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

As the co-chair of the Parliamentary Friends of Road Safety I want to make a contribution about my favourite topic in this place. Recently the Bureau of Infrastructure Transport and Regional Economics, a division of the federal Department of Infrastructure, Regional Development and Cities, launched on their website the Vision Zero dashboard, which allows users to view all local government areas with zero deaths over a 10-year period. It can be found at bitre.gov.au/dashboards/#vision. These statistics show a number of years a council has not had a fatality on their roads.

It's sad to see that only 19 councils out of the 537 in Australia have not had a fatality for the whole 10-year period. Those 19 councils represent about 35,000 people. The councils in South Australia are Kimba, Wudinna and Maralinga Tjarutja; in Western Australia, East Fremantle—which I'm reliably informed is probably the smallest council in Australia—Wyalkatchem, Koorda, Wiluna and Unincorporated Other Territories; in the Northern Territory, Wagait council is the only one with no fatalities; and in Queensland, Doomadgee, Mornington, Kowanyama, Aurukun, Mapoon, Torres, Torres Strait Island, Hope Valley, Wujal Wujal, Richmond and Cherbourg. New South Wales, Victoria, Tasmania and the ACT did not have a council area without fatalities in the 10-year recorded period. Not one of these councils that I've mentioned has more than 10,000 people. In fact, most of them are under 5,000 and quite a number have fewer than 2,000 people, so it's alarming to see that over a 10-year period most councils in Australia have fatalities.

When you press on the interactive map, you find that most councils are having fatalities year-in, year-out. In South Australia, that includes Onkaparinga, Mount Barker, West Torrens, Charles Sturt, Adelaide Hills, Salisbury, Playford, Barossa, Murray Bridge, Alexandrina and Goyder. These councils have not seen a single year of zero deaths in their council areas. This is replicated right across every state and capital city in Australia. Again, looking specifically at South Australia, the councils of Port Adelaide, Enfield, Tea Tree Gully, Marion, Light, Coorong, Tatiara, Wattle Range, Clare and Gilbert Valleys, Wakefield and Yorke Peninsula have had only one year in 10 fatality free. No wonder, in the report of the Inquiry into the National Road Safety Strategy 2011-20, the recommendation was made:

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

The co-chair of the inquiry, Associate Professor Jeremy Woolley, commented that local government has 80 per cent of the road, and 50 per cent of casualty crashes occur on these roads. Local government needs to be part of the solution.

I have to put on the record that at times I'm extremely critical of the department, but this is the first step towards this. This is good and useful work that must be continued. If we look at the budget papers, we will see that the expenditure in 2018-19 for blackspot projects is $85 million spread around these particular areas. If we look at the Roads to Recovery, which predominantly goes to construction and maintenance programs at the local level, we'll see another $364.5 million going directly to predominantly local councils. If we look at the road investment component, we will see in 2018-19 there is $3.694 billion of road investment component delivering the majority of the Commonwealth's investment in road infrastructure. It targets nationally significant projects and will improve the efficiency and safety of Australia's road network, so there's a massive investment by the Commonwealth in blackspots, Roads to Recovery and the national network. What we're not seeing is that it's targeted to specific safety recovery measured outcomes. We're not seeing the connectivity and the prescient allocation of funds to deliver both the good roads and the safe outcomes.

During estimates, my comments to Ms Leeming were:

I find it exhilarating that finally we have someone who knows their stuff in this area. On notice, I would like to see how many, in the 2017-18 year, are using the common sense … audit and how many are using the unfortunate probability of death and injury …

We were talking about Black Spot funds. There is the ability to get in front of the curve: it's to do the safety audit, apply the black spot treatment without having to have the awful evidence of death and injury. We do have, and we are starting to get, very proactive bureaucrats in the department who are getting up and defending the way the Commonwealth is acting in this area, which is good. We've finally got a website which will tell us how effective that is.

If you live in a council area where your council hasn't had a death- and injury-free 10 years, you should be asking questions, because you're on those roads, and not all of those councils are all that geographically large. A lot of those inner-city councils are not geographically large. You could be one of these statistics. We see an enormous amount of federal funding going into the Black Spot and Roads to Recovery programs and into making our road networks safer, but we don't see any measurement of it being applied in essential areas to have safe outcomes.

There is an enormous growth in road transport, and we have people saying that electric cars are going to come along and take it all away; we won't need to worry. That is all going to be quite considerably into the future. We know that, if you look at a place like the Northern Territory, they're running at statistics that are almost 50 per cent higher than last year. There have been 50 per cent more deaths than last year. We know that they have only one council area in the entire Northern Territory that has been fatality-free. If you want to know where Wagait council is, it's on the peninsula at Mandorah. It's a very small community and, fortunately, it has had that very good record. But every other piece of the Northern Territory has not been fatality-free, and most areas of South Australia are not fatality-free. Most areas of Melbourne, New South Wales and the ACT are not fatality-free. We're applying federal funds to these areas. We should be applying them as diligently as we can. We should be measuring the outcomes and, where we're having success ahead of the curve, we should be making sure that that's transported all the way around the network to ensure that you can click on this interactive map of Australia, which is available to all citizens, and see what your council area is doing in terms of being fatality-free.

We know the department is starting to get its act together. It has been pressed and pushed at estimates and in other areas, it has had inquiries launched by Minister Chester, and it has had good work done by Deputy Prime Minister McCormack. But we need to press on with this. This will not go away. We continue to lose 1,200 Australians a year and injure many more thousands of people. The cost to the economy is over $30 billion. If we're applying the funds in the correct way, we should be measuring the outcomes to make sure we're getting the right results. And, when we get the right results in a particular area, we need to make sure that they are replicated all around the network all around the country. This is not rocket science or brain surgery; this is simple applied economics 101. If we take $364 million of Roads to Recovery funds, $85 million of Black Spot funds and $3.6 billion of efficiency and safety dollars, invest it in a single year and measure it and report it, we should get the best possible outcome for the taxpayer's dollar. This is a very good start by BITRE. I commend them for it and look forward to significant improvement in this space.