Crashes on our roads end lives, cause serious injury, trauma and distress and have a very significant economic and financial cost. To reduce this toll, the Government has used a proportion of the revenue from speed and red light camera fines to fund road safety initiatives through the Road Trauma Trust Account (RTTA).

In 2011, the Government announced that from 2012-13 one hundred per cent of fines would go into the RTTA to be invested in improving road safety. This increased the revenue going into the account to $84 million, an increase of over 450 per cent compared with 2010-11.

An increase of this scale presents both opportunities and risks. The opportunities lie in greater capacity to fund road safety initiatives and accelerate reductions in deaths and trauma. The risks lie in ensuring that the management and administration of the RTTA is robust enough to deal with this sudden step change in revenue, and ensure its effective application in delivering the State’s road safety strategy. The risks and opportunities are what prompted me to do this audit now.

I can provide assurance that all fine revenue is going into the RTTA as intended and is directed to road safety. However, the governance, policies and processes used by the Office of Road Safety and the Road Safety Council in their management of the RTTA, need to be improved. Roles and responsibilities need to be better defined, and the step change in funding needs to be matched by changes in the processes for allocating funds, monitoring how they are spent and the impact they have. I am pleased that both the Office of Road Safety and the Road Safety Council have already begun working on some of those changes.

The increased revenue for the RTTA will increase expectations and scrutiny. Transparency will be essential in demonstrating to Parliament and the community that the revenue from fines has been effectively managed and spent in making our roads safer.