The safe road home

The government seems to have found billions of dollars, seemly overnight, to respond to COVID-19.

Money to boost unemployment benefits, provide one-off payments, and paying the wages of many workers. The last one, initially budgeted at 140 billion dollars.

If they can get, print, borrow that kind of money than 3 billion dollars per year is doable.

The 3 billion is the minimum amount that a government report, the Inquiry Into The National Road Safety Strategy 2011-2020 in 2018, called for. In order to keep far more people safe on our roads.

The same report noted that when it came to recommendations, "several have been on the agenda for decades. Many safety solutions are known and some are in play to some degree, while others still sit on the shelf, often due to a lack of capacity and resources."

The money could literally save lives.

Ensuring safer roads would according to the report, "…reduce fatal and serious injuries by more than 30% by improving road infrastructure to achieve more than 75% of travel on 3-star or better roads for all road users. Over the life of the improvements more than 88,000 deaths and serious injuries would be avoided, saving over $100 billion in crash costs to the Australian economy"

Why not make the minimum 6 or even 12 billion? Getting even more done on the nation's roads.

If the government is not going to do that, how about a well-resourced national memorial.

There are the makeshift memorials throughout the country. A cross, flowers, photos, for those that have been killed by cars.

If the government is not willing to pay for all the road improvements, they can pay for this.

A well-funded national memorial akin to the war memorial. In memory of the tens of thousands of people in this country that have died because of car crashes. And at times, because of our failure to keep them safe.