Page 728 - Week 03 - Tuesday, 8 March 2016
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For our part, the ACT government has been working with the Canberra Business Chamber to explore opportunities to be a trial site for autonomous vehicles. At the start of 2016 the chamber, the ACT government and the NRMA held an industry forum to discuss the possibilities of autonomous vehicles and attracted representatives from ANCAP, the Australian driverless vehicle initiative, the NRMA, SMEC and Westpac, amongst others. Interest in having trials in Canberra is strong, and it is strong for a reason—and not just local or national interest, but international interest. In many ways the ACT is the ideal place to trial and deploy driverless cars.
My government has a strong track record of moving quickly to encourage innovation and embrace change. We were, of course, the first jurisdiction in Australia to provide a legal environment for modern ride-sharing services like Uber, and we were the first capital city in the world to do so before Uber began operating.
This culture of innovation is deep-seated in the people of Canberra. We are an open-minded city of early adopters and forward thinkers. Our community excels at coming together quickly and constructively to discuss, to test and to iterate ideas. As a geographically small jurisdiction with only one level of government, we have a streamlined and well-defined regulatory environment that responds to proponents’ and consumers’ needs. As the seat of national government, we also offer close proximity to federal policy advisers and decision makers working on autonomous vehicle regulation.
We are home to the some of the world’s best researchers and academics across research institutions like the CSIRO, Data61, the Australian National University, the University of Canberra and the University of New South Wales Canberra. We offer nearly 6,000 lane kilometres of world-class road infrastructure to test in all kinds of settings—from urban streets to rural country roads, from open freeways to suburban backstreets, and from our famous roundabouts to our industrial estates.
Person for person, our businesses are the most innovative and entrepreneurial in Australia. More importantly, they are ready, they are willing and they are able to make autonomous vehicles work here so Canberra can continue to be a leader in this field, just as we have led the way on transport innovation around ride sharing.
A fact of the digital age is that technology often progresses much faster than the legislation or regulation that governs its use. One key obstacle to driverless cars is the assumption embedded in the road rules that a car must have a driver. This creates a web of legal and regulatory questions around liability, insurance, licensing, vehicle design rules and rules of the road. Work is underway to address this nationally, but my government is not content to wait for the rest of Australia to move. We can move now, and we will.
This is not about cutting and pasting a regulation from somewhere else on the assumption that they know better than we do. We need to make sure that our regulations actually work: for our people, for our city, and for industry. We must make sure the regulation we draft does not prevent the very activities it seeks to enable. There is no point mandating drivers licences in driverless cars if a key point of driverless cars is to give mobility to those who cannot drive.
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