Wednesday, 8 March 2023
Committees
Joint committee
Committees
Joint committee
Establishment
Bev McARTHUR (Western Victoria) (15:10): I move, by leave:
That:
(1) a joint committee be established to inquire into, consider and report to both houses on any proposal, matter or thing concerned with:
(a) road trauma;
(b) safety on roads and related matters;
(2) the committee shall consist of:
(a) four Assembly members nominated by the Leader of the House in the Assembly and the Manager of Opposition Business in the Assembly;
(b) three Council members nominated by the Leader of the Government in the Council and the Leader of the Opposition in the Council;
(3) the members be appointed by lodgement of the names with the Speaker and President no later than 28 March 2023;
(4) a majority of the members appointed pursuant to paragraph (2) will constitute a quorum of the committee;
(5) the committee may conduct all or any part of a meeting or public or private hearing by audio or audiovisual link;
(6) the committee shall operate under the provisions laid out under joint standing order 15;
(7) the foregoing provisions of this resolution, so far as they are inconsistent with the standing and sessional orders or practices of both houses will have effect notwithstanding anything contained in the standing and sessional orders or practices of both houses; and
(8) a message be sent to the Legislative Assembly requesting their agreement.
This very important motion aims to set up a joint committee to inquire into, consider and report to both houses on any proposal, matter or thing concerned with road trauma, safety on roads and related matters. There are a number of more technical details, including the membership – four members from the Assembly and three from the Council – their appointment date, which is 28 March now, and the committee’s operation under standing order 15.
Why is this necessary, you might ask. Well, it is vitally important. It is an issue of considerable concern especially across the whole of rural and regional Victoria but also in many metropolitan areas. It is about the repair costs and the roadwork delays but also the fact that lives depend on better roads. We should take very careful consideration about how we look at road infrastructure. We want to get the best outcome for all the motorists and people that have to use our roads but also the very best and most efficient outcome for our taxpayers. I think everyone in this house will agree – at least those who actually drive in Victoria and do not get around on bikes – that the condition of our roads is one of the most important things.
Members interjecting.
Bev McARTHUR: Well, they have bikes and they need candles and all sorts of things like that. It is one of the most important things we can spend our time debating here and resources on. It affects people every day through time lost to roadworks and delays, in repair cost to vehicles and, tragically, in the consequent accidents, injuries and deaths which occur all too frequently. Road conditions really matter in this. Some of you may have heard or read a 3AW interview in which Victoria Police’s assistant commissioner, road policing command, Glenn Weir made clear that the state of the roads was a repeated, routine factor investigated by his officers in serious and fatal traffic accidents. Of course there are other causes, but the state of the roads, particularly the collapsed roadsides and verges, is one of the biggest dangers, and reducing speed limits and blaming driver behaviour – this government’s favourite tactics – cannot disguise that reality. All of this is despite the fact that the Treasurer Mr Pallas told me in a Public Accounts and Estimates Committee (PAEC) hearing last year that potholes only occur in Liberal Party propaganda.
A member: Unbelievable.
Bev McARTHUR: Unbelievable, you’re right.
Enver Erdogan: He didn’t say that.
Bev McARTHUR: He did say that, Mr Erdogan. You need to tune in to PAEC every now and again.
Enver Erdogan: I’ll be there this year.
Bev McARTHUR: We look forward to seeing you, Minister. We will be giving you a drilling. Look out.
The subject also deserves scrutiny from a taxpayer value-for-money angle when we consider the vast sums spent on our road network. For local councils across Victoria with hundreds of thousands of kilometres to maintain it is often the biggest line item, especially when the government took away the $1 million for rural councils in roads and bridges funding – that was a disaster. At a state level billions is spent on the construction and maintenance of our highways and byways.
We have had inquiries before, including the Economy and Infrastructure Committee’s, chaired by my friend Mr Erdogan, into the increase in Victoria’s road toll. Where has that gone? These are one-off investigations.
Bev McARTHUR: Still being looked at, is it – in the mirror. These are one-off investigations from committees, which understandably have much wider matters to consider. We looked at the ‘Slow down’ signs. Those people thought we should all be driving at 30 kilometres an hour. They all came from the City of Yarra, I might tell you.
Enver Erdogan: My constituents.
Bev McARTHUR: They were your constituents, that Monash group. ‘Where do you live?’ Oh, yes, Collingwood, Preston, whatever. We need a committee with an ongoing watching brief which can remain focused and fundamentally address issues of the magnitude I have described.
I just want to give one example of the government’s lack of responsiveness on this. It is an area which the committee could properly examine. Just yesterday I received a response from the minister to an adjournment debate I raised following assistant commissioner Glenn Weir’s interview on 3AW. I asked a simple question, as I always do: for the minister to provide a breakdown of the percentage of serious and fatal road accidents in Victoria where investigating officers identified road conditions as a contributing factor. Surely this was a simple matter, exactly the sort of statistic which should be collected and should be available. Apparently not. The reply states, and this is from the minister:
I can advise that, while road conditions are assessed by Victoria Police as part of serious and fatal road accident investigations, the overall evaluation of the environment is holistic in nature and does not allow for the requested data reporting.
Well, I ask you. It reminds me of a similar concern put to me on the failure to collect near-miss statistics and those where accidents occurred but no ambulance was required to be called. These near-miss records should be absolutely vital. They are the crucial evidence which would enable us to fix problems before it is too late, yet they have been unaccountably ignored as well.
So in my view there is no doubt about the necessity for this committee on an ongoing basis. The government can hardly support inquiries into duck hunting yet complain that establishing this committee is a waste of resources. This just tells you where the priorities are of this government. They do not want to save lives. They might think they are saving ducks, but we want to save lives on roads and we want to get value for money for our taxpayers.
On the question of the specific brief of the committee, I am pleased to present an establishing motion which gives a wideranging view to members, specifically to consider:
… any proposal, matter or thing concerned with:
(a) road trauma;
(b) safety on roads and related matters …
It is all-encompassing. We are not going to leave anything out. There is a huge amount we can and should consider, some of which I included in notice of motion 6 on your notice paper, a request I put in on this Parliament’s first day of meeting, for the Economy and Infrastructure Committee to investigate a similar topic. These matters include the design and specification of roads, investigating the methods used to build and maintain road pavement and surfacing, and the appropriateness of proper asphalting versus cheaper resealing and respraying jobs. As I find continually, my toaster has got a better guarantee than the roadworks in Victoria.
