A plan to halve the road toll by 2030 will be sent back to state and territory ministers to be revisited, following experts warning it would fail to substantially reduce road deaths and could be exploited for pork-barrelling.
Over Christmas, the National Road Safety Strategy to 2030 was released, despite urgent calls it be sent back to the drawing board by the federal government's own reviewers.
The plan was drafted by then-transport minister Michael McCormack after an extensive review of the previous decade's road toll strategy that had failed to meet its targets on reducing road deaths.
But recommendations made by its reviewers, including to tie funding to measurable improvements in road safety, had not been adopted in the new plan, according to critics.
Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce — who holds chief responsibility for road safety federally — said he had heard the complaints and would make it an issue at next month's meeting of federal and state transport ministers.
"The strategy was finalised in May last year by [Mr McCormack] and state and territory infrastructure and transport ministers from all sides of politics," a spokesman for Mr Joyce said in a statement.
"The Deputy Prime Minister appreciates industry’s ongoing concerns regarding data collection and the need for action items to be strengthened, to ensure the strategy’s goals can be delivered.
"That’s why the Deputy Prime Minister has listed those issues for discussion at the next infrastructure and transport ministers' meeting scheduled for next month."
Critics say new plan worse than last decade's
The peak motoring body, the Australian Automobile Association (AAA), has warned the plan in its current form leaves road funding open to pork-barrelling.
AAA managing director Michael Bradley said that, unlike school or hospital funding to the states, federal funding for road infrastructure had no "strings attached" to ensure projects actually improved road safety.
"State and federal governments have the opportunity to spend infrastructure dollars in areas or projects which are politically helpful rather than those projects which deliver the most safety benefits, and that's a huge problem," Mr Bradley said.
Former president of the Australasian College of Road Safety, Lauchlan McIntosh 3 who was hand-picked by the government to review the previous decade's road safety strategy — said a move to tie funding for the states to reporting obligations appeared to have "faded off".
"Without those accountabilities, the whole process is sort of lost," Mr McIntosh said.
Mr Bradley said he had repeatedly warned the federal government that its new plan was a "retrograde step" that would fail to halve the road toll.
"This [strategy] is worse because it is less specific, it's more vague, there are less things that can be counted or quantified and, as a result, I'm not sure how we're meant to improve the measurement or management of road trauma in this country.
"The sad story here is, if we keep on doing the same thing as we've done for the last 10 years, I'm not sure why people think we'll get a different outcome.
Mr McIntosh said governments were still not taking the road toll seriously.
"We have an Australian Transport Safety Bureau, for instance, which investigates crashes or incidents in rail and shipping and aircraft, but doesn't do it for roads," he said.
Mr Bradley said the COVID-19 pandemic had proven why specific, current data was useful — and how it could be gathered on Australia's roads.
"No-one is collating the most basic data about who is having car crashes, what sort of drivers, what sort of cars are they driving, what sort of crashes are they having, where are they having them," he said.
Road funding has history of rorting
A 2016 Grattan Institute report on 10 years of roads funding found governments were spending money on roads "that are not very important to the economy, but are popular with local voters".
It found billions of dollars had been spent on weak or undisclosed business cases, and without public evaluations.
Mr Bradley said road safety funding would remain vulnerable to rorting until governments were forced to report the safety outcomes of their spending.
"We don't know if it's happening because lack of transparency prevents scrutiny," Mr Bradley said.
"We're talking about an opportunity to reduce the number of brothers and husbands and wives and mothers who are killed on the road each year, or who will end up in a hospital ward or a wheelchair for the rest of their lives.
"We'd like to think that something like road safety and road trauma reduction is above base politics."
