And, so, December ends with the reality-biting grimness that 2023 was the deadliest on Australian roads in five-and-a-half years.
The fact that 1,253 people were killed in Australian vehicle crashes to 18 December (three more people were killed two days later and still others may have been, too, by the time you read this) should be a matter of deep societal anguish and reflection. If people were dying violently in such numbers in any other way, it would be a national emergency.
Road “accidents” (a word that intrinsically absolves blame where blame is usually present) seem to be another matter, psychologically and socially – for all except those who are killed and injured in them, and for those left behind to wonder why society cares so little.
Society has long been inured to the human misery of the “road toll’’ – a benign term that semantically neutralises and sanitises the innumerable violent ways drivers and pedestrians die.
Except in the most extreme cases where a driver is proven legally culpable, the dead are rarely seen as victims of violence or of automobile homicide.
Instead those killed in auto-violence are “tolled”. We road toll them. It at once dehumanises them, neutralises curiosity about their deaths and diminishes in the public psyche the horrific, violent nature of their deaths. We tut-tut the “road toll’’. Then governments, individuals and society do little to counter it because we have become inured to the human element of all this killing.
We do not pause to consider the societal effect, the waste of human life, the suffering and the community, familial, financial cost of road carnage.
Australia has long been acutely cognisant of the great societal effect of the wars we have committed to, nationally and colonially. Generations of young people cut down. “Wasted’’. A shrine – the Australian War memorial – is dedicated to honouring them. We are in a state of perpetual acknowledgment if not national mourning at their “loss’’.
What of those killed in vehicle collisions?
Well, the slaughter on our roads of all that humanity, intellect, talent, youth, the wisdom of age, parental-, childish- and fraternal-love has arguably had a bigger societal impact on Australia than conflict. It has left a bigger human hole than war. But it’s mostly an invisible hole.
Consider the numbers: 103,021 Australian military personnel have died since 1860 while deployed overseas.
Here is where Kerry King, the author of the academically groundbreaking 2020 book A Lesser Species of Homicide – Death, Drivers and the Law – gives context to all that human carnage on the roads.
“Between 1925, when Australian authorities first began collating national fatality statistics, and the year 2000, official reports indicate that nearly 200,000 people died, or were killed on Australian roads. By the end of 2018, more than 25,000 people had joined that bleak figure,’’ King writes in her book.
“The addition of fatality statistics from the car’s introduction to Australia in 1896, were the numbers available, would elevate the official figures appreciably.’’
So, more than twice as many people have been killed in crashes on Australian roads as in all of our wars and conflicts.
When we drive around Australia we see many monuments to our war dead. Often they are adjacent to small memorials – wooden crosses with teddy bears and photographs of people killed in vehicle crashes. Yet we don’t relegate the killed service personnel to some “war toll’’.
A couple of years ago, when I wrote about one episode of road carnage that captured Australian imagination, King contacted me and got me thinking about how I – and most Australians – think about what has become the statistical normalisation, through tolling, of road death and killing.
But unthinkingly, a few weeks ago when I wrote about dangerous driving, I still referred to the statistically numbing, dehumanising, “road toll’’.
King says, “The whole discourse around these deaths is absurd. Unlike any other form of crime or offending, we talk of these deaths in euphemisms and peculiar smokescreens. People ‘losing their lives’, ‘accidents’, ‘road deaths’ and ‘road tolls’. It’s as though the road is some sort of grim reaper. Where is the human agency? In these deceptive, broadly accepted categories and statistical reporting, we homogenise all deaths as equal. But they’re not all equal. On the road some people kill and injure others.
“Imagine a world in which there was a comparative equivalent? Brand, for example, all deaths involving a knife or gun, be they ‘accident’, suicide, murder or manslaughter as uniform, as one category. And then, worst still, insist that the majority of those victims be homogenised with the perpetrators, and be excluded from Australia’s national homicide statistics.
“We’ve attenuated and diluted what happens on the road as a species apart. We routinely charge drivers (if we charge them at all) with dangerousness and carelessness – but rarely manslaughter. Why is what we do in our vehicles a lesser species of harm in nomenclature and penalty? We know that the majority of fatalities are caused by risk-taking behaviour – speeding, distraction, driving under the influence (of alcohol or drugs), fatigue, and the ultimate euphemism ‘distraction’ – or, if you think about it another way, the majority of fatalities are caused by traffic offending and crime.’’
If we are serious about stopping so many people being killed so violently in motor vehicle collisions, society, governments and, not least the media, need to urgently challenge the hegemony of the language most of us have blithely adopted to describe what is happening.
Let’s start talking about offending and criminal violence on our roads and highways.
Paul Daley is a Guardian Australia columnist
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