A recent road safety report has revealed that the car is Australia's deadliest weapon.
According to the latest benchmarking report released by the Australian Automobile Association, road deaths in Australia are up 6.8 per cent in the last year.
That translates to 1,350 people losing their lives on Australian roads with thousands more seriously injured.
Most notable is the rise in pedestrian deaths, up by more than 23 per cent in the past year.
That means there were more pedestrian deaths than those who were killed as passengers in vehicles, and Australians killed by guns or knives.
There's been a continuous upward trend since the National Road Safety Strategy was put in place in 2021.
It was meant to halve road deaths and serious injuries by 2030.
The plan set ambitious targets including zero road deaths for children under seven, and no deaths on major city roads and national highways.
But, according to the report, no state or territory is on track to meet those targets.
The Northern Territory and Tasmania are the only states or territories that saw road deaths decrease while the average rose across all other states.
Western Australia had the worst result, with road deaths rising from 16 to 31 in the 12 months to 30 September 2025 - an increase of almost 94 per cent.
This is despite Australia's largest state having the only road safety commissioner in the country.
Pedestrian Council of Australia chairman Harold Scruby said it was time that the judiciary and politicians took the road toll seriously.
"You never hear politicians talking about the road toll... they'll talk about domestic violence, they'll talk about knives and deaths until the cows come home... but they'll never talk about the road toll," Mr Scruby told AAP.
"They seem to think that its just part of the scenery and its something that's unavoidable.
He also pleaded with the rest of Australia to follow the lead of NSW and remove the word "accident" from the lexicon around road trauma.
"95 per cent or more are not accidents, they occur when people break the rules, so they are not accidents," he said.
His organisation has suggested implementing 30 kilometre per hour zones in high pedestrian areas, more scramble crossings and pedestrian controlled traffic lights.
But Mr Scruby said pedestrians also need to take some responsibility for their actions, calling for fines for those who cross the road while distracted by electronic devices and noise-cancelling headphones.
Australian Automobile Association managing director Michael Bradley said Australia's worsening road trauma and the clear failure of the agreed approach of governments demanded a serious response from authorities.
He called on the federal government to form a national body for road safety investigations that could provide no-blame analysis of current road safety data, which they say could help identify causal factors behind the fatalities.
A major issue faced by road trauma bodies was the lack of relevant data about where, when and why crashes occurred, he said.
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