Australia’s country drivers have long accepted that life beyond the city limits comes with a fair bit of dust, potholes, and the odd roo on the road. What they didn’t sign up for? A blanket 30km/h drop in the default speed limit across rural roads, from 100km/h down to 70. That’s the current talking point coming out of Canberra, and while the government says it’s about safety, plenty of regional Aussies reckon it’s got more to do with shifting blame than saving lives.
The Pitch: Slower Speeds, Safer Roads
The Albanese government is exploring a plan to reduce default rural speed limits as part of a broader road safety push. The central argument from the Department of Infrastructure is simple: a lot of regional roads, especially the unsealed and poorly maintained ones, aren’t safe to drive at 100km/h.
They’re right, in a way. Anyone who’s ever been spat off a washout or rattled along a corrugated gravel road knows this. The Department even estimates that dropping speeds to 70km/h could save over 100 lives a year. Hard figure, hard to ignore.
But here’s the problem: that stat doesn’t come with the whole story.
The Backlash: It’s Not the Drivers, It’s the Roads
Rather than celebrate the move, many in the bush see it as a cop-out, a band-aid solution slapped over a much deeper wound: chronic underfunding of regional infrastructure. That’s exactly the view coming from Liberal MP Tom Venning, who flat-out called it “an admission of failure” that the government couldn’t maintain country roads, so they decided to “slow everyone down instead.”
Venning, whose electorate covers a slab of South Australia, says drivers aren’t the problem, the roads are. He says funding for regional road repairs is “going backwards,” and it shows.
“We expect every vehicle on our roads to be roadworthy, yet many of our roads aren’t car-worthy,” he says.
The Cost of Crawling
There’s also the matter of productivity. Every truckie, farmer, tradie, and travelling family knows that chopping 30km/h off every country road turns every journey into a slog. Longer delivery times, slower commutes, higher freight costs. It all piles up. The government’s own modelling found that 70km/h had the worst economic return of the speed options they tested. Cutting it to 80 or 90 may still hurt, but at least it wouldn’t cripple country flow.
Which begs the question: why was 70 even floated?
Déjà Vu… With a Twist
Transport Minister Catherine King reckons these new speed limits aren’t Labor’s idea at all, claiming the Nationals under Barnaby Joyce were the first to put it on the table back in 2018. The flip-flop politics aside, what remains clear is this: nobody is denying that people die on rural roads. But dropping the speed limit might be more of a quick political win than a genuine fix.
If governments had done their job maintaining country roads in the first place, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.
The Mr 4X4 Take
Every regional Aussie has a story about “that one road” you need a snorkel to cross when it rains, or a chiropractor to survive when it doesn’t. But you know what they don’t have many stories about? Daily crashes caused by doing 100km/h on an open, straight bit of blacktop.
Blanket restrictions on speed limits punish everyone, not just the idiots doing 140 in a paddock basher with bald tyres. If the government’s serious about saving lives, it’s time to fund the roads, not slow the people who rely on them.
Because if the only tool in your road safety kit is a lower speed sign, you’re not fixing the engine, you’re just taping over the warning light.
