19/05/2026
"Drive so others survive" is this year's National Road Safety Week theme.
For this industry, "others" includes the people standing on the road as drivers pass them. Our workers on foot. Sealers. Pavers. Inspectors. Profilers. The workforce building and maintaining the network.
On average, seven of them don't go home each year. Another 93 are seriously injured.
This week, AfPA's National Health and Safety Committee is publishing two articles that, together, mark a step-change in how this industry understands roadworker risk.
The first goes live today.
→ https://afpa.asn.au/afpa-national-safety-data-initiative-may-2026/
For the first time in the sector's history, Boral, Colas, Downer and Fulton Hogan have developed a single shared safety risk language, the AfPA Safety Risk Matrix, for classifying and reporting safety incidents so that what one of them measures can be understood, compared and acted on by all of them.
The challenge this solves is one that anyone working in WHS governance will recognise. A consequence rated "Major" under one company's framework can sit at "Significant" or "Catastrophic" under another. Likelihood descriptors carry different implied probabilities depending on the matrix in use. The result has been that comparing safety performance across organisations, or aggregating it to build a national picture, has been effectively impossible.
For the first time in our industry, we can map each contributor's existing internal scales to a common equivalent, so organisations retain the frameworks they already operate; no one is being asked to overhaul established systems, while also generating data that is directly comparable to every other participant's.
The matrix is the foundation. Without it, there is no national dataset. With it, there is, and on Thursday, we'll publish what that dataset is beginning to tell us.
