Page 1175 - Week 04 - Tuesday, 24 March 2009

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(d) the hours of operation of this reduced speed limit (part-time vs full-time) for each shopping and community facility type;

(e) the extent of coverage of the reduced speed limit around these facilities (only on the frontage road to a facility vs on all roads in its vicinity); and

(f) any physical measures (speed humps, threshold treatments, signs, linemarking) required to ensure that motorists’ speeds are reduced to the new 40km/h speed limit.

Madam Deputy Speaker, in this city of ours, perhaps the world’s first city designed around the motor vehicle, it amounts almost to a heresy to suggest that the car is anything but an absolute good. This past week serious national debating hours have been devoted to the social harm of alcopops and pornographic websites. We have even pondered whether recreational skiers should be obliged to wear helmets on the slopes.

I wonder what our modern caring state might say if an enthusiastic inventor in 2009 came up with an idea for a tin can or a metal container that could travel upwards of 150 kilometres per hour, on a thin ribbon of roadway, separated from similar vehicles travelling in the opposite direction only by a line painted on the tarmac. I wonder what those who administer our safety standards might say if someone came up with the idea of a two-wheeled version, without even the comfort of an encasing, upon which a driver would perch, entirely unsecured, with the express intention of travelling from A to B in the shortest possible time.

I think these entrepreneurs would have a tough time convincing us that their products ought to be legal. If murder claimed as many victims in Canberra as cars did every year, no government would survive an election. If backyard pool drownings claimed as many lives as our roads, pools would be covered up or concreted over, by law. But the moment a government seriously tries to do something about road safety it is as though a sacred right is being infringed—a sacred right to decide for oneself when fast becomes too fast; a sacred right to answer the mobile phone with one hand and steer with the other; a sacred right to attend a happy hour and then head home behind the wheel; a sacred right to regard a 60 zone as actually and practically a 70 or 80 zone, a 40 zone as actually a 60 zone and a 100 zone as a 120 zone; a sacred right to regard Sydney as only 2½ hours away by road.

We need change, a cultural change. We need, like the Swedish parliament, to have the boldness to aim for a day when deaths on our roads are simply unacceptable. We cannot get there without a cultural change. We have the opportunity to start that change today, with the consent of the Assembly.

At the inquest into the world’s first road traffic death in 1896, the coroner was reported to have said, “This must never happen again.” More than a century later, 1.2 million people are killed on roads every year and 50 million are injured worldwide.

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