Anyway, we move on to maintenance. Here is an interesting issue: maintenance. We need to know what the contracts awarded are like, the different competitive tendering and contract awards, contract performance – now there is something; contract performance evaluation, who would think? – clawbacks and the differing performance across different parts of our state in comparison with national and international standards. Let us try and do the job to the best possible standard – that would be a new approach.
I mentioned before that my toaster has got a better guarantee than our roadworks. Then the legal situation: remedies available and some jurisdiction for compensation to be sought by motorists who may suffer financial damage – they continually do on our roads; you do not want to take your Tesla out there, it will be wrecked – and bodily injury. If you can get it charged anywhere.
Bev McARTHUR: I think that is running on candlepower too, Mr Erdogan, but anyway. Are these legal situations appropriate in Victoria? Would a different regime force government to maintain our roads better?
We need to know about accident statistics on police and coronial inquiries, and of course we do need to know the cost-benefit analysis of those old sages the wire rope barriers. They have popped up absolutely everywhere, mostly causing more trouble than they are worth. Of course that wonderful group the Monash Accident Research Centre needs a thorough investigation on its own. As for the roadside verges, they are a wick waiting for a bushfire to happen. All these people want to turn them into wildlife corridors and conservation zones. I know – they just do not understand that we have not been able to train our wildlife to look right, left and right again, because they either get caught up with a car or they get caught up in a wire rope barrier. So why would you want wildlife on the roadsides? It beggars belief.
I have outlined that this committee would be investigating serious matters, both in terms of injury and death on roads and of taxpayer value for the billions spent on the network. As argued, the wide brief gives a huge number of areas worthy of in-depth investigation, for national and international comparison and for the formation of serious recommendations for government action. Look, we are really just trying to help the government. That is our main aim in this show. We just want to help them do things better. It is not easy, but we are trying. We all know there is a problem; we see it and we hear about it on a daily basis. All you people inside the tram tracks, just come on out and we will fill you in. Mr Erdogan has been out with me; he has seen a few potholes in his day.
Bev McARTHUR: Mr Tarlamis has too. It is about time you had another trip, I think.
Although as members we can see the symptoms, it requires the focus of a specific committee, the research of dedicated staff members and the collation of expert testimony in focused inquiries to find real solutions. Facebook posts on potholes are all very well, and there are plenty of them. We now have gardens growing in the middle of roads. My colleague member for Northern Metropolitan Region Mr Mulholland identified the fabulous garden that his constituents have put in the middle of a road; you could not drive on it, so you might as well grow some plants and a lemon tree or something. That would be a bit better than having a pothole that you could wreck your car in.
We need to force this government towards solutions – that is what we are on about here, solutions and outcomes – and to lay the groundwork for future governments to do better. As I said, we are here to help. We always here to help you on the other side of the benches. You often do not take our advice, but look, we are trying. You have really got to treat this issue seriously because it is costing lives and it is costing a huge amount of money for the motorists but also for the many businesses that have to get their product to market. After all, out in the bush we are feeding you people in the city. We even provide the timber for your houses – if there is any left, because you have shut down all the native timber industry. Actually, I do not even know whether you like aluminium. I do not know what you are going to build your houses out of. You will be living in tents here soon, with candles, and you will be riding bikes around these roads where you cannot park because there is a bike path.
Anyway, I would like to think that those on the other side would happily embrace this proposal. Where are they? Those people over there seem to have left. This is a very important committee that used to exist. Somebody did away with it; I presume it was the government because it probably did apply a bit too much scrutiny to what is going on. But I know you care about the people out in the country. I can see it in your faces over there – the two or three of you that are there. And you do need to make sure that you actually represent the people of Victoria, especially those outside your little areas in Melbourne. Make sure that we get this committee up and running. It will do wonderful things, and it will take all the road users off your backs – wouldn’t that be a good idea as well? Anyway, I have moved that we do support the establishment of this committee, and I urge you all enthusiastically to support it.
Michael GALEA (South-Eastern Metropolitan) (15:25): I do rise to speak on the motion put forward by Mrs McArthur today. I would like to say that I do feel it is a little bit unfair for me to be the first speaker after Mrs McArthur, because there is no chance I can follow that act and give anywhere near as engaging a presentation.
Bev McArthur: Keep trying.
Michael GALEA: I will keep trying. Firstly and most importantly, I do want to acknowledge that this is a very serious and very important issue. There are far too many people dying on our roads. There are many, many strategies and other projects underway to address this problem, and I will circle back to some if I do get the time a little bit later, but this is a very serious issue. One death on a road is far too many.
I do recall probably a couple of years ago now: there have obviously been many, many wonderful TAC campaigns, but one that still resonates with me today had – I forget the code it was – a bunch of sport spectators gathered on a pitch, and a bunch of them were asked, ‘What is an acceptable number of deaths on our roads each year?’ Some of them said 50; some of them said 20; some of them said a hundred. Then they brought 50 or 20 or a hundred people onto the pitch and stood them right in front of them. They then asked the question again: what is an acceptable number of deaths on our roads? Zero. It has to be zero.
I do want to pick up on one thing, and there is much of what Mrs McArthur said that I do agree with.
Bev McArthur: I knew you would.
Michael GALEA: We will get on just fine. There is one thing that I would like to take an issue with, though, and that is bicycles. Now, I am not sure about candlelit bicycles or any other sort, and I am not particularly a very good cyclist myself, as my shape will probably confirm, but cyclists are also very important road users in the suburban areas, the city, where some of our colleagues represent delightful places such as the City of Yarra, and also regional and rural areas too. Bicycles and pedestrians are our most vulnerable road users. We have actually seen an increase in the number of people cycling and walking in the past few years through the pandemic and afterwards as well, and it is a very good thing. It is of course the most sustainable form of transport, and we should be encouraging it. Indeed there are a number of things that we are doing as a government to encourage it. But they are our most vulnerable road users, and working towards safer roads is for everyone. As Mrs McArthur says, it is absolutely for drivers, but it is also for the cyclists and the pedestrians as well.
In speaking on this motion today I do have to say that I am not speaking in favour of it, and I am sorry to disappoint you, Mrs McArthur –
Bev McArthur: This is the end of my love affair with you.
