our road investment.