Road Safety

Mr BASHAM (Finniss) (15:00): My question is to the Minister for Police, Emergency Services and Correctional Services. Can the minister provide the house with an update on what response the government is taking to address driver behaviour?

The Hon. C.L. WINGARD (Gibson—Minister for Police, Emergency Services and Correctional Services, Minister for Recreation, Sport and Racing) (15:01): I thank the member for Finniss very much for his question and note that he is a big advocate for road safety in his community. He has contacted me quite a number of times about issues in his area, and I look forward to continuing to work with him to make sure that we can keep people as safe as possible on our roads. I know that that is a bipartisan approach. Everyone in this house wants to make sure that people on our roads are being as safe as possible, but it has been frustrating.

Since I spoke about National Road Safety Week in this place a little while ago, we have continued to see people dying on our roads. It is tragic, it is sad and we need to do everything we can to make sure that we reduce the 'road toll', a phrase I don't like to use. I don't think anyone does because a toll is a price that we have to pay, but we know that police say that every fatal crash we have had this year was avoidable. They could have been avoided. People have made bad choices and done the wrong things when they have been either on a motorbike or behind the wheel.

We are delighted that the federal government has seen the importance of this as well and appointed someone to be in charge of road safety at a federal level. We welcome Scott Buchholz, the assistant minister for road safety and freight transport. I look forward to working with him. I was out on the weekend at the State Emergency Service training day. They had a competition, a challenge, to see who were the best operators, with the winner going off to the national championships. I commend the Tea Tree Gully team for winning that.

I speak to emergency service workers all the time when I travel around the state, but the weekend drove it home. When we think about these road traffic accidents and what happens on the road, which we often hear in the morning on the radio or see at night on the TV, spare a thought for the emergency service workers because they are the ones who actually go out there, a lot of the time in the middle of the night. They are the ones who literally have to pick the bodies up off the road and deal with the tragic scenes that you could only imagine unfolding before you.

As we see the number of people dying on our roads rise, I implore everyone to spare a thought for these people—the CFS, the MFS, the SES and SAPOL as well—who have to go out and deal with these things firsthand. It really is quite traumatic. A lot of these people are volunteers, and we thank them very much for the work they do. It is something we must be conscious of.

As a government, we are continuing with our advertising campaigns and our promotional campaigns. They are one element of road safety. In the last 12 months, we have spent 15 per cent more than we spent in the previous 12 months under the Labor government. We are investing very heavily in that and also in roads. Again, I commend the Minister for Transport, who is working very hard with his federal counterparts to invest more than $2 billion into making our roads safer. Road safety standards and concepts will very much be built into those roads as we deliver them going forward.

The police are out there doing everything they can. I can understand their frustrations when it's reported that a man was picked up on the weekend four times over the blood alcohol limit and driving at 140-odd km/h in a 110 km/h zone. I don't think anyone in this place condones that. I don't think any South Australians condone that. When they are putting people's lives at risk, there are no excuses for those actions.

At our end, we are doing everything we can. I know that everyone in this parliament is doing everything they can. Member for Finniss, I know it's something that you are very, very focused on. We will keep making sure that we do what we can to keep people as safe as possible on our roads across all those elements and across all those sectors, and I'm sure that we have a bipartisan approach in delivering that.