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

I am very pleased to inform the Senate that the Parliamentary Friends of Road Safety Group has been re-formed in this parliament. I—along with Llew O'Brien MP, the member for Wide Bay—look forward to making an contribution in this space. The friendship group has been established with the aims of elevating within the federal parliament greater awareness of road safety, informing federal parliamentarians of the need for continual improvement in safety outcomes, informing federal parliamentarians of the national and international initiatives with the potential to improve road safety, and ensuring that members of the federal parliament are aware of the enormous social and economic cost to the economy of failing to continually prioritise improving road safety outcomes. I would also like to put on record my appreciation of the support and work of the honourable Darren Chester MP, Minister for Infrastructure and Transport, who was the co-chair of the friendship group in the last parliament.

I have had a lifetime, as have a number of senators, of either working on the road or spending a lot of hours driving on the road. That has made me aware of the ever-present danger that every Australian faces each day when they drive their vehicle. I do have a passion for road safety, and our country's prosperity is in part reflected in the love affair that we have with motor vehicles. The freedom and mobility achieved by owning a car are sometimes tempered with the sickening human and economic cost of vehicle accidents. The various authorities that are charged with the third-party insurance provisions understand that death is relatively cheap when compared with the costs associated with serious and catastrophic injuries. The attendant economic costs are enormous. The last study estimated that $27 billion was lost to the Australian economy in the cost of failure to address road safety. I have always believed that the Swedish model of Vision Zero was an excellent starting point. That starts off with the statement:

… we are human and make mistakes.

… … …

… our bodies are subject to biomechanical tolerance limits and simply not designed to travel at high-speed—

yet we do so, and—

An effective road safety system needs to take human fallibility into account.

I just want to put clearly on the record what has happened since 1986. In 1986 there were 2,888 fatalities. In 2015 there were 1,205, so real, quantifiable work has been done: 1,683 Australians are here who would not have been had we not endorsed and accepted effective policing, better road design and safer car design. That is an enormous number of lives. If we break down the 2015 statistics of who does die in our fatalities, we will find that 164 of them were pedestrians—so they really had nothing to do with the motor vehicle other than the collision—203 were motorcyclists, 51 were pedal cyclists, 249 were passengers, and 555 were drivers. Very clearly, we have a situation where we can do better. We as a country can do better, each state can do better, each parliament can do better, and the tragedy is that we are not. The figures for 2016 are, sadly, on the increase. We are accepting a situation where 1,205 Australians will go out in the morning and not make it home. Very sadly, in 2001 we had 27,482 hospitalised injuries by a road user. In 2013, which was a lull in the stats, we had 35,059, an increase of 7½ thousand Australians who were hospitalised as a result of a road traffic accident.

Very clearly, we have been effective at reducing the number of deaths, and that has been done by vehicle design, road design and effective law enforcement. If I were to say one thing about law enforcement, it would be that parliaments do not have the backbone, in my humble view, to stand up and call things out for what they are. When people make the statement that fixed-point speed cameras are about revenue-raising, clearly that is the case—they do raise revenue—but, more importantly, they change behaviour. No-one gets a hefty fine or loses three demerit points without thinking about it, and behaviour is changed. Effective enforcement is behind the lowering of our toll, and we as politicians should never shy away from that. When people get these articles up in newspapers around the country saying the state government is only revenue-raising with a red-light camera or a fixed-point speed camera—for goodness sake, do you really want to go through a red light? Do you really want to face those consequences? They change behaviour.

Secondly, I think we ought to bite the bullet instead of letting the marketplace advertise cars that park themselves. That is exactly the same technology that stops you from running into the car in front of you. So we should mandate autonomous braking technology. We are not going to make, to our great shame, any more motor vehicles in Australia once Holden closes. We are not going to manufacture cars, and that it is a great shame. There is a one-off opportunity that this parliament, which controls Australian design rules, could take. We could mandate the safest cars in the world be imported here. That would include things like autonomous braking technology, which simply means you are less likely to run into the car in front of you. Senator Williams, in the country if you have fallen asleep and you are going off the road and you are going to hit a tree, lane-assist technology will correct your vehicle. If you are going to cross over that white line and collide head-on with another vehicle, lane-assist technology will help you. These things are cheap. The technology is available. They could be mandated. We could have the one million-plus cars that are sold in Australia every year having a high level of technological safety features. That is something to aspire to. That is something that I am hoping that the Parliamentary Friends of Road Safety will take on board.

In the few moments I have left I want to touch on what this subject looks like globally. There is an excellent World Health Organization report where we are in the category of one of the 28 countries representing 449 million people in the world who have adequate laws in respect of all five risk factors—speed, drink-driving, helmets, seat belts and child restraints. Only 28 countries and seven per cent of the world's population have appropriate legislation in respect of this. Over 1.24 million people will be killed in road accidents over the next 12 months. Only 88 countries have reduced the number of deaths on their roads. The total number is extraordinary—1.24 million.

These factors should not dissuade us from going faster to improve our situation to get down to zero, if that is possible. We know that there are risk-takers out there in the community who drive without a licence and do silly and stupid things, causing death and injury to other people. But the majority who are law-abiding citizens can take regulation and enforcement and change our behaviour and be safe citizens. We can drive safer cars because the government can mandate them. We have taken evidence in the parliamentary inquiry into road safety which simply says that it is quite cheap to do that. In fact, this is a one-off opportunity, I believe. If we are not going to make motor vehicles in Australia, we can simply and quickly mandate the safest vehicles for our most vulnerable road users.