It won't happen.

Late last year, as it became embarrassingly clear the target was unachievable, an inquiry was held enlisting the expertise of some of Australia's leading road safety experts.

The inquiry's summary blunted stated: "Australia's road safety performance has stalled".

"Failing to improve our current situation will result in 12,000 people killed and 360,000 admitted to hospital at a cost of over $300 billion over the next decade alone," the report said.

"We must act on a scale that matters, with a disaster response that reflects the true measure of the problem. Lives depend on it."

The latest fatality data reveals 1209 deaths on the nation's roads from June 2018 to June this year, compared with 1208 in the previous corresponding period.

One modest outcome from this year's Federal election is the establishment of a national office of road safety in Canberra to "provide national leadership in eliminating road trauma".

However, one of the most essential elements that the new national office needs but can't get, is solid data.

The deaths of people on our roads, morbid though it may be, are faithfully recorded.

However, what is conspicuous by its absence is the lack of up-to-date road trauma data. The most recent data on road-related injuries which required hospitalisation dates back to 2015.

The most recent count, now four long years ago, had just over 37,000 people requiring hospital treatment after a vehicle car crash, including 6718 cyclists and 2634 pedestrians.

Without up-to-date road-related injury data, efforts to fully understand the extent of the problem are much more difficult.

As the safety structures of cars have improved and life-saving aids such as anti-lock brakes, airbags and vehicle stability control have become standardised across most modern cars, survival rates from vehicle collisions have significantly improved.

The serious car crash that in the 1970s may have resulted in a fatality is now far more likely to result in an injury.

But what we don't know, because the latest data isn't available, is how this injury issue is trending and how we should best address it.

National research body Austroads has pushed hard to get the data but concedes that every state and territory health department interprets this data differently, and are bound up in releasing it in a timely manner because of the differing legislation and ethics policies of those systems.

Two years ago, the chairman of the Australia's Road Safety Council Iain Cameron published an award-winning report about how to lead a paradigm shift in road safety. In that report he outlined the need for "analysis, evaluation and documentation ... to improve and better share knowledge" and openly admitted that "the data is incomplete".

"Matching hospital records with police records, adding location-specific vehicle data and collecting injury and injury severity data in addition to data on deaths will provide a more complete picture and improve decision making", he said.

David Bobbermen, Austroads' road safety manager, said that efforts were under way to fix the problem but there's no short-term solution.

"Unfortunately we're not like New Zealand; the data we need is held within the health systems of individual states and territories and each one has a different approach to how and when it releases it," he said.

In March this year, Austroads released a research report called A National Approach to Measuring Non-Fatal Crash Outcomes.

It maps out a test case for a common approach and has developed a "proof of concept" for a national approach.

It now has to move that research to a second phase and test the results that follow.

While the process drags on to find a measurement formula on which everyone will agree, the deaths and serious injuries on our roads mount.

On July 1, the minister responsible, Deputy Prime Minister Michael McCormack, announced the creation of the national office of road safety within the Canberra-based federal department responsible for transport and infrastructure.

But he issued no urgent directives on road safety for the next important meeting of state and territory transport ministers in Adelaide on August 2 except that the council would "consider a range of actions in response to the inquiry".

A study by the University of Queensland found road trauma costs the country $70 million a day, roughly the same as Australia's defence budget.

There are huge number of contributing factors to the overall road safety discussion. Each factor, from physical road maintenance, roadside structures and barriers to the cars which use them, driving attitudes, behaviours and distractions, and the age of the national car fleet, has a degree of influence.

In a recent benchmarking report on the national road safety strategy, the chief executive of the Australian Automobile Association, Michael Bradley, said that "it's clear the strategy is failing, and we need a new approach".

The AAA uses Monash University's Australian Trauma Registry for its national injury statistics but that resource doesn't yield the full picture, either.

Back in March 2018, the AAA reported that "due to limitations, data for severe injuries is only available at a national level for 2014 to 2016".

It adds up to an incomplete picture of a multibillion-dollar road problem that is swamping emergency departments around the county, and affecting tens of thousands of people's lives every day.