Page 1177 - Week 04 - Tuesday, 24 March 2009
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We design our roads for safety. We design our cars for safety. We impose speed limits and blood alcohol limits and require the wearing of seatbelts. We insist that our sons and daughters are road ready before we let them behind the wheel. And then we undo the good work.
When a government installs a speed camera, its political opponents and others, particularly in the media, cry, “Revenue raising.” How about “life saving”? By a bizarre and circular logic, if these cameras catch speeding motorists, they are deemed revenue raisers. Yet to install them where motorists do not speed and endanger themselves and others would surely be counterintuitive.
I do believe that some Canberrans accept a road toll of about 15 people a year as part and parcel of modern life. But 15 of us, we Canberrans, will die every year, and that is the price we pay for our method of transport. That is not good enough. It is not good enough for me and it should not be good enough for any of us. It should not be good enough for anybody in this chamber.
Across the world nations such as Sweden have adopted vision zero—a vision of a world where no-one is killed or permanently incapacitated as the result of a road crash. I do not know that broadening the reach of 40 kilometres per hour speed zones will save lives, but I cannot see why we, as a parliament, would not want to explore it. I cannot see why this chamber, and in particular the Greens, who argue so strenuously for involvement and engagement in policy making, seem tempted, on a matter so important, to jettison carriage of this policy and have no further involvement in its pursuit. It is inexplicable, and I do look forward to the rationale being made clear.
Here is an issue that has been championed and is championed by the Greens, and I applaud them for that, but I do look forward to them actually owning and defending the issue of extending 40 kilometres per hour speed zones. I do certainly want as part of that to continue to champion the cause of reducing our road toll. That is why I am very pleased, following a meeting with the NRMA and Alan Evans last week, to announce that the government and the NRMA have determined to jointly chair a road safety roundtable that will be dedicated to devising real ways to bring about a cultural change among Canberra drivers—a cultural change on the scale of the one that has so radically altered our community attitudes to smoking, a cultural change that means one road death a year in this town is one too many and a death that must be avenged.
I will ask that one of the topics to be considered by that roundtable is the possible expansion of 40 kilometres per hour zones around the city. I would be dismayed to learn today this is not a matter on which the Assembly itself wants a say. As many as one in three road fatalities involve excessive speed and speed is an aggravating factor in many other crashes. What is beyond dispute is that, if every ACT driver and every ACT rider obeyed the speed limit from this day on, our road toll would be reduced dramatically. It is as simple as that. If all of us obeyed the speed limits all the time it is possible that dozens, if not hundreds, of Canberrans now dead would be alive.
It is a very simple equation—speed kills—and every time we exceed the speed limit we enhance the possibility of Canberrans dying. It is beyond dispute that, if every
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