AAA lobbies for road safety in federal budget

A commitment to reduce road deaths by 30 per cent within three years is "slipping from the government's grasp", says Australia’s peak motoring organisation, the Australian Automobile Association (AAA).

In a press release issued last week, the AAA went on the attack, pointing out in its report, 'Benchmarking of the Performance of the National Road Safety Strategy (NRSS)', that for the 12 months leading up March of this year the national road toll fell by just nine lives – a decrease of 0.7 per cent over the previous 12-month period.

Furthermore, the AAA argues, the 1240 lives lost on Australian roads between April 2016 and March 2017 represent an increase of 111 deaths over the period between April 2014 and March 2015, two years earlier. As the AAA tells it, road trauma is not just about deaths, it also severely affects the lives of survivors who have been injured in car crashes. Statistics put the number at around 42,000 survivable injuries sustained in car crashes each year.

The statistics hint that far from the projected reduction of 30 per cent by 2020, the national road toll may stagnate at its present level, or even rise, as the population grows. In its submission to the federal government for the 2017-18 budget, the AAA has called for the government to launch an inquiry into the growing number of fatalities, to ascertain the underlying reasons for that trend.
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