Tony Pasin (Barker, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Infrastructure and Transport) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That this House:

(1) recognises the critical importance of harmonised road safety data in formulating road safety policy;

(2) notes that:

(a) individual state and territory governments collect road safety data on a non-uniform basis; and

(b) the road safety data collected by state and territory governments is not made available to the Commonwealth Government notwithstanding the Commonwealth Government's significant financial contribution to state and territory governments to improve road safety outcomes;

(3) commends the leadership of the former Government in ensuring road safety was a consistent agenda item for the Infrastructure and Transport Ministers' Meetings (ITMM);

(4) further notes that at the ITMM that took place on 5 August 2022 road safety was not included on the agenda or indeed discussed; and

(5) calls for a nationally consistent approach to the collection and distribution of road safety data by establishing a national road safety data sharing agreement with the states and territories.

Sadly, 2022 has been a terrible year on Australian roads. In fact, we surpassed last year's national death toll by July this year. The road toll is going in the wrong direction, with 1,196 people killed on Australian roads in the 12 months to October 2022. Road related trauma places significant financial and social burden on the community, and its financial cost is quantified at more than $30 billion. Beyond the financial cost, the emotional and social cost of road trauma on the community is far-reaching and long-lasting. The Australian government provides significant funding to state and territory governments to deliver safety treatments on road networks nationally, including through the Road Safety Program. But it's self-evident that we're unable to adequately quantify the extent of road trauma or the effectiveness of funding for programs and treatments to reduce it without adequate data to understand the multiple causes of road accidents. The lack of consistent measurement and reporting of national road safety data across the states and territories continues to be a major impediment to data driven, evidence based solutions to reduce road death and trauma.

Current data collected by states and territories is not coordinated nationally and it lacks detail in many key areas such as serious injury. There need to be consistent metrics and reporting formats at a national level for data to be coordinated and made available to inform policy on and investment in road safety across all levels of government. The collation and reporting of road safety data will allow for the quantification of road safety issues, the development of evidence based solutions and the cross-jurisdictional evaluation of the effectiveness of interventions. Australia's National Road Safety Strategy 2021-30 sets out a commitment to reduce annual fatalities by at least 50 per cent by 2030, an admirable goal. Accurate and consistent data is paramount to informing policies and investments into road safety to achieve this, as is the National Road Safety Action Plan currently being developed.

Harmonisation of road safety data is an important item for discussion in previous infrastructure and transport ministers' meetings under the former coalition government. Meetings of infrastructure and transport ministers listed road safety as the first item on the agenda, signalling its importance. The first infrastructure and transport meeting under the new Labor government, held in August 2022, saw road safety dropped off the agenda for discussion. The former coalition government was committed to establishing a national data sharing agreement with states and territories, but this no longer seems to be a focus for infrastructure and transport ministers' meetings under Labor. The coalition government was making inroads—pardon the pun—having tasked the Office of Road Safety to work with states and territories to develop a data sharing plan.

But I don't want you to take my word for it; let's see what the AAA, the Australian Automobile Association, which has been calling for this data harmonisation, has had to say. AAA Managing Director Michael Bradley said just last week:

There is an urgent need for the Commonwealth to declare the changes it will make, as our National Road Safety Strategy is not credible when one of its two key objectives is to reduce the incidence of a metric which is neither measured nor reported.

Reviews of Australia's road safety performance continue to identify the leading cause of Australia's failure to achieve road trauma reduction targets as being the Commonwealth's lack of leadership and coordination.

It is not acceptable that in 2022, we have no national data on the quality of our road network, the types of road crashes occurring, the factors causing them, the enforcement of road rules, or their relative effectiveness, when road trauma continues to hospitalise 100 Australians daily and cost the economy $30 billion annually.

Commonwealth road safety data collation and reporting must be an urgent priority if road death and injury targets are to be met.

The Commonwealth's ongoing failure to facilitate the timely, consistent, and open reporting of national safety data prevents Australia from quantifying its road trauma problem, developing evidence-based responses, or evaluating their effectiveness.

It's said that if you can't measure it, you can't manage it.

What we need to see is a program that immediately harmonises data collection across state jurisdictions. In return for the gargantuan amount of money that the federal government provides for each of those state jurisdictions for road safety treatments and road funding otherwise, we should have that data and we should share it and use it as a management tool.

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