Page 122 - Week 01 - Wednesday, 13 February 2019
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video
As most of you will know, the Canberra Liberals are not particularly well known for their social media. So I was distressed to see that the Canberra Liberals caucus has not embraced their new hashtag safercanberra. It appears to me that only Ms Lee, Mr Coe and Ms Lawder are utilising this hashtag. For all of their enthusiasm about flashing lights, I hope that this can be carried over to their new and exciting hashtag.
MR RATTENBURY (Kurrajong—Minister for Climate Change and Sustainability, Minister for Corrections and Justice Health, Minister for Justice, Consumer Affairs and Road Safety and Minister for Mental Health) (11.09): Ms Lee has certainly raised an important issue in this morning’s discussions. I have said many times in this Assembly that people often overlook the importance of road safety. They start to see road deaths and injuries as an inevitable part of the transport system. They forget that everyone who dies or is injured is a person with a life and a family. And, in this context, they become complacent about issues such as speeding or driver distraction, which are serious and dangerous problems.
These issues are amplified when it comes to road safety around schools. School children are a class of vulnerable road user. They are smaller and more fragile, they have less experience negotiating our traffic environment and their behaviour can be more unpredictable. Drivers owe a special duty of care to children in these environments. They are driving a large, fast, heavy machine that can easily kill a child if they hit them. That is why we have 40-kilometre an hour zones at schools, as well as a range of other measures, to improve safety.
We are certainly very supportive of the intention of Ms Lee’s motion. We strongly support improved safety around schools as we are committed to the vision zero concept that there should be no deaths on ACT roads. And that is why we have put into our parliamentary agreement the item that requires the government to develop an individual traffic management plan for every school in the ACT. That is the best way to improve safety at schools. It is an evidence-based approach that assesses the individual needs of schools and determines what will be most cost effective.
There has been a bit of discussion this morning about who took what to the last election, and I do note that, but that was actually the policy we took to the last election. There was the Liberal Party pushing for flashing lights. The Labor Party talked about school crossing supervisors. They are very specific responses when, in fact, what we know is that each school is different; each school has a different road environment.
As Ms Lee touched on in her remarks today, there is a range of factors impacting on each school, and that is why we put forward as our policy the fact that each school needed an individual site assessment and traffic management plan because different things will be needed at different schools in response to different dangers. Simply choosing a blanket solution that every school must have something like flashing lights or crossing supervisors, we believe, is probably a bit of a wasteful approach and does not address the underlying problems.
Just because New South Wales has flashing lights at schools does not mean that this will work in every circumstance in the ACT. We have different school environments
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video