Road Safety Amendment Bill 2011

I rise to speak on the Road Safety Amendment (Hoon Driving and Other Matters) Bill 2011. This is another bill that reaffirms our election commitment to be tough on crime and to send a very clear message to the community that antisocial behaviour will not be tolerated, particularly behaviour that is life threatening.

As we have heard from a number of speakers on this side, the bill will go further towards sending this clear message to the community. It will ensure that vehicles are impounded for 30 days. It will take away the lifeblood of hoon drivers -- that is, their cars. If you want to change any of the behaviours of this particular group in the community -- these people who are very passionate about what they do on the roads -- you must take away the thing that causes the behaviour, their vehicles. I am glad we have seen support for the bill from the opposition, but I will come back and talk about the extent of that support a little later.

As I mentioned, the bill makes a number of amendments to counteract antisocial behaviour, including two amendments to part 6A of the Road Safety Act 1986 to ensure that a number of our election commitments are executed. The first is to extend to 30 days from the current period of 48 hours the period of immediate impoundment or immobilisation of a vehicle on detection of an offence. We know that if you take a car away from somebody for 48 hours, they can be back on the road recommitting that same offence immediately after that, and there is no way to stem that behaviour. The only way we are able to change that is by extending this time frame. The second part relates to prior offences. The term for consideration of prior offences will be extended from three years to six years when determining if a vehicle impoundment offence is a second or subsequent offence.

I want to talk about a particular road that borders my electorate, Dandenong Road.

There have been many times when, on coming home late at night, I have seen Dandenong Road being used as a drag road -- that is, an area that is in effect a racetrack. There is a petrol station on the corner of Dandenong Road and Chapel Street, and for years you would find young people taking their high-performance cars into the service station, tuning them up, getting them ready and subsequently speeding down the highway to see who had the fastest car.

I had the opportunity of working with a number of young people who took part in this sort of activity when I was involved with RMIT University. I spoke to some of them and asked a little about their activities on the weekend, some of which was legal and some of which was illegal. They were very proud of the fact that they would chase police cars and try to beat them. They would run red lights to get away from the police. They had no regard for the law and no regard for safety.

I asked these young people whether they knew that what they were doing was life threatening and that when they ran a red light they could easily hit a car coming from the other side of the road and kill people. The answer I got from these young people was, firstly, that they were bullet proof and, secondly, that there was no chance of them doing that because they were experts at what they did. At the end of the day the need for speed was their no. 1 priority.

You could fine these types of people and you could put them in jail, and we spoke about jail to these young people. You could do a number of things and it would not change their behaviour. But if you take away the one thing that they are so proud of and that they make a life investment in -- it is one of their biggest assets and, as speakers from both sides have said, it is sometimes valued even more than any relationship they may have at the time -- you take away a very important part of their lives. If you take that away, you take away any possible need for speed and you certainly change that behaviour.

This bill is a big step in the right direction, and I am glad the opposition is supporting it. It is very easy to support the bill when you are in opposition, but it is a lot harder when you have to make the tough decisions in government. I would like to point out that when the hoon safety bill was debated in this house in September 2010, the then shadow minister, who is the current Minister for Roads, made some very important points. He said in this place, and I hope the opposition is listening because this is a very important point, that:

On Friday, 22 January, the opposition -- the Liberal Party and The Nationals -- released a hoon driving policy. We believe that for a first hoon driving offence there should be an immediate 30-day vehicle impoundment and a requirement on the offender to complete a safe driving course. However, our amendments --to the bill before the house --only deal with the issue of the 30-day impoundment.

I point this out because we have heard a whole lot of things on the bill tonight from opposition members who now claim they support the bill.

However, it is very interesting that back when Labor members were in government and had every opportunity to extend the period from 48 hours to 30 days they did absolutely nothing.

I have a number of press statements and a number of articles from the Herald Sun and the Age that show this type of behaviour has caused accidents and deaths. The former government could have done something about this if it had made the hard decisions a year ago, but unfortunately those hard decisions were not made. Now the coalition government is making those hard decisions to ensure that the Victorian people are safe. These are the policies that we went to the election with last November and that the Victorian people elected us to carry out. They realised that crime was not being dealt with in the manner it should have been and that the government was not being tough enough and was letting things like this just slip by. We will continue to deliver on our election commitments. We are going about it one by one, step by step.

This bill makes an important amendment to the legislation. It will save lives, send a message and ensure that our streets are safe again. This is something that the Victorian public deserves and expects and something that we as a government will deliver. We will deliver because we were given a mandate in November and because we are determined to save lives, to do what we set out to do and to deliver good government to the people of Victoria, something that the community expects and needs. We as a government will ensure that we follow through on this in this Parliament. The bill is an important one, and I commend it to the house.