Legislative Council - Fifty-Third Parliament, Second Session (53-2)
2016-11-02 Daily Xml

Contents

Road Safety

The Hon. K.L. VINCENT (15:14): A supplementary, sir, arising from the original answer: given that, from what the minister said, it is a desire to keep people safe that most targets people and their tendency to speed, how is the hairy fairy character arrived at and not an advertising campaign, for example, featuring families or friends affected by speeding?

The Hon. P. MALINAUSKAS (Minister for Police, Minister for Correctional Services, Minister for Emergency Services, Minister for Road Safety) (15:15): I thank the honourable member for her question. When the Motor Accident Commission develop various campaigns, they go through a market research process to determine what message is likely to best be adept at addressing the market that they are targeting for a particular message. I think that we should take confidence as a government and a community that MAC by and large gets that balance right.

If you look at the success of various campaigns over the years, and many of them take time, and some of them have been more successful than others, but by and large I think the Motor Accident Commission has done a pretty good job of getting campaigns right to be able to address the key messages that they have aimed to put out there into the community to make our roads safer.

In respect to this campaign, along with others, rest assured that the level of scrutiny that I place upon them as minister is always to satisfy myself that that research and that work has been undertaken prior to a campaign being developed, and then of course the ads being aired and invested in. I am not an expert in this particular field. What we have to do is have trust in those people who are experts in the field who are developing campaigns that are most likely to be able to have an impact in terms of delivering key messages.