Michael GALEA: no-one can throw me off like you can either, Mrs McArthur – fundamentally because this is something that is perfectly appropriate for the Economy and Infrastructure Committee to look at, so my suggestion would be that this is something that could be better looked at by this committee. Now, that is not in any way to take away from the seriousness or the importance of this issue. I would say it is a reflection of the fact that we have a committee in place, an upper house committee there, that is the appropriate forum that covers transport and related areas that this can be looked into by as well.
On the subject of committees, as many in this chamber may know, I do have the privilege of serving on the Public Accounts and Estimates Committee with Mrs McArthur and Mr McGowan, who I see in front of me in the chamber as well. That being said, if I had been told we would be drilling ministers as part of our hearings, I probably would have said no to going onto PAEC in the first place.
Bev McArthur: It’s very good sport.
Michael GALEA: It sounds delightful. I know the intended words were ‘grilling ministers’, and I am sure we will be looking forward to working together on that as well. But committees do play a very important role, and that is what of course the Economy and Infrastructure Committee will be there to do.
So this is not to say that this is an unimportant issue – far from it. It is a very serious issue. I believe this year already we have had 67 people die on our roads. Now, that was as of yesterday. That hopefully has not gone up again, but as of yesterday, 67 people have died on our roads this year. That is 18 more than this time last year, and it is early March.
Bev McArthur: Wire rope barriers were meant to save the lot of them.
Michael GALEA: There are a number of things in place, including things that do save lives – including wire rope barriers I might add as well – but it is also not just fatalities of course. Every year about 6000 people in this state end up with serious, traumatic road-related injuries, ending up in hospital, and that has a devastating impact on their lives and often on their families’ lives as well.
I did refer briefly to Towards Zero before. In 1999 the Swedish Parliament adopted what was at the time a very revolutionary approach, which was of Vision Zero. They basically said that as the manager of the roads system, they saw it as their responsibility to have absolutely no road deaths on their roads. This is something that has now been taken up, as members would be aware, in the state of Victoria as well. We have had the Victorian Road Safety Strategy 2021–2030 and a number of committees of inquiry on this already, and I believe my colleague Mr Erdogan did a lot of work on one such committee of inquiry in the 59th Parliament. There are a number of action plans through this. The first action plan, from 2021 to 2023, has tried to take a holistic approach towards innovation in road safety across the fields of transport, enforcement, health and wellbeing, work health and safety, and community approaches.
I did mention that far too many people have already died on our roads this year. Last year 241 people lost their lives, which was eight more than in 2021, and 44 of those were pedestrians – again, vulnerable road users. Pedestrians are of course particularly at risk. They do not have airbags, they do not have seatbelts – they are fully exposed to traffic.
Bev McArthur: Keep off the roads.
Michael GALEA: It might not always be the case that they should just keep off the roads. There are many cases of where people walking on pavements and on footpaths and crossing the road safely may still be at risk through no fault of their own. Again, just as with driver and passenger deaths, there is no acceptable number of pedestrian deaths either.
There have also been some changes. We have seen some changes in driver behaviour over the past few years with the COVID-19 pandemic. We saw obviously a great reduction for a short period, but there have also been some concerning changes. We have seen increased –
Nicholas McGowan: Deputy President, I draw your attention to standing order 4.03, a lack of quorum. I ask that you consider the quorum as it currently stands.
Quorum formed.
Michael GALEA: Thank you, Mr McGowan. It is nice to have a somewhat enlarged audience for the closing remarks of my speech. I would say to those members who have just arrived that they did miss a very entertaining presentation of emotion by Mrs McArthur. Maybe I should start again! In closing, as I said, I do think this motion should be referred to the Economy and Infrastructure Committee.
Melina BATH (Eastern Victoria) (15:35): I rise on behalf of me and my colleague Gaelle Broad in support of this motion to establish a joint committee on road trauma and safety on our roads. In doing so I would like to thank the Liberals and Nationals Shadow Minister for Roads and Road Safety, the dynamic Danny O’Brien, who does a great deal of work and has traversed the state in support of various members, listening to their concerns about the deplorable state of the roads across regional Victoria. He does good work in that space and also good work on the Public Accounts and Estimates Committee in this space with Mrs McArthur as well.
Before I go into some of the detail around this motion and the need for it, I do want to put on record my very great thanks to all of those first responders who are there when there is – I will call it a crash, not an accident – a crash and there are crumpled cars, crumpled motorbikes and vehicles on the road and people who are in distress or who are not with us anymore. I want to thank those first responders. I would like to thank Victoria Police for the people who have to go out there in the most alarming of states. I would like to thank the SES, who regularly go out on those terrible nights and deal with people who have been in some form of crash or incident on the roads. I would like to thank the ambulance officers, the paramedics, who attend these very distressing events. They do so with the utmost professionalism. I would also like to thank the CFA, who in rural and regional Victoria very regularly are also the first responders dealing with a whole variety of danger. So let me place on record my thanks to them.
I also want to state that our roads are in an atrocious state, and that has to be a consideration when talking about factors that are the instigators of crashes, of disasters and of tragedies on our roads. If I look at the past, the present and the future, I would just like to raise that in 2012, under a Baillieu and Ryan government, the then minister for roads and road safety, the Honourable Terry Mulder, came up with a ministerial road safety council because he recognised a very great need to reduce our road toll. He recognised the importance of this. In one of his speeches on the Road Safety Amendment Bill 2014 he stated that Victoria continues to lead the way in terms of road safety. He said it is an international leader in road safety. He went on to say the likes of, and I quote:
We have taken great strides in reducing deaths from 1000 per year in the 1970s …
I digress. That was of course before we had seatbelts and the disaster that befitted and befell everybody who had those significant accidents without seatbelts. Indeed it was a past joint committee of this place that recommended seatbelts. A past committee of this nature – a joint road safety committee – also recommended blood alcohol limits and the testing of .05 blood alcohol limits to ensure that law enforcement can take dangerous, reckless people off the road, who cannot concentrate while impaired by alcohol. This was a recommendation from one of these committees that we are seeking to establish today. My thanks to him.
Moving on, under Labor we saw in 2018, after a record number of lives were lost, the minister at the time – as well meaning as Minister Pulford was; she was the Minister for Roads, Road Safety and the TAC, and I was in here when she often made comments about this – said:
It’s been a devastating year on Victoria’s roads with every loss of life someone’s mother, father, sister, brother, husband, wife or friend who will not come home tonight.
