Mike Freelander (Macarthur, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I would like to commend the member for Barker for moving this motion. It is of course very much in keeping with coalition policy: plenty of announcement, no delivery. They had 10 years to do something about this, and what did they do? Nothing. I recently met with one of our major insurers who tells me that the data is, in fact, available through the insurance industry for major motor vehicle accidents—from the causes to the type of vehicle, the type of driver and the type of road. All this data is available. In 10 years, the coalition government has done absolutely nothing about it.

In Macarthur, of course, the residents travel long distances to and from work. They are exposed to very poor roads, and the recent rain events and the floods have, of course, exacerbated this. So residents drive on dangerous roads and they drive long distances. I'll mention Appin Road. I have been begging for seven years for the coalition government on a state and federal level to do something about it. They have done absolutely nothing. In fact, there was another fatality on Appin Road in July, bringing the total in the last 15 years to 22 people who have died. We know from road safety data that, for every person who dies on our roads—and there are about 1,200 a year in Australia—at least six times as many people are severely injured to the point where their injuries will have major lifelong effects on them and their families. I've lost count of the number of kids I've looked after who have lost one or even both parents to major road traffic trauma, yet for 10 years we've had a federal coalition government who sat on their hands and have done very little.

The Albanese government understands the major issues that traffic accidents and road safety problems cause, particularly in rural, regional and outer metropolitan areas. Macarthur has recently received almost $1 million for recent road safety upgrades in the recent budget, and the budget also outlined another $26 million over three years to address the four pillars in the Road Safety Strategy. Those pillars are safer road use, safer roads, safer vehicles and safe speed. There's much that can be done with road safety improvements to our national vehicle fleet, yet there's no mandatory safety implementation process for new vehicles on our roads. There are very important steps being taken at a Commonwealth level to see where deaths and injuries can be prevented and, unfortunately, the Morrison government and the New South Wales Perrottet government have an appalling record in improvements to road safety.

The road issues can be fixed. The data can be addressed. We can't continue on the same laissez-faire road management process with the rorts of road grants to country areas to save a few coalition votes. We can't continue along that process. There needs to be fairer data collection and appropriate management of our road safety issues across the country, not just for a few select electorates. The New South Wales government continues to act very slowly, with many families unfortunately severely impacted by injury and death that's occurring on our roads. My personal entreaties to the coalition government about the roads in Macarthur and the adjoining electorates of Hume and Werriwa and further south have fallen on deaf ears. We've had nothing but rorts and poor management of road safety data that already exists. Yes, we need global national data. That can be collected and our insurance companies are well aware of that, yet the coalition government did nothing for 10 years. It's now down to the Albanese government to make sure that our data collection is correct and that we encourage state and federal governments to work together for better road safety across the broader Australia.

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