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House of Assembly - Fifty-First Parliament, Third Session (51-3)
2009-03-26 Daily Xml
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Grievance Debate

ROAD SAFETY

Mr WILLIAMS (MacKillop) (15:20): Today I want to talk about road safety, particularly about the lack of action taken by the government to a matter that I have raised with the government over a period of months now in regard to road safety in my electorate. The Dukes Highway runs through almost the whole length of my electorate, and it is the main route between Melbourne and Adelaide. It is a very busy road and one of the gateways to South Australia—in fact, probably the major gateway to South Australia from the Eastern States—carrying about 7,000 vehicles per day, approximately half of which are heavy vehicles.

As members would be well aware, serious motor accidents often occur on that road. It seems to be a regular occurrence that, somewhere between Tailem Bend and the border the other side of Bordertown, we read and hear of serious motor accidents. When this occurs, the police and emergency services authorities create detours to redirect the traffic around the accident site so that we do not have that number of vehicles backed up for a significant length of time.

One of the detours that is often used is called Macintosh Way, and it runs between Coonalpyn and Meningie. On 24 September last year, one of my constituents Deanna Lutze, from Coonalpyn, wrote to me complaining about the amount of traffic on Macintosh Way under these circumstances and said that:

...it is too narrow with no shoulders and the speed limit of 110 km/h is too fast when being used as a detour route.

My constituent was saying that, under normal circumstances, with the odd vehicle traversing Macintosh Way, safety was not an issue. However, hundreds of vehicles an hour traverse this relatively minor road and, although it is sealed, it has narrow shoulders or non-existent shoulders, yet it is still rated at 110km/h. She questioned the safety of that.

She said that she was forced off the road twice on 15 September last year, both times by B-doubles on that narrow road. She recalled that on 16 June a similar situation occurred on that road and she pointed out that school buses use the route on which farmers are often moving livestock and slow-moving farm machinery. She made a number of suggestions about what we might do, including that the shoulders of the road be widened and that it be made a temporary 90km/h speed limit zone in times when the road is being used as a detour.

I happen to agree with my constituent that these were very sound recommendations. On 9 October, I wrote to the Hon. Carmel Zollo (then minister for road safety) pointing out the issues that were brought to my attention by my constituent and I asked whether she could take these on board. The minister wrote back to me—I received her correspondence on 22 October—acknowledging that these roads are not of the same standard as the Dukes Highway. She went on to say that the Department for Transport, Energy and Infrastructure was scheduling a meeting in November to discuss such matters.

I wrote back to the minister in light of that correspondence and asked her to keep me abreast of any outcomes from those discussions. The rub is that on 10 March I received a letter from the new Minister for Road Safety, the Hon. Tom Koutsantonis, who acknowledged that a meeting was held on 12 December and again on 13 February to discuss the matters.

Lo and behold, the outcome from the meeting was that the Department for Transport, Energy and Infrastructure agreed to install additional signage along the detour route—and other similar detour routes—to 'reassure motorists that they are travelling in the correct direction'. I contend that this is just not good enough. It is not good enough to put hundreds of vehicles an hour onto minor back roads, and the only action the government will take is to put on a few extra signs to assure motorists that they are still heading towards Adelaide.

This government purports to be doing something about road safety. It is high time that it took some serious action and made sure that detour roads were suitable for the work they are required to do.

Time expired.

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