 a break in the far north with another two lives lost on our roads. That now takes the road toll for the far north to 13 deaths in 14 weeks. Clearly the message to a lot of our road users just aren't getting, just isn't getting through at all and sadly the deaths on the weekend are a testament to that. Yes, on the weekend we've yet again seen some blatant displays of stupidity by some road users in the far north. Yesterday at Machilba on the Atherton Tablelands a 17 year old was detected travelling at 201 kilometres an hour in a 100 kilometre hour zone in wet weather. That is just a fatal waiting to happen. We also had on Sunday another driver near Kowa detected at 194 kilometres an hour in 100 zone. Yet again there is no excuse for those speeds and at that speed all it takes is just one minute slip and there is no redemption from that. Are you shocked by the rate the road toll in the far north appears to be rising compared to the other states and cities? The road toll in the far north is the worst that nearly every office in the far north can remember. At this stage we're only 14 weeks into this year and we've lost 13 lives. The police are out there every single day. Over the Easter break there was hundreds and hundreds of hours put in by our police officers patrolling the roads and yet we are still having the fatal accidents occur. What do you need to consider? Is it the time to put in things like double the merits all the time or is there something in it that's a bit of a chat about that in Brisbane this morning on Talk Mac Radio about double the merits? Would you consider any more extreme options to try and bring the road toll down? Well any matter of policy or legislative change like that is clearly a matter for the government of the day. What we will do as the police is just continue our enforcement efforts out there, the education, talking at every opportunity to everyone on the road to take ownership of their driving, take ownership of the safety for themselves, their family and other road users. After the last couple of fables we had in a week, can you guys put in a bit more of a task force to address this? What's been the outcome of that? Yeah absolutely. Since that time the road strategy for the far north has been put in place and what that does is place the ownership of the road policing in the actual patrol groups to formulate operations, activities and to get out and target offenders on the roads at the peak times. Clearly because we've got such a diverse district up here it's not a one size fits all and so it's very much up to the officers in charge of those particular areas to make sure that they have got police on the road at the right time targeting the correct offences. Yeah yet again this is another statistic that we should not be proud of but there were 35 drink drivers detected in the far north over the east of the break. There were over 250 life and don't drink offences on the roads detected. So our police are out there just every day trying to enforce the rules but it gets back to the people, back to the drivers to make sure they're doing the right thing in the first place. You know it's not brain surgery at all these are common sense things that we repeat over and over again and that's to slow down, don't get distracted, don't use your mobile phone, have your seat belt on and for goodness sake don't drink and drive.