Benchmarking the Performance of the National Road Safety Strategy
December Quarter, 2023

December Quarter 2023 figures confirm that the National Road Safety Strategy remains offtrack to achieve its target of halving road deaths by 2030.

The 2023 calendar year had the worst 12-month national road toll in almost seven years – and the numbers grew worse as the year progressed.

In 2023, 1,266 people died on Australian roads. That’s up 7.3 per cent from 2022’s 1,180 road deaths, and almost as high as the 1,288 deaths recorded in the 12 months to January 2017. 

The second half of 2023 had 677 road deaths – the highest fatalities in two consecutive quarters since the first half of 2010 when 688 people died on our roads. 

The rising national toll was driven by big increases in NSW (24.9 per cent), Victoria (22.5 per cent) and South Australia (64.9 per cent). Road deaths fell in Queensland, Western Australia and Tasmania, but this followed big fatality increases in 2022, and those states’ 2023 figures were close to their 2020 and 2021 fatality numbers.

Australia’s annual road deaths are now 15.4 per cent higher than when the National Road Safety Strategy began. A lack of data remains a critical barrier to understanding the factors driving the increase. Indeed, three of the strategy’s five headline targets remain either unmeasured or unreported.