2016-11-23
MR BARBER (Northern Metropolitan) — This is a bill that makes a large number of small changes to various accident compensation schemes. They are small changes from the point of view of the legislative process, but of course if you have been a victim of an accident, some of these changes could be very important to you.
It is for that reason we like to give these changes, and others that have been made to the same principal acts, quite a bit of scrutiny. It is good to see that the government has taken on board some of the issues that were raised in the Law Institute of Victoria submission and has made some changes to the legislation along the way, but what I would say in a general sense is that we have a road toll here in Victoria that is going up when it ought to be going down. Let me just read that into the record: the lives lost in 2011 were 256; 2012, 252; 2013, 209; 2014, 222; 2015, 227; and in the year so far — of which there is still a month or so left — 260. That road toll is going in absolutely the wrong direction.
One figure is that there were about 520 deaths in the Vietnam War, which was considered to be a national tragedy, but when the road toll goes up and really encompasses the same number of deaths over a two-year period — think of it as the two years that this government has been in power, if you like — that seems to be being met with a bit of a shrug of the shoulders. That is seen as, 'Well, life in a big city; we just have to accept that'. This government and the government before it have in fact, in my opinion, gone soft on speed. There is not a single one of these motor vehicle accidents that would not have been less deadly, less injurious, if it had occurred at a lower speed. In fact many of the accidents could have been avoided completely.
What we have seen over the last few years, and I believe it has been contributing to this rising road toll, are a series of decisions and actions by various governments that have just sent out a general message to the community that maybe speed is not such a big deal after all. We know most of the bigger measures that have been taken to reduce the road toll over the years; well, they have all been achieved. We got seatbelts into all vehicles many years ago, we got a major focus on drunk driving, we have got a major enforcement effort in relation to speed and we have got a lot of the easier wins. We have done a lot of work to improve the engineering of both roads and motor vehicles, so further gains are going to get harder and harder.
But there is a mixed message being sent in relation to speed. First, it was the Liberals when they entered government, who said that they were going to disclose the location of all the speed cameras. You even had the Minister for Police, who was also the Leader of The Nationals, out there saying, 'Well, it's not really fair to put a speed camera at the bottom of a hill, because people tend to go faster when they're going down hills'. This sends a really bad message to effectively the 1 percenters — the 1 per cent who routinely ignore speed limits. There are 4 or 5 per cent of the population who in surveys suggest that they can make their own decisions about how fast to drive, that no-one is going to tell them and that the law does not really apply to them.
They backed off on that rhetoric pretty quickly, and they started releasing the information not only about mobile speed cameras but also about fixed speed cameras, and there is now a whole website devoted to telling us all the information about how many infringements occur, including red-light cameras as well. Of course the figures are quite shocking. You are not going to find any sympathy for speedsters amongst those figures.
Then they established — the Greens opposed it — the road safety camera commissioner. It was all a bit late because the Auditor-General had just cleared the road safety camera system of any defect, but the idea was, 'We're going to set up this new road safety camera commissioner'. Anybody who both got a fine and decided that they were not going to cop it had their own dedicated body that they could whinge to.
We have got numerous reports coming out of that body, and yet again they have never managed to find any problem with the operation of speed or red-light safety cameras that would lead to anybody's fine being quashed. In fact the same statistics show that at a typical speed camera 99 per cent of people do not get caught by the speed camera, which is to say they obey the law. This body exists for the other 1 per cent who have broken the law. In fact most of them probably just pay the fine, so it is really just bait for a minority of whingers. But it sends a very poor message. The message should be that you have broken the law, you are going to pay and you are antisocial, rather than having the privilege of your own complaints body. There has never been anything in any of those reports or in the internal reviews or in the Auditor-General's reports that has suggested there is anything wrong with the way the cameras are operating; it is just that some people do not want to obey the law and they do not like it when they get fined.
Then there was the proposal, which has been pushed by the RACV, to actually regularise a lot of the speed limits on arterial roads. There are a number of arterial roads out there where speed limits vary quite a bit, even within a short few hundred metres or kilometres, and the RACV was complaining about this. VicRoads said, 'Righto, we'll fix this. We'll regularise all those speed limits by lowering them. We'll lower them all down towards a lower level', because VicRoads understands, as I have just detailed to the chamber, that the big improvements we are going to get in road safety from here on in are going to be by addressing the question of speed, particularly in urban areas.