I am sure many people – most people who live in a town, who live down the street, who live in a community – have been affected by an unnecessary death after a tragic accident. I myself lost my cousin in a road accident death over 20 years ago, and we miss her still. It is a tragedy when we see so many deaths on our roads.
Come to the current day, the current year – fast-forward to 2023. To date 68 lives have been lost on Victorian roads this year. By comparison, we have got a 36 per cent increase in lives lost. Statistics do matter when they are people’s lives. And a significant increase is reflected in the statistics around rural roads. There were 31 fatalities in 2022, yet we have had 44 so far this year alone – a 42 per cent increase in our regional deaths. So not only are we seeing more people die on roads, there is an increasing proportion of fatalities, of lives lost on our country roads.
We on this side and those of us who live in the country know the deplorable state of our regional roads: the multitude of potholes, the multitude of unsafe shoulders, the vegetation that grows right up to the edge of the bitumen, the lack of maintenance and the lack of white central lines. I was heading out from Mirboo North to Boolarra only the other day – there is a new patch of road there on one section of the road. It has been there for a while, and yet there is no centre line. Line marking is another issue that contributes to these things.
Another concern that we see in our statistics is the age group over 70. There has been a huge increase of those people over 70 dying on our roads. And the most overwhelming and staggering representation is those young 21- to 25-year-olds who are dying on our roads – that inexperience. I know when I taught maths eight years ago we did statistics on this, and it was the case then. However, it is not getting any better. The TAC recently said:
If we accept this ‘road toll’ as the price of a rural lifestyle or getting from A to B, another 2,500 people will die in the next 10 years and 50,000 people will be hospitalised with serious and life changing injuries.
Do we accept that, or should we investigate this to the highest degree we can by having a very sensible, broad-ranging joint parliamentary inquiry? I say yes.
There is a fantastic gentleman who is the chair of RoadSafe Gippsland. His name is Andy Milbourne, and he is passionate about safety on our roads. He has provided some comments to me about a whole raft of things. He said that this investigation should include motorcycles and the wearing of safety gear being critical. He also went into unregistered vehicles and bikes, saying that unregistered vehicles and bikes are still covered by TAC if they have an accident. His thoughts were: do we need to look at this? Because it is actually costing Victorians thousands. People who are unregistered are still covered. Should our committee not investigate these sorts of things? TAC claims from dirt bike riders in the bush are also costing. Well, we need to protect people, but people also need to be responsible for themselves. The over-70s age group – it is having a serious impact on people’s lives.
I am sure he would give his eyeteeth to come down and speak to a committee from his personal, very hands-on-the-ground experience. Multipurpose taxi programs – he is concerned that some of those older people in our community are driving when they should not be driving, and providing a taxi service, particularly in rural towns where we live, could well have a very good impact on those incidents and crashes. Caravans and trailers, young people – he makes a number of comments around those subjects. We know how important the L2P program is to upskill those young people to be able to have experience. Not all children or young people have parents or grandparents who are able to help them drive.
This is a very important committee, and I recommend highly that the crossbench get behind this committee to propose it. The standing committees that we have will be burdened, time poor and money poor, and I think this is a perfect way to deal with such an important topic.
Sonja TERPSTRA (North-Eastern Metropolitan) (15:45): I rise to make a contribution on this motion about the establishment of a parliamentary road safety committee, and it is a little bit of a segue also to what I was talking about earlier when I made a contribution on the Road Safety Amendment (Medicinal Cannabis) Bill 2023. There is a bit of a theme in here today about road safety and road users, and I will return to some of the points that I made in my earlier contribution as someone who rides a motorcycle. I know there was a lot of discussion around roads and road safety in Ms Bath’s contribution, but it is not just about roads.
I am rising to make a contribution in opposition to this motion, and there are lots of reasons but primarily our government, the Andrews Labor government, take road safety extremely seriously and we want to do all we can to reduce the number of deaths and serious injuries on our roads. Of course there is always more to be done; we know that. This is not something that you can ever consider to be completed. It is always something that we need to continue to work on, but we will take a collective approach across our government agencies, industry partners and the Victorian community to do everything we can to keep everybody safe. That is because we all really have a shared responsibility to make sure that we take care on the roads, not only for our own safety but for the safety of others.
What we have seen in a post-pandemic environment is that road behaviours have changed. We have seen evidence of increased risk-taking behaviour, including high-range speeding, which is disappointing. Just this morning on the way here to Parliament I saw somebody getting caught in a lane that they should not have been in. Of course people get frustrated. They either speed or they go in the bus lane when they should not be there. I understand that is frustrating. It seems that perhaps it is much safer to be a little bit patient and arrive safely as opposed to not getting there at all. It seems to be something that some of us might have forgotten. But it is those sorts of behaviours as well that cause road accidents. Like I said, it is not just about roads and the actual physical infrastructure, it is also about driver behaviour.
We have also seen walking and cycling trips increase dramatically. There are a lot more people who are opting to take active transport measures as perhaps an addition to the ways they would ordinarily get to work, which is a good thing – get out of your car and maybe walk and cycle, which is great, and that way you can get your exercise at the same time. Of course not everyone can do that. Especially if you are out in western Victoria, you might have a long way to walk or a long way to cycle, so that may not be possible. And of course it is also very dependent on where you work. But we know that if you look around some roads, either in the city or further out in the suburbs, what you see popping up with increasing frequency are bicycle lanes and the like and those sorts of things. That is a good thing, but while we try and accommodate different types of road users it does add some complexity to the road network and the road system.
You have really got to pay attention to all the different road users. Again, on my journey into work, I think it was yesterday morning, at the intersection of Macarthur Street and Victoria Parade I was actually marvelling in my own head about the number of intersections and different road users that I needed to take account of when I was simply turning left. There was a cycle lane on my left, so I was waiting to turn left. There was a big stream of cyclists coming up, so I could not turn left. I have got to give way to those people because obviously I do not want to hit a cyclist on a motorbike – that would be terrible. But also there were cyclists who were doing a bit of a hook-turny thing where they were turning. It is a good thing. It does not mean we should not do it, but the complexity of some of our road networks and road systems has changed from what we have been used to.
