Extract from ABC News
Australia was once an international pioneer in road safety.
In 1970, Victoria became the first jurisdiction in the world to make wearing seatbelts mandatory, with the rest of the country quickly following.
Shortly after that, Australian states were among global leaders at instituting random breath testing.
Both developments saw Australia's road toll drop significantly over the decades that followed.
But according to the Bureau of Infrastructure and Transport Research Economics, that progress has stalled. In the last decade, national fatalities have remained largely flat year-on-year.
And this year, there's been a rise in the road toll, most noticeably in NSW and Victoria, which has experts concerned.
Glenn Weir of Victoria Police's Road Policing Command tells ABC RN's Rear Vision he's seen a shift.
"There's a lot of [drivers] who seem to be deliberately giving the middle finger to common sense," he says.
So why does it seem that we're not taking road safety seriously?
How did we get here?
Not that long ago, Australia's roads were a very different place.
In the 1960s, seatbelts weren't mandatory, speed cameras hadn't yet been introduced and drink driving went virtually unchecked.
It was a time of carnage on our roads.
In 1970, the worst road toll year on record, 3,798 people lost their lives.
That's more than three times higher than the figure for last year, when 1,194 people died.
John Crozier was a young medical student around this era and he has vivid memories of treating road trauma victims.
"In the absence of effective drink driving legislation and seatbelts, there were horrific facial injuries. They would take hours to clean and suture," says Dr Crozier, who is a former head of the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons' National Trauma Committee.
He says there were so many cases like this, they were regularly delegated to medical students.
The fight over seatbelts
In the 1960s and 1970s, there was strong public resistance to the idea of mandatory seatbelts.
Some Australians were scared of them and worried that if they had a car crash, the seat belt could trap them in the vehicle.
But a coalition of different parties was pushing for change — including many in the medical profession, like trauma surgeons who were witnessing the devastation firsthand.
Mandatory seatbelts became law in Victoria in 1970. And by 1972, every state made wearing seatbelts in the front seat compulsory.
But the laws had loopholes.
"There were get-out clauses," says Mark King, an adjunct professor at QUT's Centre for Road Safety and Accident Research.
"If you had a car that had been manufactured before a certain date, you didn't [need] to have seatbelts in it."
And, as part of the transition, children under eight were initially exempt.
But as it became clear that seatbelts were saving lives, resistance faded and they became widely accepted.
'An imposition on the working class'
The battle for random breath testing was even longer and fiercer.
Different states moved at different paces, fighting fierce campaigns from pubs and clubs along the way — many of whom were convinced that their profits would take a hit and venues may be driven out of business.
In 1968, NSW introduced laws to breathalyse drivers if they had committed a driving offence or were involved in a crash.
Random breath testing started in Victoria in 1976, with other states soon following.
Terry Slevin, the CEO of the Public Health Association of Australia, says pubs and clubs argued random breath testing was "anti-business".
"We heard all the mum and dad pubs [saying] 'We're going to close because of these draconian nanny state laws'," he says.
"There were very significant resources invested by the alcohol sector … seek[ing] to undermine, challenge, push back and depict this [as] overly controlling."
In 1982, for example, the NSW Australian Hotels Association president Barry McInerney called random breath testing "an imposition on the working class".
But a number of politicians stood up to these industry forces — and the potential for electoral backlash.
"It takes a while for that cultural change to shift. It takes investment of time and effort and energy [to make it happen]," Professor Slevin says.
By the early 1990s, random breath testing with a blood alcohol limit of 0.05 was standard across the country.
Getting worse?
This year NSW and Victoria — states that led the way with road safety initiatives — have both seen a rise in road deaths.
In NSW, as of the end of September there were 265 lives lost, compared to 204 that time last year.
Meanwhile in Victoria, there were 212 lives lost as of the end of September, compared to 184 that time last year.
Mr Weir of Victoria Police adds that in his state, there have been many more instances of multiple fatalities in car crashes this year compared to last year, including double fatalities, quadruple fatalities and an instance where five people were killed.
"We've had a really strange set of incidents in Victoria this year … that's really unusual."
And he says one potential factor in increased road deaths and injuries is more people not wearing seatbelts.
"For some strange reason, we're seeing a bit of a 'back to the future'. We've got a significant number of people now not wearing seatbelts involved in road trauma," he says.
Mr Weir believes Australians have "lost a bit of patience".
"We've lost some manners as a society and certainly as road users," he says.
And he says there's a chance the pandemic is partly to blame.
"I think there's a bit of in-built arrogance that seems to be prevalent in a lot of people … whether it's a reaction to lockdowns and COVID-19 restrictions, I don't know."
Work to do
David Cliff, a former police officer and CEO of the Global Road Safety Partnership, says while it's not always popular, cutting speed limits has the ability to save lives in both regional and metropolitan Australia.
"When everybody slows down by just a few kilometres an hour — that makes a massive difference to the trauma levels," he says.
"While Australia has made fantastic gains, the speed limits on many of the rural, non-divided roads are still way too high."
But there's another danger on our roads we have yet to properly deal with, says Russell White, the founder and CEO of the Australian Road Safety Foundation
"Not everybody will drink and drive. Not everybody will break the speed limit," he says.
"But everybody — regardless of how you're using the road — will have a mobile phone either in their hand [or] in their pocket, or be using it in some way."
It's a major distraction, and one we haven't quite worked out how to combat "anywhere near how we should", he says.
Mr White says part of the problem is there are still many public misunderstandings around phones and driving.
"A good example is the view that if you're using a hands-free phone — if you've got it in a cradle — then that's taking the risk away. And that's not true," he says.
"There's plenty of scientific evidence that says the level of distraction, using a phone hands-free or hand-held, is exactly the same. It doesn't change."
'It won't happen to me'
Mr Cliff of the Global Road Safety Partnership says there's one key misconception around road safety — and it's very hard to change.
"When we get behind the wheel of the car, we perceive it to be safe," he says.
"We, as drivers, don't perceive risk."
He says it comes down to a general lack of understanding about the many risks associated with driving.
When it comes to road crashes, "the basic thinking for most drivers is 'it won't happen to me'", he says.
"And sadly, because of the volume of deaths and serious injuries, we know that it does happen to quite a significant number of people every single year."
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