Australian Government To Set National Targets To Reduce Road Deaths & Injuries

The Australian Government has long been ignorant of the grass root causes of the Road Toll. More and more money has been put into revenue raising schemes such as more Speed Camera’s and more police to enforce the schemes.

The majority of work gone into better road safety has come in the form of fear campaigns to scare drivers into slowing down and laying of the drink driving. Nonetheless, generally speaking most of these measures have generally failed to make much of a difference.

However, the Federal Transport Minister Mark Vaile has now made a commitment to set a number and aim to reduce the road toll to match it. Queensland recently launched the QLD 300 campaign. A campaign aimed at bringing the road toll below the 300 barrier, so far it hasn’t had the best of luck – we believe this is mainly due to the QLD governments continued insistence in using fear (as oppose to driver education and training) as a form of deterrent.

The Governments National Road Safety Action Plan (NRSAP) for 2007 and 2008, which first came to light last year, is aiming to reduce the road toll by 40 per cent over the 10 years – an almost unachievable figure if the government doesn’t change its methods of improving road safety.

However, this new agreement that our transport minister has committed to will be another push in the right direction to force state governments to get serious about the real causes of deaths on our roads and perhaps (and this is a big perhaps) stop with the short term “speed camera” solutions and concentrate on the grass root problems.