That means that as a road user I have got to pay extra attention to that. That is not a bad thing. That just means I have got to be extra cautious. You can never be too cautious. You have got to pay attention. Drivers can be distracted. If you are a road user and you are on a pushbike, like a bicycle, or a motorcycle, you really do not get second chances. I know everyone is talking about road users and thinking about people in their cars, but I also want to remind everyone in this chamber that there are cyclists and motorcyclists as well, and they are vulnerable, much more vulnerable than perhaps someone who is in a car. As I said, people who are pedestrians or cyclists or motorcyclists are seen as vulnerable road users.
We do not support the motion put forward by a member for Western Victoria Region, although I thank Mrs McArthur for bringing it and for her advocacy. I know you are a strong advocate for people in your region, and I know they appreciate your work, so good on you. I always give credit where credit is due for bringing something to the house, but sorry, we cannot help you today. Nevertheless, I do thank you for bringing this motion.
As I said, these are important matters of road safety, but our position is that this matter should be referred to the Legislative Council’s Economy and Infrastructure Committee for inquiry. We think that is an appropriate committee to inquire into this matter, and the good thing is it will allow road users and different groups to make submissions, appear and give evidence, and it will allow committee members also to ask questions of those road users and to gain greater insights into their lived experience as road users and what their insights are as well. I myself was just given a little bit of an insight into what it is like being a motorcyclist on a road and having to accommodate pedestrians and other vulnerable road users like cyclists as well. It is complex, but again, as I said earlier, this government does take road safety extremely seriously, and we want to do all we can to reduce the number of deaths and serious injuries on our roads.
In talking about road users – and I am sure other people have seen as well – the amount of different kinds of vehicles that are on our roads at the moment, things like e-scooters, I am amazed by. Seeing the number of perhaps older blokes on e-scooters I kind of think, ‘Maybe they shouldn’t be riding an e-scooter. I don’t know. Maybe they’re for younger people.’
A member interjected.
Sonja TERPSTRA: Yes. Those things go pretty fast, those e-scooters, and I am not sure whether you know what I am talking about, but they are the two-wheel things. They are not like a motorcycle. These e-scooters are the charging the battery kind of business. They fly. I do not know whether these things are actually meant to be on the road, but I have seen people riding skateboards that are also electric or battery-operated things. The number of different options that are around right now are ever growing and ever present, and as I said earlier, it really does add a whole different complexity to roads and our road systems. It is becoming more and more challenging, and that is why we need to make sure that we can have a proper inquiry into these things and hear from all these different road user groups. It would be fantastic to hear more from them.
There was a parliamentary inquiry into the increased road toll back in 2021. The government tabled its response to the recommendations made by the parliamentary inquiry back then. Again I will reiterate our thanks to the Economy and Infrastructure Committee for its report. I think perhaps Mr Erdogan might have been the committee chair at that time –
Sonja TERPSTRA: Committee chair, yes. So congratulations on your stewardship of that inquiry. As I said, we accepted the majority of the recommendations that came from the committee and acknowledge that many of these have been addressed in the state’s road safety strategy. I guess the important point to note is that, as I said, the Economy and Infrastructure Committee is well versed and well placed to deal with these matters, and as I said, we have accepted the recommendations. I will just go into a bit more detail: of the 36 recommendations put forward to the government, 10 were supported in full, 13 were supported in principle and five were supported in part. Three were not supported and five were marked as ‘under review’. The key themes that emerged under that review and the recommendations made by the committee included transparency in road safety targets and how they would be measured, making road safety a part of all transport projects, informing the public about the standard of all roads and improving how data is collected and shared with experts.
I guess the theme of my contribution today has been that this is complex. There are no easy answers with any of this. There is no silver bullet to solve our current road safety problems. Our ability to achieve the strategies and targets requires a full multifaceted approach to eliminating risk from the road network as well as better managing the risks that cannot yet be eliminated. As I said earlier, it is a work in progress. We have got to keep working on this. Mrs McArthur, I agree with your point: really, road safety is a shared responsibility. We have all got a part to play in making sure that we try and behave as safely as possible on our roads, do not speed, and obviously obey the road rules and the like. All Victorians need to play their part. But as I said earlier, just in closing my remarks, we do not support this motion. As I said, we think it is more appropriate for the Legislative Council Economy and Infrastructure Committee to deal with this as a matter of inquiry.
Moira DEEMING (Western Metropolitan) (15:56): I rise to speak in support of this wonderful, wonderful motion by my colleague Mrs McArthur. I would just like to read out part of the motion first of all, because there was some confusion on the other side about what it would and would not cover. It says here very clearly that it would:
… consider and report to both houses on any proposal, matter or thing concerned with:
(a) road trauma;
(b) safety on roads and related matters …
Clearly that covers bicycles. Sadly it is with regret that I must inform Mr Galea that the TAC have now updated their fatality statistics. It is now 68 lives that have been lost on Victorian roads in the first 66 days of this year, because this very morning at 6:40 am a cyclist was killed in Mount Waverley. Those of us that live in the west still have in mind the death of a cyclist just one month ago in Footscray. He was riding his bike on a bicycle path when a truck collided with him. This was at a notorious intersection where there is a green light for cyclists at the same time as a green light for trucks turning left. The truck driver might have seen him, but his view was blocked by a large pillar that was erected as part of the West Gate distributor tunnel construction. His tragic death was avoidable, if only more attention had been paid to the practices around signage and signalling and the community – which had cried out repeatedly for this – had been listened to.
The truth is that Victoria’s road management and infrastructure is in crisis. In my own region of Western Metropolitan Region residents who faithfully pay their taxes year in and year out find that their money is not being reinvested in their own communities. For example, the local government municipality of Melton has received zero dollars in major road funding from the state. Every council in my region has a long list of roads that by virtue of the traffic volume on them should be a state government responsibility, yet the government refuses to acknowledge any statistics or any responsibility for these roads, and our residents are therefore left in limbo.
In the Western Metro Region our roads are simply falling apart. The potholes are big enough to swallow small cars, the shoulders are worn away and cause cars to swerve dangerously and the traffic is completely out of control, with residents spending up to 2½ hours each way to and from work. When the residents cry out for an explanation, they find that the government refuses to take responsibility for roads that should be theirs or they blame VicRoads or they blame councils – or as we have heard repeatedly today, they blame drivers and road users and bike path users themselves. This is just simply not good enough. The reason why it needs to be a joint committee is because this government clearly needs oversight in terms of interpreting the tiny little 10 recommendations that they did accept from the last round. Clearly it is a matter of interpretation, and they need some extra supervision. So I commend this wonderful motion from Bev, and that is it.
