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

As a young neurosurgical resident in the late 1970s, I went to Royal Ryde Rehabilitation Hospital on many occasions to visit patients who were in long-term rehabilitation for severe neurological injury following motor vehicle accidents and other accidents. It was terrible. I'd like to acknowledge that, whilst every day in Australia three people die on our roads, over a hundred are severely injured, many of them left with severe neurological problems. I'd like to pay my respects to Royal Rehab Private Ryde, which is still doing amazing work in the rehabilitation of people following major motor vehicle injuries and also other injuries, and I acknowledge the work they do.

I'd also like to acknowledge our first responders. I know the member for Barker, as a police officer, probably did see severe trauma on our roads and had to deal with that, as do our ambulance officers, police officers and, of course, our emergency doctors and nurses—seeing people brought in after severe motor vehicle accidents. What is a tragedy is that every one of those people killed affects their larger family, and those that are severely injured often have lifelong complications that affect not just them but their whole families. It is not only an enormous cost in terms of money but also an enormous emotional cost for all of those people that are injured on our roads, and their families. I'd like to acknowledge those families as well.

Unfortunately, what is happening is that our road toll, both in terms of deaths and the severely injured, is increasing. This is in these days of improved technology, improved medical care, improved rapid responses, improved neurosurgery, improved orthopaedic surgery and quicker access to acute management. Yet our road toll is increasing.

One thing that we really don't know is why. I don't want to politicise this argument in any way. None of us in this place—none of us—want to see our road toll increasing. We want to bring it down, we want lives saved and we want to see fewer people with the severe consequences of motor vehicle accidents. It's not something that I want to politicise. But we do need better data. I'd like to acknowledge the work that Michael Bradley and the Australian Automobile Association are doing in trying to improve data collection in this space.

We don't really know why our road toll is increasing. Our cars are better, our technology's better and our health care is better, yet the toll is increasing. And that's creating a huge burden on our health services, on the NDIS and on the families involved with this. We have, of course, better access to better roads through our Roads to Recovery Program. The federal government has doubled the spending on the Roads to Recovery Program to a bit over a billion dollars per year. We've increased funding for the Black Spot Program. We've created safer local roads and community infrastructure. We're making our infrastructure better, yet our road toll is increasing.

We need better data collection. We need much better access to the technology involved in road safety. With the support of the Transport Workers Union, we've been able to get better, new technology for recognition of bike roads et cetera for our large vehicles by using the technology that's available. We need to get that in all our vehicles on the roads, and that will make a difference. But, above all, we need all our states and territories to get together to put together a much better data collection system so that we know what is causing our road toll and what is causing the deaths and the severe injuries. We need to make sure that lives are saved. This is not a political issue.

See this speech in context