Road Safety, with assistance from the Northern Territory Department of Infrastructure and Planning, organised and chaired the third indigenous road safety forum held in Alice Springs on 27 and 28 September 2004. Previous forums were held in Adelaide in 2002 and in Darwin in 1999. The forum aimed to enhance and build on existing strategies and initiatives relevant to indigenous road safety and provide a resource-sharing and networking opportunity to help empower communities to implement practical solutions to indigenous road safety problems.

Summary

The Australian Transport Safety Bureau, with assistance from the Office of Road Safety in Western Australia, convened the 2006 Indigenous Road Safety Forum from 23–25 October 2006 in Broome.

About 60 people from a range of professions in the health, safety, justice and education sectors attended the forum.

Forum delegates reacted positively to the opportunity to work with and develop communication networks with their road safety colleagues to identify further actions to improve road safety outcomes for Indigenous people.

Onscreen text:

Being Safe, Not Sorry

Improving road safety for Indigenous Australians

Presented by Catherine Liddle

Warning: this documentary may contain images and voices of deceased Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. Viewer discretion is advised. The views and opinions of authors expressed in this film do not necessarily state or reflect those of the Australian Government.

Introduction

While international conventions are clear on the duties of various parties to assist persons in distress at sea, there are no conventions which specify where survivors are to be taken, beyond the requirement that they are to be taken to a place of safety. Traditionally, it has been assumed that a ship's master will consult with ship owners and relevant authorities on the best place to take survivors, depending on the individual circumstances surrounding each case, and for survivors to be processed by border control authorities or the relevant port State.

Summary

The purpose of this publication is to examine trends in the numbers of transport accident deaths in Australia in the 1980s and 1990s in the light of the most recent comparable data from most other countries that are members of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Overall, the data indicate that in the period from 1980 to 1999 Australias transport safety improvement compared favourably with that of other OECD countries and performance reached OECD median levels in the 1990s.

Summary

Changes have been made to the Trade Practices Act intended to legalise the sale in Australia of bicycle helmets meeting the American Snell B95 Standard. These changes have been made as part of the regular review of the mandatory consumer product safety standard for pedal cyclists under the Trade Practices Act 1974 as the current regulation, which was based on AS 2063.2- 1990 and had become outdated, Department of the Treasury (1999). The State and Territory road authorities have not accepted the changes.