Alicia Payne MP: Good morning, I'm Alicia Payne, the Member for Canberra, and it's great to be here with Minister Kristy McBain at one of our busiest intersections, here at Yamba Drive and Hindmarsh Drive. 

Today we're announcing the next round of black spot funding for the ACT, almost $7 million on 17 projects that will help make our roads safer. The Black Spot Program is a Federal Government program that's been running for 40 years I believe, $150 million around the country. And the great thing about this program is that anyone in our community can put forward a submission to have an intersection or an area where there have been crashes, or it looks like there could be crashes, to make it safer.

We've got 17 projects in this round and the majority of those were put forward by the community, by road user groups, and that is exactly what we want to see from this program.

I'm the Member for Canberra but was also able to chair the ACT Black Spot Program that brought together a range of stakeholders - safety groups, road user groups, pedestrian groups - to consider these projects. And we're really pleased that we were able to fund these 17 projects that are going to make our roads safer for Canberrans.

Minister McBain:  It's a real pleasure to be here today with Member for Canberra, Alicia Payne, who's the Chair of our ACT Black Spots Committee. And as she said, this is part of a broader road Black Spot Program that the Albanese Labor Government funds. We've increased funding on this road Black Spot Program to $150 million a year. And it's one where community groups and state and territory governments can come together and actually put forward intersections or roads that need additional treatment for safety. 

We are really pleased that there are 17 projects across the ACT receiving funding in this round of the road Black Spots Program, and most impressively this intersection here near the Canberra Hospital, Yamba Drive and Hindmarsh Drive is always incredibly busy.  It's one that we have seen some minor crashes, so it is really important that we look at those treatments that we can put in place. 

We know road safety is incredibly important. That's why as a government in this last budget we have put money towards additional road safety measures including making sure there are further investigations using state and territory data, and national data, so that states and territories can come together to plan priority projects just like this one more effectively, making sure that we're taking into account changes in car technology in particular.

Road safety will continue to be a big important part of what we do as a government to make sure we are keeping people safer.

It's one of the reasons we've increased our roads to recovery funding for every local council across the country, making sure that more roads are maintained more effectively for local communities.

It's a real pleasure, as I said, to be here in this spot today, announcing $7 million of funding to the ACT for road safety.

And I want to thank all the stakeholders who have put forward those intersections and those roads that do need additional treatment.

Reporter: So 17 locations, that is quite a number of places actually getting some work done for safety upgrades. What do these works look like? What exactly has been upgraded to improve safety?

Payne: Well, the Black Spot Program is around what you'd call minor treatments to intersections, things like signage, reducing speed limits, adding speed humps or traffic calming devices - and those sorts of things that have been proven to make a big difference to safety.

So I won't try and go through all 17 in detail, but this on here is the biggest project, near the Canberra Hospital, and that's around putting mast arms, which puts signs over the road, and also changing, correcting the angle of the slip lanes and widening the road to make this major intersection safer.

Reporter: So, with this in mind then, 17 upgrades again is a pretty significant number. What exactly are you hoping to achieve with all this?

Payne: It's about making our roads safer, and as the Minister pointed out, this is obviously not the only thing that either the Federal or ACT governments are doing here in the ACT to make our roads safer, but it is a really important program around those relatively minor improvements to intersections or dangerous spots around the roads, which have been suggested by the community.

Reporter: Now this has also come at a time when the ACT has so far this year already had nine road fatalities, more than the entirety of last year. Do you believe that these upgrades will actually help address this number and possibly reduce it?

Payne: Well, the Black Spot Program is about identifying places on our roads where there have been accidents and improving those areas to prevent future accidents. So we hope that this will help to prevent accidents of all sorts.

I think that these 17 projects - they can be both preventative or where we have seen incidents - and I think the majority of these were ones where we had seen incidents, not fatalities, but where there can be things done to make those areas safer.

Reporter: Okay, so the first question for you [Minister McBain] today is, $7 million going towards these upgrades. That's not a very cheap investment. Are you positive that this is enough for safety upgrades on ACT roads?

Minister McBain: We'll continue to work with territory and state governments over our investments in the road Black Spot Program. This is one announcement, it won't be the end of announcements for this program. We work with the chairs of these committees, and they're all chaired by members of parliament, and Alicia chairs the ACT committee with stakeholders and the territory government to make sure that we're capturing not only the data, but also the anecdotal evidence that community puts forward around crash data, including whether there are fatalities, incidents or preventative treatments.

So it's not the only thing we're doing, but it’s a good start. Any death on our roads is one death too many and unfortunately we've seen the road death tally go up in the past couple of years. It's one of the reasons we've increased funding to this road Black Spot Program. We've increased funding and also created a new program called Safer Local Roads and Infrastructure, which is $200 million a year. And we've increased Roads to Recovery funding.

And that means the territory government is receiving substantially more money for maintaining roads across the territory because we understand that everyone should be able to go to work, to school, to sporting events safely and come home safely. It's what we all want to see.

One death on our roads is one too many, but we need to start addressing it somewhere, and this $7 million is an investment in road safety in the ACT.

Reporter: Just want to follow up on what you just said there. It's a great start for the territory and stuff like that. $7 million is a big step forward. What are the next steps here if you're talking about that?

Minister McBain: We continue to invest in the ACT. I think you'll find their Roads to Recovery funding has gone up by more than $20 million over the next five-year funding period and we continue to work with the territory government on a range of other projects.

In the last round of the Safer Local Roads and Infrastructure Program, the ACT received funding to upgrade a range of culverts as you head towards Sutton on ACT roads.

So we continue to work with them on a range of road funding programs.

This is one big investment here on road safety, and one of the big things about this program is we hear directly from community members and stakeholders who can actually nominate black spots.

One of the crucial parts about this program is actually making sure that we're dealing with the data that's in front of us but making sure that we're actually taking advice from community about where these accidents are happening.