Libby Mettam: Labor’s lack of focus on road safety costs West Aussie lives

The 2024 WA road toll will be the worst in more than a decade.

The highest road toll in the past 10 years was 195 deaths in 2016.

With 118 deaths to date this year and four months to go, averaging a death on our road every other day, 2024 is on track to be one of the worst.

In November 2020, WA Labor did what it does best; produced a glossy brochure dripping in Labor’s signature red, had a big media event and promised something voters wanted to hear.

On that occasion: a road safety strategy for zero WA road deaths by 2050.

Quite a promise.

In his foreword to the strategy, then premier Mark McGowan said: “This strategy is bold, and it encourages us to aim high”.

It’s an age-old political strategy; promise something you’re never going to be around to deliver or defend if it fails.

June 2023, with the road toll still climbing, Mark McGowan quit.

But the strategy still stands and then road safety minister, Michelle Roberts, is still in Parliament as Speaker.

It was Ms Roberts who used the policy to set an interim target, a 50 to 70 per cent reduction in the road toll by 2030.

If — and we all pray it won’t — the road toll continues its current trajectory to the end of the year, just four years into the interim target, Labor will have achieved a 70 per cent increase in road deaths, not the promised 70 per cent decrease.

It is now Premier Cook who must come to account for this shameful outcome on our roads.

Mark McGowan is gone, and Ms Roberts has been moved out of her role as minister for road safety.

While these numbers represent a spectacular failure on the part of the Labor Government, they are not just statistics, they are lives. Their loss sends devastating ripples through families and communities.

There is no greater responsibility for any government than preserving life and this road toll should have sent shockwaves through the Cook Labor Government months ago.

Instead, Roger Cook waited to be jolted into action by a run of horror fatalities on our roads, including the deaths of a baby boy and two women in the same car, and the death of a three-year-old girl in a rollover.

Roger Cook has his priorities all wrong, and it’s costing West Australian lives.

And even then, the best it could do was a talkfest in the middle of September.

Another road death and a call for more immediate action by the WA Liberals, the summit is moved forward. By two weeks.

It’s now in early September.

Roger Cook is in knee-jerk mode and gambling with people’s life.

Even before the death toll began spiralling out of control earlier this year, the warning bells had been ringing, but the Cook Government turned a deaf ear.

Going back two years, the Government ran a six-month trial of new cameras designed to catch drivers on their phones or not wearing seatbelts, as well as speeding.

It picked up almost 380,000 speeding, mobile phone and seat belt offences — almost 2100 offences every day.

As a trial, no one was fined — but two years later, there is no legislation to allow cameras to issue fines for these offences, and the Government has only asked for tenders to buy some.

In June, it was also reported in The West Australian that one in five positions for officers in road policing command were empty.

In other words, 20 per cent of the police who were supposed to be on the road discouraging dangerous behaviours didn’t exist.

Since 2012-13, a special purpose Road Trauma Trust Account, funded by revenue from speed and red-light camera fines, has received an average of over $100 million a year to fund road safety initiatives.

In October last year, the Auditor General warned there was insufficient ministerial oversight of spending from the WA Road Trauma Trust Account.

She also found the Government has no idea if most of its initiatives are working or failing and no idea if they can afford to keep them running.

WA Labor also made the decision in 2018 to raid the RTTA to pay for the cost of administering red-light and speed cameras, reducing by about 25 per cent the funds available for road safety initiatives.

Prior to 2018, the operating costs of red-light and speeding cameras had been met out of general revenue, where they should be funded.

Roger Cook has even raided the account to pay for new software to keep track of who owes speeding fines.

At the time Labor dressed the money grab as a “budget repair measure”. I would suggest to Premier Cook that successive surpluses in the billions of dollars mean it’s time to return the funds to the RTTA, where they rightly should be used to save lives.

If we are serious about saving lives on the roads, we need to be committed to spending the money in the RTTA to do things like lighting dangerous intersections, fixing blackspots, or installing rumble strips.

Instead, this Premier has been more concerned about getting money out the door for glitzy events, than he has about getting money out of the Road Trauma Trust Account to save lives.

Roger Cook has his priorities all wrong, and it’s costing West Australian lives.

Libby Mettam is the Liberal leader