Alex Gallacher (SA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to make a contribution in this adjournment debate on a subject which you probably hold very dear, Mr President: that is, the Australian National University's internship program. I think this is my fifth intern. Frederick Litchfield has just completed a report for my office on subject matter that I find I am very closely involved in. The work is, as always, exceptional. Mr Litchfield has delivered a report entitled The cost of road crashes in Australia2016: an overview of the safety strategies. He has completed this work in around three months. It has condensed down to approximately 41 pages. He has done, as always, excellent work—as have all of the interns that I have had the luxury of hosting in my office.

As someone who has probably sometimes looked at university graduates with bit of disdain, these types of exercises really bring home the value of a top, high quality education. This young intern has done exceptionally valuable work, which I think is worthy of being widely circulated, widely read and widely tested as to the references he has drawn the information from. Just to give you a sample of what he has done, this report builds research on the Bureau of Infrastructure, Transport and Regional Economics in 2009 to calculate the total social cost of road crashes. The report updates the cost for 2016 using new fatality and injury data and includes estimates of the cost of property damage. These results can serve as a very useful guide for policymakers when assessing the merits of safety strategies in Australia.

Transit fatality data are explained, including with comparisons between heavy trucks and non-heavy vehicles as well as state-based and time-based comparisons. State and territory injury data is analysed to estimate the number of serious and minor injuries from road crashes in 2016. The property damage costs arising from road crashes are also calculated.

There were 1,295 fatalities from road crashes in Australia in 2016, and the report's analysis shows that that is a 19 per cent decrease from some 10 years ago. However, it is a 13 per cent increase on 2014, our lowest fatality year. Since 2006 Australia has fallen from 14 out of 34 to 17 out of 34 in the OECD rankings for fatalities per capita. Fatalities per billion kilometres travelled were 5.9 in 2016, and fatalities per 100,000 people were 5.4. Heavy trucks were involved in 14.7 per cent of fatalities in 2016 despite making up only 3.1 per cent of registered vehicles and travelling only 7.2 per cent of the vehicle-kilometres travelled.

Due to state and territory methodologies and the different ways of counting in each state and territory, there is currently no nationally consistent road crash data in Australia. The report's estimations are that there were 32,300 serious injuries and 224,104 minor injuries sustained from road crashes in 2016. Some 620 people per week are seriously injured in crashes on our Australian roads. The report used the willingness-to-pay method of estimating the cost of road crashes, with the outcome being an average cost per fatality of $7.8 million, cost per serious injury of $310,094 and cost per minor injury of $3,057. It found that property damage costs increased relative to 2006 by 36.5 per cent including inflation and resulted in higher insurance administration costs and vehicle repair costs, of which 22 per cent, interestingly enough, were borne by heavy vehicles. On this basis, the total social cost of road crashes in Australia for 2016 was $33.16 billion: $9.38 billion in property damage costs, $10.2 billion in fatality costs, $13.58 billion in industry costs and a total increase from 2006 of 22 per cent, which is less than the overall CPI but still equates to two per cent of GDP.

This report provides a comprehensive overview of the different types of safety strategies and their management in Australia, presents what is being done and what could be done under multiple categories—management, resources, leadership, awareness, roads, infrastructure, technology and heavy vehicles—and concludes with a number of recommendations in these areas.

This is excellent work. This is the result of a bright young mind having the opportunity to access the Parliamentary Library, the department of transport resources and other groups like the Australian College of Road Safety—all of the various groups which we gave him the basic introduction to. He has gone out and produced an exceptional piece of work which I commend to any senator or party interested in road safety.

It gives me that underpinning evidence so that, when I go to estimates and I ask the department, 'Why didn't you spend $24 million allocated in the budget to road safety?' and they do not have a coherent answer, it makes me believe that we do not have a coherent strategy in the national department in respect of road safety. If the officers attending estimates are unable to tell any senator why a measly $24 million was not able to be spent in a year when we have a cost to the economy of two per cent of GDP—in excess of $32 billion—I find that absolutely extraordinary.

When you press really hard on those officials who turn up, they do not have answers. Clearly, what that says is that there is no structured road safety group within the department. No-one has carriage or responsibility for directing the federal effort across the nation in respect of this huge challenge. We are approaching 1,300 deaths per year and 620 serious injuries per week, and the department does not spend the $24 million allocated. And to add insult to injury, if you look into the forward estimates they budgeted to spend less money, not more. You can probably guess that if you spend a dollar in road safety, the underpinning evidence says you will get a minimum of $1.30 back. But what about the human and social costs? What about the human and social costs of 620 people tying up the time of all those emergency service vehicles and the emergency sections in our hospitals? What about retrieval by helicopter? There are huge costs attributed to inaction in this space.

I have asked the department to do one thing, and that is to mandate autonomous-braking technology. It would stop lunatics driving into people. That is what it does; it actually stops you from driving into people. It would save an enormous number of injuries, particularly in the pedestrian area. And it is a cheap technology, and it is readily available. It is actually taken out of vehicles that are imported into Australia, and that is a disgrace. We will not make motor vehicles in Australia at the end of this year, and the department, the minister and this government—and I would say this if it were Anthony Albanese—must mandate the safest-possible technology for Australian motorists. We import a million and a bit cars per year and there is no reason we cannot have the safest cars in the world imported into Australia, just as they are in the European Union or United States. We need to make an impact in this space. We need to make a big impact in this space, not only in heavy vehicles but right across the board.

It is not believable to me that we, as policymakers, can just blithely accept 1,300 Australian deaths per year and 620 seriously injured per week. It is beyond my comprehension that we can sit here and do this. It is affecting our GDP; it is costing us two per cent of GDP. We are spending a miserly amount on it and we need more urgency in this policy area. The Hon. Darren Chester believes in road safety. I co-founded the Parliamentary Friends of Road Safety with him, but we need action. We need to get on the front foot and take up this sort of work. It needs to publicised and it needs to be acted on. We need to reduce the fatalities, reduce the injuries, and start doing things appropriately in road safety.