Mr. Keith Walsh:

I thank the Senator for the question. As she knows, the speed limit review went to Government and was approved by it in September 2023. The first phase of that, which was the reduction of local rural road speed limits from 80 km/h to 60 km/h, was done by way of national default through legislation in February of this year. The next phase of it, as the Senator outlined, is the change from 50 km/h down to 30 km/h in built-up urban areas. The hope or the intention was initially to do that second phase in the same manner by way of national default. However, when we looked into this, it just was not possible to do that. The reason is there is no definition in legislation of what a built-up urban area is, so it is not possible to, at the stroke of a pen, change the default 50 km/h in built-up urban areas down to 30 km/h. We effectively had two options when we were looking at how to implement this. When I say “we”, I mean the implementation group of experts looking at this. There were two options for implementing phase 2. One was to look as a first step to defining what a built-up urban area is and to put that definition in regulation or in legislation. It was felt that would be a very complex and technical thing to do and would take a lot of time. It was decided a better approach was to go down the local authority route and that is the approach that has been taken. Effectively, it will be a matter for local authorities via by-laws and decisions of the local councillors to identify built-up urban areas with roads that are 50 km/h and to reduce those to 30 km/h.