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

I want to make a contribution about a seminar I attended on 15 November in Bangkok, Thailand, at the invitation of the World Health Organization. The World Health Organization invited a parliamentarian from Australia and a parliamentarian from the United Kingdom but, due to the election in the United Kingdom, Mr Barry Sheerman was unable to attend and they sent the executive director of the Parliamentary Advisory Council for Transport Safety.

Why did the World Health Organization seek to invite a UK and Australian politician to Thailand? Well, I suppose the first awful description is that Thailand has the highest number of road deaths in ASEAN. They're ninth in the world. It is an unenviable statistic. It is the leading cause of death in Thailand amongst the population aged 10 to 29. Sixty people die, 2½ thousand are injured, 500 are seriously injured and 20 are disabled daily. Three out of four deaths involve motorcycles and cars, and four out of five of those killed are males. About 25,000 people a year lose their lives in Thailand in road accidents. Almost 65 or 70 per cent of them are under 30. The cost to their GDP is around six per cent.

The Thai government have taken the momentous step of getting a parliamentary group together. There were approximately 35 politicians at the seminar from across the chamber, from across the parties. They said: 'We can't allow this to continue. We need to do something. We need to ask people who are doing stuff: what works?' We are excellent at retrieval. We have helicopters. We have landing pads on top of hospitals. Those things aren't going to fix the problem in Thailand though. If you get more people to the hospitals, you're really going to have more long-term disabled, more seriously injured and more pressure on the health system. The seminar, at the end of a very long discussion, got to the crux of the matter: you need to design the process—the roads, the vehicles—with the correct principle in mind, which is that human beings are frail and they're not meant to travel at speed and any sudden stop is catastrophic. You need to design for people who will make mistakes because that is what we do as human beings, particularly when we're young and take more risks than when we're a little bit older and more experienced.

We need to get into both infrastructure design and the design of the vehicles they're driving. One of the excellent solutions put forward was that the Honda motorcycle company may have to be encouraged to build smaller-capacity electric vehicles and the like. One of the senators, who had been a former policeman, said: 'I go to a village. I arrest three girls without helmets or licences on a motorcycle. The village comes to the police station and says, "Why are you doing that? There are no school buses. How do they get to school?"' They really need to think carefully about how they do it. They have got a good economy. It is a generously grown economy but they've got this awful tragedy happening to them each and every day. I do pay credit to the leaders in that Thai parliament who have decided to get together.

Basically the questions to Australia were: how does the Parliamentary Friendship Group of Road Safety work? I explained it is bipartisan, it is across the chamber, you generally get people who put aside all politics, are working on a common cause and, if you can get that started, it works. Then they wanted to know how the budget in Australia works. I said we have got a generous budget in road improvements. The problem is we don't always get to spend it quickly enough with the three layers of government. The federal, state and council governments don’t always act quickly enough. We have a Black Spot Program, which is proven to save lives and injuries but we don't get action as quickly as we would like, and you need to focus on that.

But the key issue that came out of this was we need to accept that people are going to take risks and make mistakes, we need to design vehicles for that and we need to design infrastructure for that. These people are on an enormous journey, but they realise that they cannot continue the way they are going with untrammelled economic growth. They have got good road infrastructure; it is just too crowded. There is no separation. They have got lane merging and sometimes reverse lane merging, because motorcycles come towards you the wrong way.

I want to put on the record that I commend the Thai parliament for their great effort.