Tom McINTOSH (Eastern Victoria) (15:59): I would like to thank Mrs McArthur for bringing this to the house’s attention. I also, coming from regional Victoria, have spent a lot of my life thinking about roads, road tolls and perhaps the risks that, particularly regionally and rurally, we all take every time we get in a car just because of the speeds that we are moving at. It is not to say that there are not accidents and challenges and safety issues that face the city, but on roads where we are doing 100 kilometres, I think we will probably look back at some time in the future and think we were all hopping in little metal boxes – and 30, 40, 50 years ago they did not have seatbelts – and hurtling along at 100 kilometres an hour with a white line between us and a lot of circumstances. I think anyone that comes into this place is looking for how we can improve public safety and is considering the risks that all of us in the community face on a daily basis. Obviously roads is a big one of those.
I was reflecting on some comments Mr Berger made in a contribution earlier about workers on the roads. There are a huge number of workers on the roads, whether that be those that are working in heavy transport in trucks and the challenges they face with the, at times, long hours and long kilometres they have to do; whether it is our emergency services workers and their work in emergency conditions and the conditions they have got to navigate, like other road users, the weather conditions and the speed that they have to travel at to perform their job to help members of the community in times of emergency; or whether it is our delivery drivers. I talked about the challenges faced on metro roads before. We have got a lot of people on pushbikes or on scooters making small deliveries on a regular basis around our metro areas. And then of course we have working Victorians every day trying to get to and from their homes and work, and that travel, if it is not part of their actual daily work, is absolutely a fundamental part of their day.
As I say again, I am glad this has been raised. Being on the Economy and Infrastructure Committee myself, I would welcome seeing it there for discussion and debate, because I am passionate about the issues, the risks and the challenges that we face.
I think also culture is something that really needs to be looked at when we have this discussion. I mentioned before things like seatbelts. Over time we have had pushback from industry. We have had pushback from parts of the population over this journey to safer transport and safer car usage over why various governments of various persuasions over many, many decades have introduced new safety elements. It is disappointing to look back and to see – I do not know exactly when it was but I recall reading – in the past in America how heavily certain sectors of industry pushed back on the introduction of seatbelts. Culturally, we know that when breath testing came in, again, growing up in the country, we saw at times some pretty slow adaptations to driving with a safe level of alcohol in the blood or with no alcohol in the blood system. And then also there is risky driving behaviour. I know for me, growing up, as we were turning 18, 19 and 20, whether or not there may have been alcohol or drugs in various people’s systems or whether we were just simply driving at speeds that were not safe on roads that definitely were not safe to be going above the speed limit on, it was part of a cultural issue.
So much of the work we do and why it is well worth looking at the issues raised is about the culture of people using our roads. Absolutely, we have got to look from a government perspective at everything we can do to make the roads safer, whether that be guards, various rails, various kinds of fencing, signage or speed limits – all those sorts of things. But I think culture plays a big part in it too, and that is where we need leaders in local communities to make sure that the advancements and progress we are making around the culture of the way we view and use vehicles are understood by anyone who is getting into a car. As I said before, with a lot of my mates, there were a number of them who were very, very lucky to get out of cars that ended up in paddocks upside-down off the sides of roads. I have got mates who were not so lucky – mates who we had to bury at age 18. That is the tragic outcome of that culture and clearly not understanding the danger.
As I said at the start, these metal boxes that we are getting inside and hurtling along at a hundred kilometres an hour in have in the last 120 years revolutionised the way we live. It is fantastic that we can now travel from one end of this state to the other in a day, that we can get from home down to the shops quickly and easily. With that incredible change to the way we live, the way our society operates, the way we can support each other, the way we can access education, the way we can access food and the way we can access everything in our lives, we probably at times do not give enough thought to or appreciate enough just how far technology has come along in that time. But with all of those upsides and rewards, it is also about acknowledging the risks that are posed.
It is great to see that we are tracking in the right direction, that we have a goal of zero deaths by 2050, and we are staggering that as we head along towards 2030. As a government we are putting in place some of the things I outlined before – many, many things, whether they are infrastructure changes or educational changes or licensing changes to help drive down that death rate.
I think the goal of zero deaths is an absolutely commendable goal and one that we should all be striving for, but we also should not forget the amount of injuries that occur. It does not matter whether we are talking about deaths on roads or deaths in workplaces or anything along these lines, we should also remember the people that are injured, the amputees. A lot of people walk silently in our communities with a form of trauma or injury that will impinge on them every day of their lives, and we do not see that, we do not hear a lot of that. It could be as simple as somebody suffering whiplash or some other sort of injury that is going to impede them or impede their ability to fully participate in the community.
That is why I think the TAC is just so valuable for what it does to help get people back up on their feet and get people participating in our society, participating in our economy, participating in their families and with their friends because, not only from an economic perspective but from the emotional and mental health perspective, for every individual who unfortunately has had an incident on our roads, to get them back up and about and moving is crucial. That is why again I would just like to say that the TAC and the insurance that that brings is absolutely just something that I am so proud of. I always fully support any model where we can be supporting or insuring people in our community for situations that arise that they just have no control over. That is something that I think over decades we have done a better and better job of supporting and providing and delivering.
I think we have other challenges that have arisen, not just in cars but I think also on the pavement. Mobile phones are a big challenge. A bit of mindfulness being practised by pedestrians and drivers is very, very important, and that sort of comes back to that culture side of things I was talking about before – ensuring that we are focused on what we are doing at the time just to prevent these sometimes incredibly needless injuries or in worse cases deaths. Thank you to Mrs McArthur. I do hope we see this in the Economy and Infrastructure Committee. Thank you, Acting President Berger, for letting me speak on this.
Sheena WATT (Northern Metropolitan) (16:09): Hello, Acting President Berger. Can I take a moment to acknowledge this is the first contribution that I have been able to make since your appointment to the acting presidency role, and I offer you my hearty congratulations.
I of course rise to speak on the trauma and road safety motion, and in doing so I would like to firstly pass on my deep sorrow and regret to anyone who has lost a loved one to a road accident and to all those affected. My heart truly does go out to you. No death on a Victorian road is acceptable. I look forward to the day when we can achieve zero deaths on our roads.
