Page 773 - Week 03 - Wednesday, 29 March 2006
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problem by putting in an extra speed camera, even though we are not really doing anything overall to attack the problem. Let us brag about how many extra police we have not put on the road, or how much notice we have not taken about the safety of road cycle lanes. Let us brag about how little we care about cracking down on hoon driving or road rage and why we have not increased police numbers to tackle these problems. Let’s show how reluctant we are to adopt a random drug-driver testing regime in the ACT.”
That is what the government portray—reluctance on all fronts and buck passing onto the community. This government have managed to put all the onus back onto road users without taking any added responsibility themselves for contributing to what has resulted in two and a half times the road death toll for the whole of 2004. In fact, we have all just read reports in the media recently that the ACT has now recorded the highest percentage increase in road deaths of any state or territory. This is also the highest ACT death toll in 15 years.
An additional speed camera, such as the minister introduced recently, will not be enough. It is a good start, but it will not be enough to reduce deaths on our roads. It is a combination of better road safety measures and messages, a stronger police presence on our streets, and improved legislation and enforcement that is desperately needed. The bulk of complaints I receive about speeding comes from residents who are sick of cars speeding along suburban streets. In order to address this problem at least there should be mobile speed cameras located more often in suburban streets, in particular around school zones and aged care facilities, and in those areas known to be hooning hotspots.
What is also desperately needed is a greater police presence on our streets to deter bad behaviour, whether that is on the roads or targeting vandalism and theft in the suburbs, trail bikes and minibikes on pathways, or car burnouts. I suspect, firstly, that there are not enough officers to go out on the beat to respond to complaints such as these, and, secondly, that police do not have the resources to pursue offenders like trail bike riders when they flee.
To highlight this Labor government’s lack of serious commitment to addressing the road safety problem even further, we see that the annual number of random breath tests, RBTs, conducted by ACT Policing dropped, with data showing the number of tests has plummeted to the lowest number in five years. The ACT Policing report revealed that 43,033 random breath tests were conducted in 2004-05, and that is fewer than 40 per cent of those conducted in the 2000-01 financial year when there were 107,959 tests conducted.
The police minister, Mr Hargreaves, argues that the number of tests dropped because RBT was being conducted in a more targeted fashion and therefore they do not need to conduct as many tests. He is right, I grant him that: they are being targeted; they are being deployed in a more targeted fashion. But what these statistics clearly show is that random breath testing has revealed an increase in over-the-limit drivers in comparison to the number of drivers tested. So there is a juxtaposition of performance versus stats. There is clearly an increase in drink-driving in the ACT as more and more people think they can get away with it as there are fewer police on the roads and they do not think they will get caught. There is no significant deterrence factor.
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