Rick Wilson (O'Connor, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Trade) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to support my good friend the member for Barker and his private member's motion on road safety data collection. The first point I want to make is that the road toll this year is heading in completely the wrong direction, with 1,197 people so far this year having died on Australia's roads. I'll come back to my electorate of O'Connor in a moment, but 95 of those people have died on regional Western Australian roads. That's about 70 per cent of the total road toll. Many of those 95 people perished, sadly, in my electorate. The member for Robertson has given a very moving description of what happens in the emergency department of a major hospital when someone is brought in from a critical accident. People across my electorate of 1.1 million square kilometres can only dream about getting to that level of care and help so quickly. Many people have accidents hours from that critical care, and, sadly, many of those people, who may otherwise have been saved by the care of the member for Robertson and other fantastic medical professionals, may well pass.

The quantified financial cost of road trauma in Australia is around $30 billion. That's a massive cost to the economy, and it's obviously a massive emotional cost to those families and loved ones when someone doesn't return home from a road journey. Sadly, still to this day, current data collection by states and territories is not coordinated nationally, so it's very difficult for policymakers to get an accurate handle on exactly what is going on out on the roads and what we need to do to drive down that way-too-high number of road deaths in Australia. The Australian Automobile Association has said, through their director Michael Bradley:

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.

That's a fairly damning statement on all policymakers. I know that the previous coalition government were certainly working very hard to achieve that outcome. We had the former minister and former Deputy Prime Minister here talking about the moves and efforts that he'd made to get a coordinated compiling of that data. It's simply not acceptable, given the increased road toll, and policymakers certainly do need to get on with the job. It's incumbent on the new government now to take up the cudgels to try and bring the states on board.

I want to talk a little bit about of my electorate of O'Connor. As I said, it's 1.1 million square kilometres, so a great deal of the Western Australian road network falls within my electorate. I'm sure the member for Macarthur, who is one of the really decent people in this place, regrets making his comments about road funding in regional areas being a rort. I really think if he had time to reflect on those comments he would probably come back in here and withdraw them, because it is a spear in the heart of those 95 families who have lost loved ones on regional roads in Western Australia to describe efforts to make the roads safer and prevent deaths in future as a rort.

I'm very, very proud of the road safety funding program in Western Australia—$120 million across our state. Every Western Australian would have travelled roads where there's about a metre of bitumen being put on the shoulder, which Main Roads tell me has a significant impact on road safety. Also, as the chair of the WA roads black spot funding committee, we put $13 million into identified road black spots to reduce those instances of fatal accidents. I also want to say, in the lead-up to Christmas, to everybody who's taking a long journey or who's going to be on the road in the next little while: please drive safely and make sure you come home to your loved ones.

See this speech in context