Road Safety

The Hon. V.A. TARZIA (Hartley) (14:26): My question again is to the Minister for Police. What is the government doing to meet its road safety targets? With your leave, sir, and that of the house, I will explain.

Leave granted.

The Hon. V.A. TARZIA: The government has set a target of zero lives lost on our roads by 2050, yet this is the worst road toll in two decades, while we have a road maintenance backlog of $3 billion.

The Hon. J.K. SZAKACS (Cheltenham—Minister for Police, Emergency Services and Correctional Services) (14:26): Whilst I won't be talking about road maintenance because that is a matter for the Minister for Infrastructure and Transport, I can absolutely say that, notwithstanding the difficulty and the potential enormity of the task of reducing our road toll to zero, we are not a government that is going to give up because of the enormity of the task.

The pursuit of zero road fatalities is one that has been shared through the National Road Safety Action Plan. That is one that as recently as a couple of weeks ago the first-ever national meeting of road safety ministers committed ourselves to. I can say—and I have reflected on this—that I, as minister, and all of us on this side as ministers participate in many different national committees of ministers and different ministerial councils, but I was really emboldened by the commitment of my fellow ministers around the country that we would simply not be shying away from the enormity of the task.

Directly to some of the substance of the question from the member for Hartley, of course the improvements to roads, road conditions, road treatments—everything from intersections to roundabouts to duplication of major stretches of highway—are a priority of the federal government and supported by the state government through commonwealth and state funding.

But on a more microlevel, as I started to touch on in my previous answer to the member for Hartley, we need to change people's decisions, and we need to influence people's decisions. A safer stretch of road is critical, and it must happen, but somebody is still at liberty to make a poor decision in a fraction of a second on that road. No stretch of road that is safer will prevent someone from making the dumb decision not to put a seatbelt on.

We know that this misconception that country deaths are city folk who are travelling to the country is nonsense. It's country people and regional people who are killing themselves on our roads. In a breathtakingly devastating proportion of these cases, it's people not wearing a seatbelt, or it's people who are choosing to drink to excess, consume drugs and drive; it's people who are speeding. Every other minister in this place and I are constantly searching for our ability to legislate away stupid. We are constantly searching for the way that we can make laws that can codify out stupidity in our community, on our roads—but we can't. We can't.

People are still going to be making these bad decisions. That's why we need to make sure that our laws are as strong as they possibly can be to dissuade people from making these dumb decisions and, in the instances that they do make these dumb decisions, to ensure that their liberty and at times their livelihood, through loss of licence and other penalties, are very severely impacted by their decisions. But, at the core of it, it is every conversation, every interaction with a potential driver, making sure that that interaction leads to better decisions and safer decisions on our roads.