Australia’s road toll is rising.
Why? Experts blame a combination of increased car use after the end of pandemic restrictions, vehicle choice (more SUVs) and the state of road infrastructure, particularly in rural and regional areas.
But the answer might lie in data about crashes, the way road rules are enforced and the condition of roads.
Surprisingly, while this information is already collected by states and territories, it is not shared with the federal government, despite its sizeable role in funding roads.
That might be about to change.
From Wednesday, the Australian Automobile Association will start its engines on its Data Saves Lives campaign, an attempt for the government to tie $10bn of federal road funding to a requirement to pop the hood and make the data public.
The AAA points to a commitment in the week before the 2022 election from then shadow transport minister Catherine King to “improve the timeliness and quality of road trauma data”.
King said she would “look for opportunities to ensure we can extract better-quality road safety data from states and territories in return for funding of road projects”.
In 2022, a parliamentary inquiry recommended federal funding be conditional on the data, including “where practicable” the star rating of roads.
But the current shadow transport minister, Bridget McKenzie, thinks the government has been asleep at the wheel as the terms of reference for a review of the national partnership agreement are “completely silent” on the issue of road safety data.
The opposition is riding shotgun with the AAA campaign. McKenzie says it has her “full support” and the inability to access road safety data is a “travesty”, especially as road deaths are going up.
AAA’s managing director, Michael Bradley, says: “We need to see the facts so we can understand what is going wrong.”
The Albanese government is negotiating a new national partnership agreement with the states, a five-year deal to be finalised in December. “The clock is ticking,” Bradley says.
The campaign will “give Australians their opportunity to tell their local MP what they think about this important issue”, he says, with marginal seat MPs in pole position when the AAA puts the pedal to the floor.
Along for the ride are 15 partner organisations, including the Pedestrian Council, Motorcycle Riders Association of Australia and the Australian Road Assessment Program, the organisation that actually grades the roads.
Despite the concern that nothing is being done, expanded and standardised information about road accidents is en route.
The assistant minister for transport, Carol Brown, said “after a decade of neglect under the former Coalition government, national road safety data harmonisation is finally a focus”, with a new data-sharing agreement set to be “signed off at the end of the year”.
But this is not expected to include data about policing, which is dealt with elsewhere in government. Commuters who have been caught above the limit in a 40km/h zone they thought was a main road might be out of luck if they want to know whether the speed trap actually works.
And the most surprising omission: it doesn’t seem like the commonwealth will be given the quality rating of the roads. Apparently states and territories think this will lead to unfair comparisons, like tabloid headlines about most of the roads in the Northern Territory being rated just one or two stars out of five.
Hard to think of another policy area where rather than measuring, closing or at least justifying the gap in outcomes, a government would suggest ignoring it.
A prospective car buyer generally likes to know the Ancap star safety rating of a vehicle they have their eye on. If it underperforms, they can pick a different car.
Roads aren’t as simple – you can’t necessarily change your route just because your daily commute takes you down a dodgy road. You might insist that the government upgrade the road, though, which is why AAA argues the data has an important transparency purpose.
How could we tell if governments are funding projects to win votes – rather than save lives – without crash and road safety data?
Better crash data isn’t a one-way street, though. More detailed demographic data about accidents might also lead to increased insurance premiums for some.
It’s not clear whether the AAA doing figurative burnouts on parliament’s lawns will be enough to change decision-making so late in the year. But the minister should at least say why this is the road not taken.
