Opinion Piece | 25 May 2026
Hon. Julie Freeman MLC
Shadow Minister for Road Safety
National Road Safety Week should have ended with reflection and renewed commitment. Instead, it has ended in heartbreak.
Five young Western Australians. Five futures gone. Five families now living every parent’s worst nightmare – their lives changed forever on Wheatbelt roads that too often leave no room for human error.
In regional communities, these tragedies do not happen in isolation. Everyone knows someone. Everyone carries the shock. A football teammate. A daughter’s classmate. A young apprentice. A cousin. A neighbour’s child. The grief ripples through entire towns because country communities are deeply connected communities.
As a country mum who taught her children to drive on Wheatbelt roads, these tragedies hit painfully close to home. I know the feeling of lying awake listening for tyres on gravel and waiting for headlights to turn into the gate so you can finally breathe and know your child made it home safely.
That anxiety never really leaves you in regional WA.
It is there during harvest. It is there during seeding. It is there when your teenage son drives home after dark from footy training, or when your daughter heads off before dawn for work. It is there when your farmer husband is coming home exhausted after a 14-hour day in the paddock.
At this time of year especially, fatigue is an unavoidable reality across the Wheatbelt. Farmers are working around the clock to get crops sown while battling mice plagues, fuel and fertiliser uncertainty, weather pressure, machinery breakdowns and enormous financial stress. Then they climb into a ute and drive home on narrow, dark roads where a split second can change everything forever.
Regional drivers face risks metropolitan drivers simply do not experience to the same degree. We drive longer distances. We drive at higher speeds. We drive on roads with poor shoulders and deteriorating surfaces. We share roads with triple road trains and oversized agricultural machinery. We contend with wildlife strikes, darkness, isolation and fatigue.
And, because of all of this, regional Western Australians continue to bear a disproportionately high road toll.
The warning signs have been there for years.
The Office of the Auditor General was highly critical of the management of the Road Trauma Trust Account, warning more than a decade ago about the lack of strategic planning, transparency and accountability in how road safety funding was allocated.
The Auditor General specifically noted that two-thirds of WA road deaths occurred on regional and remote roads. The report also found the Road Safety Council could not demonstrate that funding decisions were maximising the chances of achieving road safety goals because there was no master action plan guiding priorities.
That criticism still echoes loudly today.
For years, the Road Trauma Trust Account was underspent, particularly in regional WA. We are now seeing the devastating flow-on effect of too little action, too late.
Meanwhile, revenue flowing into the RTTA continues to grow dramatically. The current budget shows revenue is expected to increase from around $100 million to almost $200 million, driven heavily by the expansion of AI traffic cameras.
So, let’s be honest about what this means.
The failure to urgently improve regional roads is not a lack of money. It is a lack of political priority. Governments love to talk about how important regional WA is. But regional families do not need more speeches about resilience. They need safer roads. They need investment where the data clearly shows lives are being lost.
A significant amount of work has been done on state-managed highways and major roads, and that investment matters. The road toll is reducing on the roads where the safety treatments are applied. We know this works. We know it saves lives. But the next urgent frontier is local government roads.
That is where far too many people are dying.
Local governments are already being asked to do more with less. Small regional shires simply do not have the financial capacity to deliver large-scale safety upgrades alone. They need urgent State Government support to implement proven, low-cost safety treatments that save lives.
The evidence is already there. The RAC has advocated strongly for a Regional Local Road Safety Program focused on practical interventions like sealing shoulders, widening lanes and installing audible edge lines to reduce run-off-road crashes. These are not glamorous projects. They do not make flashy announcements. But they save lives.
But this is not about politics, it’s about the injustice of entirely preventable crashes, and acting with the urgency regional road safety deserves.
Because right now, too many regional Western Australians are attending funerals instead of birthdays. Too many parents are answering late-night phone calls that change their lives forever. Too many country communities are carrying trauma that could have been prevented.
National Road Safety Week should never end with more young lives lost.
If the Government is serious about reducing the road toll, then the funding priorities must finally match the reality on the ground in regional WA.
Country families are tired of hearing promises.
They want to see the roads made safer before another set of headlights never makes it home.
ENDS
