Wednesday, 18 March 2026

 John LISTER (Werribee) (10:29): I rise today to speak to the inquiry into the impact of road safety behaviours on vulnerable road users. The reason why I have selected to speak on this committee today comes from a conversation I had with Levi and his mates down at Wyndham Park only a few days ago. Levi is a great kid. I have had the honour of looking after him at Wyndham Central College, and a lot of the kids were there on their bikes. I got chatting to them about e-bikes and some of the concerns around the safety, the monitoring and the enforcement of rules around e-bikes.

This inquiry went a little bit of the way into these electronically assisted vehicles, but I do want to make sure that as I am speaking I am using a little bit of gen Z slang to ensure that those people who may be reading this in Hansard – I would hope that Levi checks this out in Hansard – understand that yes, chat, we are cooked when it comes to safety around e-bikes. There is a lot of unsafe behaviour on our roads and in our community, and it has been identified not only anecdotally to me or through emails but also through our local police survey that gets done every year. It is one of the top crime concerns. The inquiry goes to e-scooters, which is a little bit millennial – not many gen Z ride around on e-scooters – but to extrapolate I would like to look at some of their findings, particularly findings ‍46 and 47, and how they apply to both e-scooters and e-bikes. Finding 46 says that:

Regulations have not kept up with the growing popularity of e-scooters –

and I would add, to extend to that, e-bikes –

and the availability for purchase of e-scooters that are capable of high speeds.

I know there is a lot of work that we can do in this area. We want to see people using alternative mobility modes. It is particularly important in communities like mine for younger people to be able to get to and from work and to be able to get to and from school, but when we see kids chasing clout or aura farming by doing monos down Synnot Street on their e-bikes, it is incredibly dangerous. Members of the community have raised this with me, and in fact Levi and his mates raised this with me too in relation to some of the people that they knew of, although they did not snitch when I asked them to.

I think there are a few very important points here when it comes to e-bikes and e-scooters. We need to make sure that the community is reporting illegal behaviour when they are seeing it. The inquiry does go a little bit of a way into talking about the reporting methods and how we need to have some more promotion around those mechanisms, particularly around Crime Stoppers when it comes to road safety matters. I do endorse recommendation 16 – we have to try and develop more awareness around the avenues to report this dangerous behaviour. I would say to Levi and his mates, you can snitch anonymously by going to Crime Stoppers and reporting as much of a description of the behaviour that you saw, whether or not you knew who it was.

I have not only been a teacher and worked with a lot of these young people but I have also met some of them in much different circumstances as a rescue operator with the fire brigade. I will always remember the young man who was riding a motorbike illegally along Shaws Road, lost it and ended up with three compound fractures. I had never seen a compound fracture before that job, but to see three in a young man, 15 years old, at 1 o’clock in the morning out the front of Wyndham Central was pretty confronting.

The inquiry did briefly touch on the issue of the TAC and accident compensation not necessarily covering those injuries when you are in these circumstances. To think that this young man that we helped that night – we ended up having to get him transported to the Alfred pretty quickly – may not be able to access compensation because he was doing the wrong thing is very concerning. I think it starts from going right back to those friendship groups, to those mates that I saw down at Wyndham Park, reminding them that not only is it about reporting it to police, reporting it to adults, but it is also about talking amongst each other. There is no clout to be had in ending up strewn across the road on these e-bikes when you inevitably have an accident. There is no aura in ending up at the Alfred for months in rehab. What I would encourage people in my community to do is to continue to report it to Victoria Police so that we can follow it up through highway patrol. I thank the committee for their work in looking at this particular part of our road safety system.