Ms PATTEN (Northern Metropolitan) — On 1 March I attended the Sydney Road festival and the wonderful Brunswick Music Festival. They were joyfilled events that were crammed with tens of thousands of locals enjoying the spirit of the day.
There was, however, a shadow over the mood that you could just sense amongst the crowd that day. It came on the back of a very sad day when a young man had been tragically killed after a cycling accident on the same road where locals were celebrating — a dooring incident that had shocked and saddened everyone. My heart goes out to his family and friends. As I passed the spot where his life was so quickly and so awfully taken, I saw that his friends were just sitting there, weeping. There is nothing that can be said at that moment when you are faced with the brutally quick and senseless loss of life, which is what his loved ones were faced with.
My heart also goes out to the driver of the car who opened the door, which ultimately led to this tragic accident. Through an everyday moment their lives were changed. It was an accident; preventable though it may have been, it was an accident nonetheless. There was also the driver of the truck and the people who saw it. It was just awful.
I applaud the government, in particular the member for Brunswick in the Assembly, Jane Garrett, for her immediate intervention on the issue — her willingness to encourage the Labor government to look not only at the geographically specific reasons why this occurred in this area of Sydney Road, Brunswick, but also at the issue of cyclist road safety as a whole across the state, with particular attention to dooring as a prime campaign focus.
