- New hard-hitting advertising campaign to target speeding
- Advertisements highlight the tragic consequences of driving too fast
- Speed consistently represents the number one killer on our roads
The Cook Government will today launch a new hard-hitting advertising campaign to target speeding on Western Australian roads.
The Speeding Shatters Your Excuses campaign explores the excuses people use to justify speeding and the tragic and all-too-frequent consequences of those decisions.
The campaign follows a roundtable called by Premier Roger Cook this month at which road safety advocates called for more targeted and harder hitting advertising to drive home the road safety message.
The advertisements will run across television, print and radio as well as billboards, cinema, streaming services, video-on-demand and social media.
The campaign targets young people who are over-represented in crash statistics and those who self-identify as road rule breakers, but who are also open to be influenced to change their attitudes and behaviours.
This covers a wide range of people given 87 per cent of WA drivers admit to speeding and 51 per cent consider speeding to be acceptable driving behaviour.
Earlier this month, the Cook Government announced a $32.5 million boost to road safety initiatives on regional roads over the next four years.
The initiatives - which included an expansion of safety treatments, two new alcohol and drug testing buses, increased police enforcement and new high-visibility police car livery as well as improved traffic data gathering - follow a spike in regional road deaths this year.
As stated by Road Safety Minister David Michael:
"We know that the single biggest factor driving our State's road toll is speed - speed plus inattention, speed plus fatigue or both - and when we add in not wearing a seatbelt we have a fatal cocktail.
"This is why the new road safety campaign we are launching today is so important.
"Speeding Shatters Your Excuses is a hard-hitting campaign, which I believe will make people think again before they make the dangerous choice to drive too fast.
"It's a simple matter of physics. The faster you are driving, the more likely it is for you to crash and the faster you are travelling when you crash, the more likely it is that you will be seriously injured or killed.
"There really are no excuses."
