Is it too easy to get a driver’s licence?

You often hear comments about Australian drivers, like: “They must’ve got their licence on the back of a cereal packet” – especially as they weave around the road or cut other drivers off.

So is it true? Is it actually too easy to get a driver’s licence in Australia, and therefore leading to poor driving skills?

Let’s take a closer look…

We’ve all heard the old story of way back when, in a quiet country town, the local copper would watch you pull out front of the police station on your L-plates and that was all it took for them to hand you a driver’s licence.

Depending on where and when you were doing this, that piece of paper was a full, unrestricted driver’s licence, too. P-plate provisions didn’t reach all states and territories until the 1990s.

But the authorities cottoned on to the fact that young drivers were over-represented in crashes by a big margin. Even though some Australian states have required restricted provisional licence ‘P’ plates for a long time (since 1966 in NSW, for example), the requirements to even just go from your L plates with a supervising driver to the P-plate stage has ramped up significantly.

Even though each state and territory has a slightly different take on it, the fact is that you have to spend a lot more time and do more tests over a longer period to get a licence, especially if you’re under 25.

We’ve covered this in our guide to L-plate and P-plate rules across Australia – and the fact is, it’s complicated; different states have some of their own, unique requirements.

Having to stay on a provisional licence for longer periods if you’re under 25 is just one of the big changes to getting a driver’s licence in recent years.

Minimum driving hours for learners, passing a hazard perception test and restrictions on passengers for provisional drivers are other changes for some, but not all, states.

Generally speaking, prospective learner drivers have to sit a theory test on the road rules, then if they pass that and an eye test, they are given their L-plate licence or permit. Then they have to log up to 120 hours of driving accompanied by a fully licenced driver, with 20 hours of that driving done at night.

That’s a lot of hours to accumulate, and often it has to be done over a minimum of 12 months if under 25 years of age.

However, you often don’t have to do the full 120 hours behind the wheel if you’re prepared to pay for some expert tuition. Some states give a ‘discount’ on the hours, as an incentive to get instruction from accredited instructors or by doing specific driver safety courses.

So, if you do an hour’s tuition with an accredited driving school, it’ll be worth three hours towards the 120. Some sates allow you to do up to 10 hours of driving practice this way, meaning you can get 30 hours credited for 10 actual hours.

Doing the five-hour ‘Safer Driver’s Course’ in NSW gives you a bonus 20 hours towards the state’s 120 hours required.

None of that, of course, comes for free, while there are longer-term costs to consider if parents, guardians and even older siblings or relatives are passing on all their bad driving habits to a learner.

Are they also complicit in fudging the figures on the learner driver’s hours behind the wheel?

Even if that’s the case, the acid test is just how well a learner driver performs in the practical driving test. Some jurisdictions will also require you to pass a hazard perception test beforehand.

To say countries like Germany require drivers to spend more time and money to get a licence than Australia isn’t the full story. It is true that in Germany you have to do a day’s first-aid course and you can’t rely on mum or dad to save costs by being the licenced driver when you’re learning.

Instead, you must have professional tuition by signing a contract with a driving school, and it takes more than a year to get a licence from scratch.

The cost of the various tests and the licence itself are not high in Australia – roughly $50 to $60 a go for the driving test, and it may take several goes.

The biggest load comes with the cost and time involved in getting the driving hours during the L-plate period.

If you don’t have a friend or relative with a full licence (and a car) willing and able to help you practice, during the Ls period then you will need instruction from a driving school. That costs a minimum of $6000 (on a package deal) if you have to do all the hours with the driving school, and up to $12,000 if strictly on an ad hoc hourly tuition rate.

Once P1 licenced, it takes another three years to get a full licence in many Australian states – and you usually have fewer demerit points that you can accrue when a P-plater (four versus 12, for example).

It is much easier to lose your provisional licence, and there are various graduated schemes to getting it back.

If you visit another country, you are usually on your best behaviour when driving there, or at least a bit more cautious. So observing that drivers overseas seem better than the fellow Aussies that share your commute might come down to perception.

Psychologists have also long identified that we humans tend to ignore or minimise our own behaviours but more harshly judge others. It’s okay for me to speed a bit, or sneak into a line of traffic because I’m in a hurry, but that doesn’t mean anyone else can, right?

Is it time for a driver mirror check in more ways than one?

As Australia’s population grows, the number of licenced drivers and cars registered are increasing too.

According to the Bureau of Infrastructure, Transport and Regional Economics (BITRE), there were 17.2 million licenced drivers in 2016; by 2030, 21.7 million are expected to hold driver’s licences nationally.

ABS figures also show that as at January 31, 2021, there were 20.1 million registered vehicles in Australia. We might have a vast country, but many of those cars are packed in sharing urban roads with us, making the traffic snarls bigger and for longer.

Remember when ‘peak hour’ in a capital city was actually for one hour, at most?

Busier roads don’t always make for better drivers. If you thought it seemed easier to get around years ago, with fewer cars on the road, you’re probably right. If you got your licence in 1982 like I did, you were one of just eight million drivers wheeling around nationally that year. Now it is more than double that.

While urban planning has slowly started to change and some city centres are more concentrated and encourage public transport and other forms of transport over cars, that is not going to quickly reverse the tide of decades of suburban sprawl, let alone the move by many out of cities to a sea or a tree change in rural areas.

Loads of people simply have to get a driver’s licence to be part of modern society – to get themselves to work, to get kids to school or just to get to a shopping centre.

Until we have some other way of accurately measuring drivers’ skills, the only benchmark of that skill that we have to go on is how many vehicle occupants are dying or being injured on the road.

In that regard, Australia’s drivers are not so good.

The road toll in Australia is climbing, the most recent figures (from March 2024) showing:
• For the 12 months ended March 31, 2024, there were 1286 road deaths – an increase of
8.2 per cent from the 12-month period ending March 2023.
• The rate of annual deaths per 100,000 population stands at 4.8. This is a 5.6 per cent increase compared to the rate for the 12-month period ending March 2023.

Compared to other countries, the most recent statistics (from 2022) placed Australia’s road fatality rate per 100,000 population (4.54) in 18th position out of 31 nations with such data.

Those countries with the lowest rates were Iceland (0.25), Norway (0.27) and Sweden (0.35). Between 2013 and 2022, the OECD median rate of fatality decline was 25.6 per cent, while Australia’s fatality rate fell by just 17.2 per cent over the same period.

So maybe we’re not looking so good as a nation of drivers after all…

Clearly, it’s not easy to get a driver’s licence anymore, so do you think Australian drivers should improve? And if so, how else can we make us all better at it?