Alannah Mactiernan (Perth, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Last week in Adelaide I felt very privileged to be able to get a preview of the game-changing technology of autonomous vehicles, at the International Driverless Cars Conference. This technology will change the shape, the sounds and, profoundly, the livability of our cities. It is going to enable us to reduce the number of vehicles we require on our roads to deliver the mobility we need. It will significantly improve road safety. The fact is that 1.3 million people die on the roads around the world each year from car crashes. That is an alarming figure, and this technology has amazing capacity to reduce that problem. It will enhance the quality of life for those that cannot drive—for our increasingly aged population, for our young people. It will enable us to double the transport task on existing roads, so, where there are 2,000 cars per lane per hour, this technology will enable us to double that throughput, getting much better value for our dollar and our road investment. It may totally change the model of car ownership. It will challenge notions of what are public and private transport and it will change the planning for mass transit.

This is not something for future generations. This is not something that is not going to be here for another 15, 20 or 30 years. The basis of this technology is with us here and now, and we enjoyed participating in the first trial of an automated vehicle on a public road in the Southern Hemisphere. At this point, I want to congratulate Jay Weatherill and his government in South Australia for seizing the day and trying to make sure that Australia gets in on the ground floor of this new technology, so that we are not, once again, left with just being technology takers but take this opportunity to be technology makers. We saw the big trial with Volvo but we also saw Tesla cars there and the Navya minibus shuttle, all performing very well. There was one incident where, unfortunately, an inflatable kangaroo was injured! But over and above that it all went extremely well.

In the few minutes that remain, I want to talk about some of the things that we need to do at a federal level. First up, we have to make sure that we protect the bandwidth that is going to be needed to enable these vehicles to communicate with each other. To move into a fully automated system, we are going to need these vehicles to be able to communicate with each other, and vehicles fitted with that intervehicle communication technology will be coming on the market as early as 2017. So we need to make sure that we have the proper bandwidth. The 5.9 gigahertz spectrum is the one that is probably the best suited in Australia. There is commercial pressure to erode what has been set aside, but we have really got to lock that in for this purpose. We also need to move on the GPS. We need to ensure that our current level of accuracy which is only about 10 metres, comes down at least to one metre. Hopefully, we can support Geoscience Australia, who have actually developed the technology to enable us to get it down to a mere three centimetres and leapfrog the capacity of the rest of the world. I urge us all to accept that this technology is here and now. We all need to move very, very quickly to ensure that we have got the infrastructure to enable us to utilise this.

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