Seatbelts Forum - Townsville

Seatbelts: Lets make it click forum

Date: Thursday 30 August 2018

Place: Rydges Southbank Townsville, Palmer Street, Townsville

Background

The Honourable Mark Bailey MP, Minister for Transport and Main Roads, hosted the Seatbelts: Lets make it click forum in Townsville, as part of the Queensland Road Safety Week.

The purpose of the forum was to explore the reasons why some individuals do not wear seatbelts and to develop short, medium and longer-term solutions to address this. In summary, to encourage more people to buckle up, more often.

26 people participated from a range of local and state government agencies, youth, health, transport and community organisations including intercultural and Indigenous groups. The full day workshop saw participants analyse recent research, including motivations and barriers to seatbelt use, and generate practical ideas to encourage more Queenslanders to wear their seatbelt on every trip, every time.

Key outcomes

Many ideas were generated at the forum and fell into 3 categories: communication, engagement and experiments.

The Department of Transport and Main Roads is proceeding with implementing or investigating the actions:

• New communication raising awareness of the impacts on others, influence of children on their parents, cost of fines and demerit points, dangers of not wearing a seatbelt even at low speeds, on local roads.
• 2018 Christmas seatbelts campaign ‘All they want for Christmas is you’ has been developed as the first deliverable.
• A second phase of this campaign with new creative is scheduled for early 2019.
• A series of boosted social media focusing on seatbelts throughout 2019.
• A pilot engagement program developed for Indigenous people to discuss road safety broadly and potentially identify solutions to develop with the community, with seatbelts included as an issue.
• Development of a road safety workplace guide to help identify the practical ways that organisations can encourage safer driving by their employees. his would include advice regarding encouraging employees to always wear their seatbelts.
• Targeting children to reach parents with key compliance messages via education/school programs and other key stakeholders.
• Encouraging local groups to propose solutions to the seatbelts issue locally and fund the solutions. This could potentially include focus on regional early pre-teen learners who learn to drive on the land (rather than the road) where seatbelt non-compliance is often first learned.
• Consideration of in-car technologies including personalised (family related) visual or audio cues additional to the current seatbelt alerts to discuss with relevant stakeholders.