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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1999 Week 7 Hansard (2 July) . . Page.. 2208 ..

MR SMYTH: You can announce it, quite. Mr Hargreaves can call it very easily because he walks away from the scene of the crime. Mr Speaker, if the spokesman for Urban Services - - -

Mr Stanhope: Who walks away from the scene of accidents? Who is that walking away from the scene of accidents?

MR SMYTH: You should listen to this, Mr Stanhope, because you might learn something about the team that you lead so poorly. You should listen to this before you interject on something that you are so ignorant of that you have not even paid attention to it.

Mr Speaker, the ACT does have a road safety strategy, and we are updating it. How do we know that it is being updated? We know because more than 50 delegates went to the forum on 25 February this year that discussed the updating of the road safety strategy. Who was not there, Mr Speaker? Everybody was there bar the Labor Party. We had insurance companies, we had the NRMA, we had the police, we had safety experts, we had departmental officers, and we had people who had suffered from the trauma of road injury and death. They were there to help us develop a strategy that will take us into the next century. This forum endorsed the goals of a new strategy. The key points of the strategy were to reduce road trauma levels, despite the increasing population and travel, and to create community responsibility for and participation in road safety. Mr Hargreaves, you asked for it. In most cases, it is already there. It was just the same old bleating, Mr Speaker. He just bleats that things should be done without making any inquiries to find out whether anything is already in train.

Mr Hargreaves went on to talk about the speed cameras and he said that we are going to attempt to push their introduction through in this session. Mr Hargreaves' office was told over a week ago that it would not be brought on until the August session because we did not have time.

The whole point in having speed cameras and red light cameras is the safety issue. Mr Hargreaves made mention of the fact that Mr Humphries had said last week that we would make some money if we had speed cameras. That is true. We will make some money out of speed cameras; we do not deny that. I think the figure in the budget is $2.5m. How would we make money out of speed cameras, Mr Speaker? It is because people speed. Hopefully, one day we will get a zero amount of money out of speed cameras, and that will be the day Canberrans stop speeding.

Mr Speaker, I have said many times since I started this job that we will have an integrated approach to road safety. We are the government that is introducing the new drivers - new attitudes education strategy to make sure that we train safer drivers. We are the government that, through my colleague Mr Humphries, has its own AFP traffic enforcement strategy in place. We have now come up with the red lights and speed cameras. We are updating the ACT road safety strategy. The NRMA road safety trust has been renewed and will be going on. We are the government that actually has road safety in mind.

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