Tuesday, 6 February 2024

Road safety

Ann-Marie HERMANS (South-Eastern Metropolitan) (18:32): (657) I rise today with my adjournment matter for the attention of the Minister for Police, and the action I am calling on the minister to take is to hold a bipartisan road safety summit to identify measures to address the rising Victorian road toll. For every 100,000 people, over four lives are lost in road accidents. In fact that includes nearly four fatal crashes. The local government areas with the highest number of lives lost according to the TAC are Moira, 16; Greater Shepparton, 14; my area of Casey, 13; Wyndham, 12; Brimbank and Yarra Ranges and so on, nine; Geelong and Latrobe, eight; and so forth. I would like to highlight the importance of not only acknowledging that more work needs to be done to educate drivers but also maintaining a safe road network. When talking about areas where we can educate drivers, I would like to shout out to the TRAG – the Teenagers Road Accident Group – Drive 4 Life program, which I had the great pleasure of attending. TRAG has been going since 1999 and provides road trauma presentations to secondary schools in the south-east of Melbourne and also in the Mornington Peninsula. It is wonderful to see all of the different emergency services volunteering their time to make sure that young people understand how incredibly important it is to be safe on the roads.

Now, the RACV estimates that 80 per cent of Victoria’s 180,000 kilometres of regional roads with 100-kilometre limits needs upgrading. In fact if we look at the TAC, it says the following:

If we accept this ‘road toll’ as the price of a rural lifestyle –

or outer suburban lifestyle; I am just adding that little bit in –

… 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.

…

The price we pay for using the road shouldn’t be death or serious injury.

In my electorate the City of Casey is one of the fastest growing municipalities, if you listen to the government’s own rhetoric, and on a typical weekday close to 50,000 vehicles use O’Shea, Clyde and Greens roads in Berwick, and the number is expected to increase. The current road infrastructure will be unable to cope with increased demand. In fact in areas of Cranbourne I can say that the roads have always been clogged up for the last few years; it has been absolutely atrocious. The top concerns according to my local people are that we need to have our potholes and our broken edges fixed up by this government.