For immediate release, Monday 18 November 2024, Sydney: As part of its longstanding partnership with Road Safety Education Limited and its commitment to Zero Harm, extending to the responsibility of road safety and better educating drivers and passengers, Boral Limited (“Boral”) will today support in the delivery of the RYDA road safety program at Singleton High School in the Hunter Valley.
The company will also be awarding the Boral Police Award to Senior Constable Alison Stewart of Maitland Police for her dedication to road safety education and instrumental work in facilitating school, police officer and road safety expert participation throughout the Hunter region.
Last year, more than 1200 people were killed on Australian roads, a 7.3 per cent increase on the previous year.[1] Traffic injury is the biggest killer of Australian children under 15 and the second-biggest killer of all Australians aged between 15 and 24.[2]
Singleton High School will participate in RYDA for the first time in 10 years, joining more than 40,000 students who have participated in the program so far this year throughout Australia. It is being delivered thanks to corporate partners which include Boral. The RYDA program is professionally developed by leading learning organisation and not-for-profit Road Safety Education Limited (RSE).
Monday’s workshop will feature six interactive sessions facilitated by experts to help Year 10 students make better decisions on the road – as they become novice drivers and from the seat of a car as passengers – and prepare them for responsible road use. Boral will have a heavy vehicle present at the workshop to help students understand and experience the visibility challenges from a truck cabin.
David Hardy, General Manager Concrete Regional NSW, says: “We are proud to be a longstanding partner of RSE and the RYDA program, having students learn from our Boral drivers to better understand risks around trucks and heavy vehicles on the road. As one of the largest suppliers of construction materials in Australia, we have a large heavy vehicle footprint – about 3,500 heavy vehicles - and are on the road everyday delivering to customers. We are committed to better educating the next generation of drivers and passengers with whom we share the road with.
“We are very pleased to present the Boral Police Award to Senior Constable Alison Stewart for her deep level of support and unwavering commitment to road safety education. She has been instrumental in securing school participation as well as local road safety experts and police officers into workshops throughout the Hunter region. Alison has contributed greatly to safer roads for road users and the communities she serves and we’re delighted to present her with this award.”
Senior Constable Alison Stewart of Maitland Police, says: “Having a licence is not a right but a privilege and this privilege opens up opportunities for education, employment and being able to connect with our communities socially, which to young people is extremely important. It is a long road to obtaining a licence, but, it can be a short path to losing it. This can lead to frustrations by young drivers, which in turn can cause them to make bad choices to maintain their independence. Education can be the difference between the safety of themselves, their passengers and other road users.”
John Elliott, RSE’s Head of Program Delivery, says: “Senior Constable Stewart and her fellow officers have seen first-hand what can go wrong with poor decision-making on the road. Not only crashes but the impacts of losing licences, especially on youths, in the Hunter region.
“This award not only recognises the invaluable contribution police make to road safety education across Australia, but the support Boral and our corporate partners provide to ensure life-saving education is affordable and accessible to those who need it the most.
“In the past five years, 139 people have been killed or seriously injured on Singleton roads, with 29 (21%) of these aged 17 to 25. Road trauma, especially those effecting youths who are so overrepresented in statistics, is a community challenge. It takes a community response, with local police, businesses, Rotary volunteers and schools to take on that challenge. RYDA brings together local support with the Australia’s largest and longest-running best practice road safety education program.”
[1] Bureau of Infrastructure and Transport Research Economic, December 2023, https://www.bitre.gov.au/sites/default/files/documents/rda_dec2023.pdf
Photo/video opportunity:
The Boral Police Award will be presented at 9am on Monday 18 November at Singleton High School by David Hardy, Boral’s General Manager Concrete Regional NSW. Short remarks will be provided by RSE’s John Elliott, with Senior Constable Stewart accompanied by Acting Superintendent Matthew Zimmer from NSW Police.
Students will take part in the heavy vehicle session of the program at 11.10-11.40am and 12.44-1.14pm, where they can be photographed listening to a talk from a Boral driver and sitting in the truck cabin.
For media enquiries, please contact:
Macrina Lim, FTI Consulting
0430 547 751
macrina.lim@fticonsulting.com
About Boral
Boral is the largest vertically-integrated construction materials company in Australia.
Our network includes prized quarry and cement infrastructure, bitumen, construction materials recycling, asphalt and concrete batching operations.
We employ about 7,500 employees and contractors across our operations that span more than 360 sites nation-wide.
For more than 75 years we’ve been building something great in Australia - rarely a day goes by that you wouldn’t pass one of our sites or trucks, enter a building, use a road, bridge, tunnel, footpath or other critical infrastructure that our people and products have helped enable.