There is always work to be done on the road toward zero deaths, and I am proud to be a member of the Andrews Labor government, who take road safety extremely seriously. This is a government who want to do all we can to reduce the number of deaths, and we have got a strong track record of reform and working towards achieving safer roads, safer speeds, safer vehicles and safer road users. We are investing to upgrade, maintain and improve roads in rural, regional and metropolitan areas but also upgrading infrastructure for pedestrians and bicyclists to ensure that all those who interact with our roads are able to do so in as safe conditions as possible.
We have also been encouraging the use of vehicle safety technology and enforcing and targeting high-risk behaviours. We have launched education campaigns and invested in road user behaviour research as mitigation measures to save lives and minimise loss. For us to achieve the goal of zero deaths and serious injuries, we must all work together, not only at a government level. The whole community must get behind it, because we must all believe that zero is possible. All Victorians should be safe and feel safe on and around our roads.
We are delivering road safety initiatives that have an impact in the short term while preparing us for the future. We are working with local communities across the state to increase our understanding of hooning so we can take steps to further reduce this dangerous activity. We have recently released a motorcycle crash card for helmets. This card provides emergency services with key personal information to speed up medical care after a crash, potentially saving lives.
Pedestrians are completely exposed to the full force of a crash, making them some of the most vulnerable road users. Our $23 million safe pedestrian program will improve pedestrian safety across the state by treating precincts, routes and sites where pedestrian crashes have been identified or where there is a high risk of pedestrian crashes.
Our Unsafe2safe program is supporting up to 1000 young regional Victorians to purchase a newer, safer vehicle with a $5000 subsidy, contributing to cutting road trauma among one of our most at-risk groups. Our road safety program in partnership with the Commonwealth government supports the rollout of life-saving road safety treatments on rural and regional roads and promotes greater protection for vulnerable road users like cyclists and pedestrians in our urban areas. The Andrews Labor government’s $1.4 billion safer roads program has delivered more than 3400 kilometres of life-saving flexible safety barriers on more than 1100 kilometres of high-risk roads across our state. We are investing $19.5 million to improve road safety at more than 55 schools, shopping strips and intersections across the state, saving lives and supporting Victorian jobs.
In addition, Victoria has a comprehensive camera program that aims to reduce deaths and serious injuries at high-risk locations such as intersections and our freeways. Road safety cameras are an effective and proven deterrent to speeding drivers and are an effective countermeasure available to government to reduce road casualties. In 2023 new cameras that can detect illegal mobile phone use and non-seatbelt wearing will be turned on, and new rules governing the use of mobile and other portable devices will be introduced. In fact I do recall speaking on that particular bill at its introduction during the last term.
Following the increase in lives lost at the start of 2023, the government’s road safety partners, led by Road Safety Victoria, met to identify options and opportunities to support road safety in the short term. A partnership approach to the issue is in development and will include the deployment of variable message signs to support Victoria Police operations and deliver on-road safety messaging. Communications plan to support messaging delivery to target groups including regional and rural road users and options for enhanced communication to culturally and linguistically diverse communities across our state.
As a state we are determined to continue to reduce the number of lives lost on Victorian roads every year. Managing speed limits is key to bringing down the number of lives lost on our roads. We know most deaths and serious injuries occur on high-speed roads in regional areas. We also know intersections continue to be key locations for major trauma to drivers and unprotected and vulnerable road users. Excess speed contributes to least 30 per cent of fatalities and a quarter of serious injuries.
We also know that there is a 15 per cent decrease in crashes when speed is reduced by 5 kilometres an hour. We want safe movement of people and goods and balanced and place-based needs for those in our community. We need to ensure our road limits are appropriate to the infrastructure and function of the road. We choose to provide the safest road system we can for all across our state.
Our government is committed to supporting active transport as a means to provide real transport options, help achieve emissions reduction targets in our state, improve population health and relieve pressure from the road network by reducing some short car trips. Right next to my electorate office in Brunswick we are building a dedicated bike lane to the city as part of the removal of eight dangerous and congested level crossings in the Brunswick community.
Members interjecting.
Sheena WATT: It is indeed inside the tram tracks. That is right; proudly so. Not only does elevated rail help protect pedestrian safety, it also creates wonderful open space in which active transport infrastructure can be built. The dedicated bike path to the city will mean people from my Merri-bek community will have another option to get to the city, get cars off the road and encourage active transport. To achieve this mode shift – and we do understand that that does require work – people need to feel and be safe when they are walking or cycling. Pedestrians, cyclists and motorcyclists are among our most vulnerable road users, and I will just add to that scooter users. With developments in vehicle safety technology making significant inroads into reducing road trauma for vehicle occupants, the proportion of other road users like pedestrians, cyclists, motorcyclists and other micromobility users in our road trauma statistics is going to grow.
As well, active transport plays an important role in contributing to the sustainability of our environment. Neighbourhoods that are designed for cycling and walking can reduce car use and therefore reduce emissions and traffic noise, increase air quality and support the longer term decarbonisation of the transport network. It is imperative that we reduce the risk that pedestrians and cyclists experience on a daily basis. We have introduced significant improvements to cyclist safety in recent years, including the new minimum passing distance for cyclists. Rules have been changed to allow children 12 years and under to cycle on footpaths and those 13 years and over who accompany them to also cycle on footpaths. What a great initiative that is; it is very much seen actively in my community.
This is on top of hundreds of kilometres of new walking and cycling infrastructure across the state to improve safety and give Victorians more choice about how they travel. Road safety, especially the safety of our schoolchildren, is paramount. This is why the Victorian government remains committed to the school crossing supervisor program – what a marvellous program that is – with $25.9 million allocated in the current state budget. Can I just give a shout-out to all the folks that do that very, very important work. This includes an additional $5.1 million to the $20.8 million previously allocated in the 2021–22 state budget. This additional funding supports the government’s commitment to deliver this road safety program for communities across our state.
As I said, I do like the school crossing supervisor program. It has been in place for quite some time. It ensures schoolchildren are provided with a safe journey to and from school. This is in addition to other measures to keep schoolchildren safe, such as school speed zones, school education programs and infrastructure improvements. There is so much more to be done, and we will continue to take a collective approach across government agencies and across the community to keep everybody safe on our roads.
