Developing a national approach to managing drink driving offenders

Although the need for uniform national laws in a number of areas has been well recognized (e.g. commercial transactions, consumer credit and gun control), drink driving penalties, police enforcement and drink driver rehabilitation/education programs vary across Australian states and territories. Given the national success of breath analysis concentration limits (BAC) and random breath analysis (RBT) in reducing crash fatalities it may be possible to further reduce alcohol-related driving deaths by developing a uniform national approach based on best practice to manage drink driving offenders. The current drink driving legislation, penalties and rehabilitation programs across Australia will be discussed in this paper as a preliminary step towards examining the most effective drink driving prevention model.