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

I rise to make a contribution in this adjournment debate on a matter of great importance that does not get the significance in the federal parliament that it should: the national road safety situation. On average, four people are killed every day and 90 are seriously injured every day on Australian roads. Almost everyone has, at some stage, been affected by a road crash. In recent times, these numbers have been on a downward spiral. At the same time, road use has been increasing.

A number of very important initiatives have contributed to the management of this very significant economic issue, with tremendous social impact. Since 1989 there has been a steady decline through interventionary forces such as random breath-testing standards, speed policies, fixed speed cameras, random drug testing, the impounding of vehicles, hoon driving legislation, P plate restrictions and increased training for P plate drivers. While the P plater often gets a raw deal from the average motorist, it is important to recognise—particularly in some jurisdictions like South Australia—that 90 per cent of P platers actually go through their graduated licensing progression without a single infringement. It is simply the risk-takers in society—who take risks in every facet of their life and who engage in risk-taking in motor vehicles—who give P platers that less-than-enviable reputation.

We have safer cars. Cars are now built with electronic stability control, traction control and automatic brake assistance, but there is more to do. It is ironic that you can see a car advertised for sale in Australia that can park itself and that is seen to be a marketing initiative, when there is technology about that actually stops you from running into the car in front of you. It seems to me that emergency braking technology which would stop you hitting something in front of you would be a more valuable thing for a vulnerable road user, or any road user, than a car that parks itself—because if you cannot learn how to reverse into a parking spot there is not a lot of hope for you. But the reality is that is what the industry does—they are marketing cars that will park themselves, when there is emergency braking technology which will stop you from using the vehicle in front of you. It would save the economy hundreds of millions of dollars that are chewed up in emergency rooms with whiplash injuries and the like.

We cannot just leave the industry to do what it does. Let us put this in context: since 1925, there have been 180,000 deaths on Australian roads. Unfortunately, in the year 2013 alone, we have lost 1,193 people. There is a significant number of people who are losing their lives and an even higher number of people have been injured, some catastrophically, requiring decades of long-term care and large amounts of insurance money set aside to provide for that care.

What we need is a proper strategy. We need a proper strategy driven by the federal government. It cannot be left to the state governments. Some states have road safety ministers; other states leave it to a public servant who may be the director. The economic costs of road crashes in Australia is estimated to be $27 billion. Add to that the devastating fact that children grow up without parents, brothers or sisters, and the cost to the health system is extremely high. Then you add in the cost of emergency services: fire brigades, police officers, ambulance officers and trauma teams in hospitals. They wait with dread, every long weekend in Australia, for the sound of a helicopter evacuating people from a crash in a rural area or the sound of ambulances coming in from a crash on a freeway in a major city or regional area.

This is a really significant issue. It is with this in mind that I, along with the Hon. Darren Chester, the member for Gippsland, co-convened the Parliamentary Friends of Road Safety. On Wednesday this week the Parliamentary Friends of Road Safety will be hosted by the Australasian New Car Assessment Program, ANCAP. They will be in the national parliament, getting people with an interest in road safety together to discuss the issues.

This issue has been around for a very long time. If you do any research on this at all you will find that Julius Caesar attempted to solve the problem in ancient Rome by banning horses and carts from dusk till dawn. You will find that there was a great horse manure crisis in 1894. There were more horses in London and New York than there was the ability to clean up after them. There was 1,200 metric tonnes of manure in New York in the 1890s. More importantly, the actual number of injuries from traffic accidents was 70 per cent higher than it is today.

My point is that this problem has been around for a very long time. There have been attempts to bring it under control and get it into the right perspective, but despite our successes it is still a huge problem for the Australian economy. It is a huge problem for the Australian health system. A huge amount of law enforcement activity goes into mitigating behaviour on roads.

In my view, there is probably not enough backbone in the parliaments of Australia to call it for what it is. When people say that fixed point speed cameras are revenue raising, that is stating the obvious. They do raise revenue, but what they also do is change behaviour. No-one gets a $500 fine without thinking about it. No-one loses three demerit points without thinking about it. Behaviour is changed and it is changed for the better; people are more aware on the roads. The enforcement arm is very successful in a lot of ways. I would like to see this government—and it is the job of an opposition to tell them what to do and make suggestions about good policy—have a parliamentary secretary for road safety. They should be designating somebody in the federal outer ministry to take responsibility for road safety—to coordinate and drive some cohesive national policy which would build on all of the good work done in the states. It would build on, collaborate with and consolidate all of the excellent work that is done around the country in the area of road safety expertise, where there are many very high-quality contributors.

I think we ought to bite the bullet. Instead of allowing the marketplace to advertise cars that park themselves, we ought to be mandating emergency braking technology. We ought to be mandating the fact that the car you are driving will stop before it hits the car in front of you. We ought to be mandating lane assistance, so that if you cross over onto the wrong side of the road your car will correct itself. This technology is available. It is available in high-end cars in the world, as we speak.

If we are not going to make cars in this country, we ought to be making sure that cars that are sold in this country are the safest cars in the world. If, through this Australasian New Car Assessment Program, we were to mandate that the cars that come into this country have emergency braking technology we would save a lot of lives, a lot of injuries and a lot of money. If lane assistance was mandated people would not be having head-on crashes. They are an all-too-frequent event.

Whilst there is no silver bullet there should be a will in this parliament to take this issue on in a very bipartisan way and to get involved, at the federal level, with all of the stakeholders, to promulgate good policy, push it and carry it through irrespective of what party is in government. Road safety is too important an issue for us not to be bipartisan and collegiate on it. It affects every Australian community, and we should be doing a lot better.