If the fast moving vehicles don’t get you, these brainless talking points will.
Last Thursday, the NSW Parliament debated the Safer Speeds Bill (actually the Road Legislation Amendment (Speed Limits) Bill 2025). This was a chance to hear from some of the least-qualified but most-elected people in the state on why they opposed this reform. Here’s what they had to say.
David Harris MP, Several Ministries and Member for Wyong (10+ road deaths since 2020):
We believe we can get better outcomes for New South Wales by working with communities to make decisions at a local level by considering what the road is used for, who uses the road, and what is the nature of the road and its environment. We can then set the right speed limit, rather than using a broad, blanket approach that may not be the right speed across the board.
This is a common trope that the Government and Opposition have used when discussing the Bill. Instead of ‘mandating a blanket approach’, let’s work with communities and councils to find the right setting, as we (supposedly) do under the current law. It is carefully constructed language that hints at technocratic elites preventing local decision-making, but falls apart with even a minute’s thought.
First, speed limits always involve ‘mandating’. They are mandatory. That is how a law works, which I think David knows, because it is his job to make laws.
Second, 30km/h as the default urban speed is no more or less a blanket approach than 50km/h. It is simply a different (safer) setting within the existing system, where speeds can also be set differently through a speed zoning review. David knows this too, because he set out the system in tedious detail at the start of his speech, which I spared you from reading. You will be shocked to learn that he thinks the previous default change (from 60 to 50) was good, but that this proposed change (50 to 30) is a dangerous overreach.
The Member for Wyong then explains how a lower default speed isn’t needed, because the current system works so well, using an example from his electorate. Stick with me, because this is unhinged:
The village of Gorokan in my electorate of Wyong has a shopping strip called Main Road. There is an aged-care facility on one side of the road, and a pedestrian crossing. Because of the traffic volumes, a large number of people were hit trying to cross the road. They were mainly older people who took longer to cross the road than young people.
In consultation with the local council and residents in the area, speed humps were initiated at both ends of the shopping strip and the speed limit was dropped to 40 kilometres per hour. That annoyed some people. They were upset that the general speed limit of 60 kilometres at that time was slowed down, but it was absolutely essential to protect older citizens crossing the road. Many people parked on the opposite side to the shops, and then crossed the road without proceeding to the pedestrian crossing but running across the road instead. In that case, it was appropriate and the change was made.
The New South Wales Government’s approach to speed limits recognises the evidence on road safety risk, as I was just saying. There was a history of people being hit by vehicles. We engaged with the community to align speed limits to the environment on that particular section of the road near the shops and the residential area, where older citizens lived. We all have the same goal of setting safe speeds and making our roads safer. We need to determine the right way to get there.
Now, you may be thinking “this sounds like a story from the main street of Hell”, and you’d be right. This Government MP, who has five (5) ministries, thinks that the best system for lowering speeds is that “a large number” of “mainly older people” were first hit by cars at 60km/h, leading to a lengthy and expensive safety review, which then meant speeds could be lowered.
In his own telling, the community opposed these changes anyway, but because “there was a history of people being hit by vehicles”, the change was able to be made. It is kind of staggering to witness this narrow process argument about how speeds are set lead a presumably intelligent person to such an obvious policy failure.
I was planning to do a deep dive on other claims made throughout the debate, but there isn’t much depth to them, so a shallow one will do.
On the way out of his speech David claims without evidence that parents are endangering their children by encouraging them to cross the road unsupervised because they can’t be bothered to get out of their car.
The Shadow Minister for Roads and Member for Oatley (6+ road deaths since 2020) uses his speech to criticise “sweeping statewide changes that override local decision-making” (again, they do not).
The Member for Liverpool (8+ road deaths since 2020) attacks a council in her electorate for making local decisions, in this case, to lower the speed limit in their area.
Each speaker opposing the bill gestured vaguely at other measures to make roads safer, such as infrastructure, technology and driver behaviour, as though that was somehow an argument against lowering speeds.
We don’t need more evidence that 30 will save lives. We need more politicians who are willing to change speeds before people are hit and killed around main streets and school zones.
Without Government support, this Bill will be voted down on the next sitting day, sometime in May. At least 30 people will die on NSW roads between now and then. We owe it to them to keep pushing for change.
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