AAA denounces commonwealth's road safety inertia

The Australian Automobile Association (AAA) is demanding the Turnbull Government find the extra sum of $150,000 per annum for its National Road Safety Strategy (NRSS), to reduce not only deaths on the roads, but also serious injuries.

"The NRSS, signed by all Australian governments, aims to reduce the number of road deaths and serious injuries by at least 30 per cent between 2011 and 2020. Despite progress in the first few years, we are again seeing increased fatalities on our roads," says AAA Chief Executive, Michael Bradley.

According to the AAA, during the last 12 months to the end of September, deaths on Australian roads have increased by 7.2 per cent – to 1273 fatalities. In addition, serious injuries are suspected to be on the rise, but the AAA remains uncertain of this, because each state records road trauma differently. It's not possible to establish the nationwide aggregate of serious injury on the roads without comparing apples with apples.

"We can accurately measure road deaths, but because different jurisdictions record road trauma differently, we have no national measure of the number or severity of road crash injuries," Bradley explained.

"Australians have every right to be concerned that after five years of the NRSS's rollout, there is still no national measure of road trauma in Australia, much less any clarity on whether the rate of injury is rising or falling.

"To reduce road deaths and injuries we must have a fuller picture of where crashes occur and their severity. The AAA and the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons have been working with the Australian Government to secure an investment of just $150,000 a year to fund the Australian Trauma Registry to provide detailed information on severe road crash injuries. We are hopeful this funding will soon be forthcoming, but with the death toll continuing to climb, this funding cannot come soon enough," Bradley said.

In a report issued last week, 'Benchmarking the Performance of the National Road Safety Strategy', the AAA estimates that roughly 625 Australians are injured seriously each week, on the nation's roads. Individual state governments are not only slow to harmonise their data collection methods with other states, says the AAA, they're "years behind" in reducing road trauma. But there's a trend emerging, this being the second occasion the AAA has poked the federal government for signs of activity.

Picture courtesy of kgbo/Wikimedia Commons