The federal government has been accused of "tolerating failure" on road safety after the country experienced its deadliest six months on the roads since 2010.
There were 1266 road deaths recorded nationally across the country for 2023, up by 7.3 per cent on the year before.
To make matters even worse, NSW has recorded 24 roads deaths in 26 days so far in 2024 - the worst start to the year in more than a decade - while Victoria has lost 19, and Queensland 13.
The ACT had recorded only one fatality for 2024 by Australia Day.
In the latest road deaths in NSW, a ute and a truck collided late on Thursday morning at Kyalite near the NSW-Victoria border, and both drivers died. Earlier that same morning, a 38-year-old motorcyclist police had seen running a red light just after midnight, later hit a truck at a Liverpool intersection and died.
Data analysis by the Australian Automobile Association found the largest year-on-year fatal crash increases in 2023 occurred in the country's two most populous states - NSW (up by 24.9 per cent) and Victoria (22.5 per cent). South Australia was up by 64.8 per cent.
However, the 2023 NSW data had been skewed by one terrible incident: the Hunter Valley bus crash of June 11, in which 10 people died.
The AAA said the National Road Safety Strategy 2021-30 was failing.
"In it, all states and territories, as well as the Commonwealth, set a target of halving road deaths by 2030," said the association's managing director Michael Bradley.
"Yet the figures are going the other way. We seem to be tolerating failure."
The AAA has been campaigning strongly for the federal government to require states and territory government to publish more data about road safety as a condition of their receipt of their share of the $10 billion spent each year on roads.
"Without good data, Australia has no credible plan to understand its current road trauma problems or prevent their continuation," he said.
"While so much data relating to roads quality and crash causation remains secret, Australia can neither identify the cause of its rising road toll, nor develop the most effective measures to reduce it.
"AAA research shows Australians are deeply cynical of how politicians prioritise road project funding, and improved data transparency is a commonsense approach.''
The National Road Safety Action Plan 2023-25, the first instalment of the decade-long strategic plan, exposes the need for "long term cultural change".
It presents a tactical change in strategy where a "social model approach" is defined in an effort to address the high number of deaths and injuries on rural and regional roads.
These objectives are to support local government capabilities and the culture within Australian businesses and to partner with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander organisations on "community-based road safety initiatives".
