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

Last week in the parliament, something extraordinary happened. It wasn't the chaos and dysfunction we've seen for the last couple of weeks. It was a presentation of a report into a road safety strategy by the honourable Michael McCormack. The main committee room was full and the big table had all the respected stakeholders in road safety in attendance and there was a large number of industry experts in the meeting room.

The inquiry was conducted by an Associate Professor Jeremy Woolley, Director of the Centre of Automotive Safety Research at the University of Adelaide; and Dr John Crozier, Chair of the Royal Australian College of Surgeons National Trauma Committee. They had as an adviser Lachlan McIntosh AM, President of the Australian College of Road Safety since 2007 and the current chair of the global New Car Assessment Program; ably assisted by Mr Rob McInerney, CEO of iRAP, the International Road Assessment Program.

Though unreported and probably unremarked and unnoticed by a lot of people in this chamber and the other place, a very important piece of public policy work was done by really competent, reputable, respected industry professionals. It was a bipartisan effort. The honourable Anthony Albanese was also a contributor in the main committee room and supported the report.

I want to go to the 12 main recommendations that that report highlighted:

1. Create strong national leadership by appointing a Cabinet minister with specific multi-agency responsibility to address the hidden epidemic of road trauma including its impact on the health system.

2. Establish a national road safety entity reporting to the Cabinet minister with responsibility for road safety.

3. Commit to a minimum $3 billion a year road safety fund.

4. Set a vision zero target for 2050 with an interim target of vision zero for all major capital city CBD areas, and high-volume highways by 2030.

5. Establish and commit to key performance indicators in time for the next strategy that measure and report how harm can be eliminated in the system, and that are published annually.

6. Undertake a National Road Safety Governance Review by March 2019.

7. Implement rapid deployment and accelerated uptake of proven vehicle safety technologies and innovation.

8. Accelerate the adoption of speed management initiatives that support harm elimination.

9. Invest in road safety focused infrastructure, safe system and mobility partnerships with state, territory and local governments that accelerate the elimination of high-risk roads.

10. Make road safety a genuine part of business as usual within Commonwealth, state, territory and local government.

11. Resource key road safety enablers and road safety innovation initiatives.

12. Implement life-saving partnerships with countries in the Indo-Pacific and globally as appropriate to reduce road trauma.

Why should we do this? I'll tell you why. This is what will happen if we don't. Failure to improve our current situation will result in 12,000 killed and 360,000 injured, at a cost of over $300 billion in the next decade. People will say, 'Where did he get those figures from?' They are the published stats as we currently speak. If we do more of the same, this will be our outcome.

The only thing we really know is that if we want to look at performance of Australian governments, we can go back into history. I'm indebted to our great people of the Parliamentary Library for providing me some historical context. We knew in the 1940s that when planes stopped suddenly there was a need to appropriately package passengers. That was their terminology in the 1940s. If a plane came to a stop suddenly, people needed to be restrained. It's not rocket science. By 1954 the preliminary research data on the effectiveness of seatbelts had become available. In 1955 seatbelts were first offered as optional equipment in some US passenger vehicles, but not in Australia. In 1960 a Senate committee—one of our Senate committees of the Commonwealth parliament, established under the select committee process—came out with, 'The motor trade should install seatbelts of an approved standard in all motor vehicles.' It's not rocket science. That was 1960. The first Australian standard came out in 1961.

And what did the legislators do? We might assume that between 1961 and 1970—a period of one decade—when the manufacture of new cars required seatbelts, it could be reasonably assumed that seatbelts were effective and that their use would stop people from dying. But our whole process took a decade. In that decade we lost 30,895 souls. In the time it took for the evidence to be presented internationally and in Australia, for an Australian standard to be produced, and for the regulation to be enacted in every state and territory—it took 10 years. In that 10 years we had 30,000 deaths on the road and countless injuries.

We know that not every death in a car can be prevented by a seatbelt. I can remember the days when you only had to have one seatbelt in the car, for the driver. You could let your wife, your children and anybody else in the car just move around. Anyway, we know that 30,895 people lost their lives in that decade, and we know that 30 per cent—that is the best estimate from the stats we have—of those people would have been saved with a seatbelt. The lowest estimate is 24 per cent.

Here we have a situation where we can see where we're going, doing more of the same—1,200 people lose their lives every year and 36,000 are hospitalised for one day or more, so in a decade we will have 12,000 and 360,000—and we know where we've been because it took us 10 years to take action previously with the most obvious of methods like seatbelts. We know where we've been, and we know where we're going. What we need is the intestinal fortitude, the courage of both houses of parliament and a totally bipartisan effort to make serious inroads into this.

I commend to you the three- or four-minute video made by Dr John Crozier, a 21-year trauma surgeon veteran, who goes to Liverpool Hospital every Monday morning with his list of elective vascular surgeries. He makes it his business to go by it and do excellent work. Halfway through his day, a theatre alongside will be prepared and an accident victim will come in. He talks about a 17-year-old girl who is involved in trauma going to school with her father. He's doing his elective surgery. She's brought into the theatre next to him. He has to open up her body, take a metre of bowel out and put it in a bucket. He's got blood on his hands. He talks about the seven Australians who donated a litre of blood so that she may survive, and how she is then transferred to intensive surgery. He says, 'If there were 100 crosses on the lawns of Parliament House each month to mark every person who's killed in a road accident, and if there were 100 markers each day for someone who's injured in road accidents, there would be a seismic change in how we deal with this.' It is a hidden epidemic that we need to take urgent, proactive action on.

I commend the work of Dr John Crozier, Lauchlan McIntosh, Rob McInerney and, most importantly, my close friend and colleague from South Australia, Associate Professor Jeremy Woolley. They are doing great work. They've laid out a great plan. The wherewithal must come from this government. If this government can't do it, the next Labor government should.