Founding chairman of NDARC’s Advisory Board, the Hon. Kevin Rozzoli, gave a fascinating insight into how research and evidence feed into policy change when he returned to the Centre last week to address staff at NDARC’s weekly education seminar.
Mr Rozzoli was Speaker of the Legislative Assembly of NSW when random breath testing was introduced in NSW November 1982 after it finally became impossible for the Wran Government to ignore growing community pressure and research evidence pointing to a direct link between drink driving and the unacceptably high road death toll. At the time half of the 3,500 road deaths in Australia involved alcohol.
While the evidence linking alcohol and road deaths was increasingly irrefutable it took close to 14 years for community opinion to break through the powerful alcohol and hoteliers lobby and parliamentary inertia, explained Mr Rozzoli.
Persistent presentation of that evidence by ordinary members of the community and local Members of Parliament to their Parliamentary colleagues finally resulted in the landmark legislation, said Mr Rozzoli.
Significantly for NDARC one of the leading academics behind the research evidence, UNSW’s Professor Sid Lovibond, went on to become a member of the Commonwealth Government’s steering committee, set up in 1986 to establish a Centre of Excellence to “focus initially on extending the knowledge base required for the effective treatment and rehabilitation programs”.
Three years later Kevin Rozzoli, who himself had been crucial to the passing of the RBT legislation, was the Chair for the inaugural meeting of the National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre Board of Management in June 1989. The minutes record that the new Centre should henceforth be known as NDARC.
Pictured: Kevin Rozzoli.