Lara Jensen: Australian families are ‘fed up’ with lack of action on rail safety

“Fed up” — this graffitied message on a grain wagon sums up exactly how the families of rail crash victims I represent around Australia are feeling. We are advocates for public safety who campaign in our own time, at our own cost, and who face massive opposition from ASX-listed companies with massive resources at their disposal. These companies have the support of the State Government that chooses to ignore us — as evidenced in the multiple unanswered emails I have sent to Transport Minister Rita Saffioti’s office regarding long overdue action on train illumination, dating back to last year. Our hearts went out to the families and friends of the two train drivers who were killed in a truck versus train collision near Bindarrah on the South Australian border on New Year’s Eve. Every rail crash stings for us personally as we too have lost family members in the same way. What also stings is the fact that not one of the families of rail crash victims I represent were invited to the National Level Crossing Safety roundtable in Brisbane, so we had no chance to be part of the national dialogue surrounding level crossing safety that the Bindarrah tragedy was the catalyst for. We collectively looked on in complete disbelief at how easy it was for the rail industry to secure a national safety summit with full Government support in a matter of weeks following this tragedy, in complete contrast to the reaction to the deaths of our loved ones killed by collisions with trains and road vehicles. The uncomfortable truth remains that nobody from the rail industry, including the State Government-owned rail freight operator involved in our accident, Westrail, ever came forward when my brother and his two friends were struck and killed by a fully loaded grain train at a notorious crossing near Jennacubbine in the WA Wheatbelt on July 8, 2000. Furthermore, Westrail vehemently resisted our families’ pleas to make any improvements whatsoever to train lighting following the unequivocal recommendations for immediate action to improve it by WA State Coroner Alastair Hope in 2001. We didn’t get a roundtable, a safety summit, any genuine remorse, or any commitment whatsoever to improve train lighting — and here we are 23 years later, still fighting for these lifesaving improvements. We are told change is coming but our families lobbying for rail safety reform are acutely aware that when it comes to train illumination specifically, progress is grudgingly slow and the wait is far from over. It is still completely unclear what the outcome of the forthcoming Rail Industry Safety and Standards Board review of voluntary train lighting standard AS 7531 (the third in as many years) will be, or how effective a code of practice on level crossings and train visibility being developed by the Office of the National Rail Safety Regulator will really be. Based on my lived experience, though, it is a foregone conclusion that if this ONRSR code of practice isn’t specific, mandatory and enforceable with penalties for non-compliant rail operators, then the ONRSR may as well file it in the bin right now. We have already observed for decades what rail operators driven by the protection of profit over public safety can get away with when weak regulators fail to enforce and spineless Governments refuse to legislate. Lara Jensen is the owner of Wondinong Station at Mt Magnet and a rail safety campaigner.