Driving Instructor Accreditation

Mr McBRIDE (MacKillop) (14:17): My question is to the Minister for Infrastructure and Transport. Will the government increase the number of driver instructor accreditations that are available in the South-East? With your leave, Mr Speaker, and leave of the house, I will explain.

Leave granted.

Mr McBRIDE: There is currently a moratorium on appointing authorised driving examiners for class C car licences. In the city there are around 295 driving instructors while in the South-East—MacKillop and Mount Gambier—there are only 10. Some people are having to book six months in advance to get a driving lesson.

The Hon. A. KOUTSANTONIS (West Torrens—Minister for Infrastructure and Transport, Minister for Energy and Mining) (14:18): It is a good question. The member for MacKillop is absolutely right: the current system is not working. The reason the current system is not working is because the accreditation model was outsourced to the private sector, which means the people who are doing the training also do the accreditation and the assessment. What the government is doing will be insourcing that accreditation, which means that you won't be reliant on the private supply of private providers in your community.

About 50,000 people a year in South Australia get their driver's licence. The department believes that a cohort of about 50 FTE equivalents throughout South Australia would more than easily manage that demand throughout the year, which would mean that we will be able to schedule more driver testing in the South-East than what is currently occurring. If the legislation passes the upper house, I think what you will see is a better outcome. The outcome that I think will improve for the member for MacKillop is that the government can assign the testing regime on the basis of need and demand.

If you imagine a driver tester working for the department—because we don't have any doing it now, it is all done privately—if we have them doing, say, five to six examinations a day, it would easily more than clear backlogs throughout regional South Australia. Obviously, we can travel to regional communities where a backlog has built up over the past couple of years because of the current operations, but, most importantly, what we are attempting to do, and what the previous government rightly attempted to do, is to fulfil the outcome of the ICAC investigation into the driver training industry.

Let me preface it by saying this: the overwhelming majority of driver trainers and assessors are good and decent people and they are hardworking, and they want to train our children to make sure that they have the very best chance of having the very best skills to drive on our roads. However, there is a minority within this cohort that, unfortunately, in a cost-of-living crisis, are pushing the cost of getting a driver's licence higher and higher.

I have had people come to my office and tell me that they have spent up to $4,000 training their children to get a driver's licence. I have heard firsthand accounts of parents who have told me, as a result of the review that we did, that they were being told to turn up to car parks while their children were being assessed with a bag full of money, in cash, to pay for the assessment, and then seeing their children failed and being told they need a few more lessons to get their drivers licence. That type of behaviour is exactly what the premier associations of the driver training industry want to stamp out, and that is why they are supporting our legislative changes. That is why the RAA is supporting our legislative changes. That is why, as of last night, the shadow minister told me he is supporting our changes. That is why the crossbench is supporting our changes.

What we need to do is make sure we can service those people in regional communities because it has not worked to date. I think regional communities are the ones that are doing it a bit tougher here, because there is less choice of driver trainers and those driver trainers are the same people who do the assessments. There are fewer people doing the driver training, which means, I think, that there is an opportunity there for us to try to decouple the training and the assessment, to get that bit more rigour into the system and, of course, to make sure that the modules that are being used are fit for purpose. I hope that answers the member's question.