The Bracks government made a move that was considered to be quite gutsy at the time. They took metropolitan speed limits from a default position of 60 kilometres per hour down to 50 kilometres per hour, except where otherwise signed.
[Speech was interrupted.]
Mr BARBER — It was a good decision; thank you, Mr Dalidakis. In fact it was reviewed by the Monash University Accident Research Centre. They were actually able to demonstrate, with statistical significance, the reduction in road accidents and the number of lives saved. It is simple physics; it is simply the laws of physics. If you are hit by a car travelling at 60 kilometres an hour, you will almost certainly die. If you are hit by a car travelling at 40 kilometres or less, you will almost certainly live. It is a function of both the laws of physics but also the braking pattern. The first time that you hit the brakes, you do not slow down very quickly, but the vehicle, as the brakes kick in, rapidly reduces speed.
After a lot of work was put in by local communities, we started getting 40-kilometre zones outside schools and in shopping strip hotspots. But the government ought to look at — and they have already been advised to do this by the road safety bodies — a default 40-kilometre speed limit across the metropolitan area except where otherwise signed. If there is a road sign that says you can do 60, that means you can do 60, but if there is no speed sign, you will have to do 40.
Mr Dalidakis just looked at me with a look of shock on his face. Actually Mr Dalidakis should have a look at the government's own website — the Transport Accident Commission website — called Towards Zero. What we see there is a circle with a number 30 inside it. The government has not told us what this new logo is meant to indicate, but I do know that the Minister for Roads and Road Safety has been off to the Nordic countries, where they have been working on a 30-kilometre-an-hour speed limit. So there is nothing radical at all about a proposal for 40-kilometre speed limits. It has been put forward by the Monash University Accident Research Centre, which is the body that is on retainer from the Victorian government to give it regular advice. Mr Dalidakis, Mr Donnellan and the rest of them can turn in any direction they want, but they will get the same advice from right across the road safety expert community, and that includes their own body, VicRoads.
Back to the story of regularised speed limits. VicRoads decided to take these 50, 60, 70, 80-kilometre-an-hour zones and regularise them by dropping all the speed limits. What happened? A few people kicked up a stink. What happened next? The Minister for Roads and Road Safety went to water and put the whole program on hold. The program actually started under the coalition government, but Mr Donnellan panicked and freaked out as a result of a couple of articles in the local paper, and the next thing you know it is all on hold. In the meantime the RACV are fighting the idea of a reduced speed limit on Bell Street. You would be lucky to do 30 point to point on Bell Street for most of the day, but they want to maintain the ability to do 60, probably just late at night or for a few hours of each day when the traffic clears enough.
[Speech was interrupted.]
Mr BARBER — Some people refer to Bell Street as the hipster-proof fence, but it is a misnomer. The Greens vote has been rising on both sides of Bell Street. It is just that at the moment the two-party preferred is roughly 50 per cent to the Greens below Bell Street. Some of Mr Dalidakis's colleagues are working on a plan to pull the troops back to a defensible line, which they think might be Bell Street.
Anyway, this is the problem we have got right now. Unfortunately I do not see a broad-ranging public debate about the fact that the road toll is going in absolutely the wrong direction, nor do I see a plan from this government. I see some very interesting information on the Towards Zero website, including this hint that we are getting that maybe a 30-kilometre-an-hour speed limit is going to be trialled by the government somewhere. The rising toll of serious injuries among cyclists and pedestrians means we certainly need to look at some further speed reduction measures. At the moment you can only do 40 on Sydney Road, but the minute that you get into a side street you can do 50, and these are residential streets, so I just do not see the common sense behind this bunch of settings at the moment.
But I do compliment the Minister for Roads and Road Safety for going off and looking at the Scandinavian experience. Their road is toll is falling fast there. I looked at a few places in the US. In the city of New York, a city with a population of 8 million people, the mayor took the whole place to 30 miles per hour, which is 40 kilometres an hour, all in one go. This was across the five boroughs and not just in lower Manhattan. There was no fiddling around doing one shopping strip at a time, then evaluating it and having an argument about it; it was the whole city. That just goes to show what a leader can do when they go to the people with a mandate to save lives and then work to implement it.
The Greens will be supporting this bill. It includes a number of important measures around accident compensation schemes, including transport accidents, and I really hope that backing up this measure we have some further plans coming from the government to prevent accidents happening in the first place.
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