Georgie CROZIER (Southern Metropolitan) (16:19): I am pleased to speak to the motion that Mrs McArthur has moved, a very important motion about establishing a joint committee to look into road trauma, safety on our roads and other related matters. The reason I want to briefly speak to this motion – and I will not go through the details because Mrs McArthur has done that – is to make a few points about why it is important that this joint committee be established. A road safety joint committee had been very much part of this Parliament for many, many decades and did exceptional work over those years. They brought in things like safety belts, and of course Victoria led the world in that – to have safety belt requirements – and other areas around roadside blood alcohol testing and other safety measures. So that committee was an exceptional committee, and there have been other joint committees – I remember when I first came into the Parliament there were a number of joint committees. I had the privilege to be chair of the Family and Community Development Committee. With the work we did there we also led the way.
So these joint committees have got a very strong and proud history, and I think in light of what is happening on our roads in country areas particularly, as Mrs McArthur knows, in the western parts of Victoria, an area I know exceptionally well too, having grown up in that part of the world – when I travel down there I am horrified about the state of the roads. I think it was Acting President Berger who made some very good points in the previous debate this morning about the number of road deaths in Victoria – 67. Correct me if I am wrong; 67 this year already.
Harriet Shing: 67 fatalities.
Georgie CROZIER: Sixty-seven fatalities, yes – a terrible statistic already, and we need to do all that we can to have road safety measures in place. Obviously there are many, many issues that have been canvassed by Mrs McArthur.
I would also say that in that debate this morning the issue around medicinal cannabis and the issues around exactly what the Acting President was talking about – road safety measures, having an ability to do this – could have been also assessed by a joint parliamentary committee. I made the point to Mr Ettershank after the conclusion of the debate that the joint committee that we are actually debating this afternoon could look at that issue at through that process. The work that these joint committees have done in the past, as I said, has been very notable.
The final point I would like to make is that the government is keen to establish a joint committee into duck hunting, which is all very good, but surely safety on our roads, the state of our roads – there is an enormous cost to the community in so many ways. It is not just the loss of life and the devastating impacts that has on individuals and families that are associated with road trauma but also those broader communities, but it has an impact, the state of our roads, on our economy, on the ability to transfer produce across the state, interstate or to get to port, on the ability for our tourism industry to not have reputational damage because of the state of the roads. There are so many aspects around why it is important, and I just find it absolutely extraordinary that the government is willing to establish a joint committee into duck hunting yet it is not willing to establish a joint committee into such an important issue as road safety. I would urge all members to support Mrs McArthur’s motion. It is an excellent motion, and we need to get this committee established so we can look into some very, very significant issues.
Bev McARTHUR (Western Victoria) (16:23): I thank everybody for participating – Mr Galea, Mr McIntosh, Ms Terpstra, Ms Watt, Ms Crozier, Ms Bath and Mrs Deeming. You all made excellent contributions. It is a shame the government does not want to support this joint committee, but they do have form in this, you know, because this Road Safety Committee was introduced in 1967 by the great Henry Bolte, but it was cut by John Cain subsequently and then reintroduced again in 1992 by Mr Kennett, that fine Premier, but it was cut by that other man, Mr Andrews. So you have got form in not wanting to ensure that we continually look at roads. It is an interesting thing that we are looking at ducks but not roads.
Georgie Crozier: It shows their priorities.
Bev McARTHUR: The priorities, absolutely. Absolutely the priorities are out the door. But anyway, the most important thing, it seemed to me, that Ms Watt raised was the issue of how we are doing everything for cyclists. Now, look, I can tell you it is a bit of a long trip out in the bush if you are on your bike. Most of us have got tens of kilometres to travel. I mean, I would have to travel 20 kilometres to go and buy the milk. You really cannot do it on your bike, I have got to tell you.
Ms Terpstra raised of course the very important issue of motorcyclists. They live in fear and trepidation of their lives now with all these wire rope barriers. They are called cut and splicing operators because you just do not want to come into contact with them or that will be the last day you are on your bike.
As for the safety aspect raised about school children and crossings, I can tell you that school buses are really under threat out in country Victoria on some of our roads. They are so dangerous that our schoolchildren in buses – their lives put at risk.
We have heard reference to the road toll inquiry, which I was on with Mr Erdogan. I had to produce a minority report because the solution that the inquiry came up with was just to lower the speed limit. Let me tell you: out there, outside the tram tracks, out in the bush, if you lower the speed limit you just make life intolerable for so many people who have got to get on the road to go from A to B –
David Davis: Businesses.
Bev McARTHUR: Businesses, transport – whatever. I was on a road the other day that has had the speed limit lowered. It is now down to 40, I think. It has been lowered for four years. For the entire time I have been in this Parliament the speed limit has been lowered, but the road has never been fixed. You lower the speed limit on roads so that you then can avoid actually repairing the road properly. This is why you need a constant brief looking at how you do roadworks, and so on, better. Yes, people have to behave better on the roads but, as the police have said, so many accidents are being caused by poor roads. I am hoping that our friends from the crossbench, who do not seem to be here, will support this motion. Clearly the government has got greater priorities – ducks and things – but we think this is vitally important. Yes, we could have an inquiry go to the Economy and Infrastructure Committee, but we think it should be ongoing, a committee like this. So I urge everyone – they are not here, but they might come in – to support the motion that we have a permanent road safety committee operating in this Parliament.
Council divided on motion:
Ayes (17): Matthew Bach, Melina Bath, Jeff Bourman, Gaelle Broad, Georgie Crozier, David Davis, Moira Deeming, Renee Heath, Ann-Marie Hermans, David Limbrick, Wendy Lovell, Trung Luu, Bev McArthur, Joe McCracken, Nicholas McGowan, Evan Mulholland, Rikkie-Lee Tyrrell
Noes (22): Ryan Batchelor, John Berger, Lizzie Blandthorn, Katherine Copsey, Enver Erdogan, Jacinta Ermacora, David Ettershank, Michael Galea, Shaun Leane, Sarah Mansfield, Tom McIntosh, Rachel Payne, Aiv Puglielli, Georgie Purcell, Samantha Ratnam, Harriet Shing, Ingrid Stitt, Jaclyn Symes, Lee Tarlamis, Sonja Terpstra, Gayle Tierney, Sheena Watt
Motion negatived.