Tuesday, 15 October 2019

 Mr RICH-PHILLIPS (South Eastern Metropolitan) (12:40): My question is to the Minister for Road Safety and the TAC. This week, the middle of October, the road toll in Victoria has exceeded the toll for the whole of 2018, and Victoria Police have now forecast that that will increase by a further 50 fatalities by the end of the year. In May of this year you agreed to the taking of $2.9 billion in dividends from the Transport Accident Commission (TAC) over the next four years. What impact does that have on the capacity to roll out new road safety initiatives?

 Ms PULFORD (Western Victoria—Minister for Roads, Minister for Road Safety and the TAC, Minister for Fishing and Boating) (12:40): I thank Mr Rich-Phillips for his question and indeed his comments about that horrific milestone that we passed in the last few days, where now a greater number of people have lost their lives on Victoria’s roads in 2019 than did in 2018—in the entire year—and we have had a number of further deaths on Sunday that have again added to that horrible number. We do talk about these things and they are reported often as numbers, but each and every one of these represents a family that is shattered and a set of Christmas preparations—at this time of year people are thinking about these things—where everyone involved, be it in a workplace, in a social group or in a family, is going about their business with great grief and incredible sorrow. It is also important to make the observation that there are an even greater number of people whose lives are changed dramatically by injuries on our roads as well, and so too are those people’s lives changed forever by road trauma. So we all need to do better.

The community, the government, the police and we all need to redouble our efforts to make our roads safer and to make them more forgiving when people make simple mistakes—you know, we are all human; people make simple mistakes—to have in place the right regime around rules and penalties, to have the right campaigns, to talk to the right people around the community about behaviours and to have appropriate speeds that are safe for people.

Our government has been making a $1.4 billion investment, the Towards Zero action plan. It includes some very significant infrastructure projects. The first 20 of the safety barrier projects have now largely been completed. Seventeen of them are absolutely completed, with the construction crews packed up and moved on, there are three where there are some works that are continuing and the next 16 of those projects will be commencing soon. So the infrastructure upgrades are important, the advertising campaigns are important and the investment that is made is a very, very important part of what we do. And then we have other things that do not have the same sort of price tag as some of these initiatives—like the hundreds of intersections that are being upgraded—where there are rules and campaigns— (Time expired)

 Mr RICH-PHILLIPS (South Eastern Metropolitan) (12:43): I thank the minister for her response. She spoke about road fatalities, she spoke about catastrophic injury and she also spoke about drivers making simple mistakes. She did not get to the nub of the question, which was the impact of removing $2.9 billion in capacity from the Transport Accident Commission. I would like to put that in a specific context. While the minister spoke about simple mistakes on the road, Victoria Police have highlighted the prevalence of illicit drugs in drivers who are involved in fatalities, which of course do not fall in the category of ‘simple mistakes’. Given that is such a problem on the roads now and given the removal of $2.9 billion in dividends from the TAC, why has the government not increased the level of roadside drug testing, given Victoria Police have identified it as such an issue?

 Ms PULFORD (Western Victoria—Minister for Roads, Minister for Road Safety and the TAC, Minister for Fishing and Boating) (12:44): My apologies, I misread the clock. My answer to Mr Rich-Phillips’s first question is that there will be no consequence as a result of the dividend being taken. The investments will be maintained at the current level. No-one’s premium will be increased as a response to this, and governments of all persuasions have in 28 of 30 years, I believe, taken a dividend from the TAC, so there is nothing particularly unusual about that.

On the question of drug testing, we certainly provide Victoria Police with the resources to drug test. As Assistant Commissioner Leane has said in the media on many occasions, but as recently as today, this is an area of great importance to the police and a high focus for them. It is an area where there are not simple mistakes made but where people are taking unacceptable risks with their own wellbeing and that of others in the community, and we will continue to provide police with the powers and the resources they need to crack down on drug driving.