Fatal Bus Crash Survivor —An Open Letter to the NT

Note to reader: This letter was first published in 2024 and was lost due to a technical fault with Vocal and AWS. It is republished here, edited, with an update written on 15 July 2026 at the end. Criminal proceedings arising from the crash are before the courts; the allegations described below are drawn from the charges publicly announced by NT WorkSafe and remain to be tested at trial.

Dear Northern Territory of Australia,

After the Hunter Valley Bus Crash verdict, we, the victims of a fatal bus crash in the NT, face a future without justice.

I bring to your attention the verdict in the Hunter Valley Bus Crash, which resulted in the driver being jailed for 32 years. A crash that happened over a year after our own.

The crash that devastated our lives happened on 6th June 2022, the Hunter Valley tragedy happened on 11 June 2023, and the driver was convicted on 11 September 2024. We are now four years past the date of our crash, which ruined my life, and we have waited what feels like an eternity for this to reach trial.

The victims and family members of the Hunter Valley crash have rightly received justice via a custodial sentence, and they can now seek, via a civil court, restitution from the parties that so horribly wronged them. Those in our crash cannot.

For those unaware: anyone injured in a motor vehicle accident in the NT cannot sue or bring a civil claim in relation to it; regardless of how wronged they are, or how criminal the cause of the crash. The common, some might say human, right to sue in a civil court a person who has harmed or damaged you is denied to you in the NT whenever a vehicle is involved.

An Allianz-run MAC TIO scheme replaces the aforementioned right. It is devil incarnate in its administration. Please see our petition, which is nearing 2,000 signatures, at the end of this article for details of our terrible treatment at the hands of the TIO and how the TIO has harmed us and others further since the crash.

This reprehensible programme ties in with the legal system in a perverse way that, as mentioned, removes our common law right to hold the party alleged to be responsible for this crash, the tour operator, Emu Run Experience, and its director, Patrick Bedford, to account in a civil court. Again, people in the NT have no legal route to sue or seek damages from a civil claim when a vehicle is involved. I strongly advise against visiting there until this disgraceful privatised law, the TIO MAC No Fault Law, is removed.

The only path for our common justice is a WorkSafe prosecution, which carries no custodial sentence. As such, it is meek, without teeth, a slap on the wrist: a punishment unfit for what was done to us. We have seen over the last four years how those in Alice Springs coordinate in an 'old boys club' fashion to protect and shield the accused.

We have tried, despite how difficult it is, to speak out about how ruinous this crash has been to our lives and our health. It destroyed our lives as we knew them.

Consider what NT WorkSafe itself alleges in the charges it has laid: that the bus had been significantly modified, converted from six wheels to four, in a way that would have impacted its safe operation; that the modifications had not been assessed or approved in accordance with engineering and vehicle standards; and that the tyres fitted after those modifications were not used in accordance with the manufacturer's specifications.

We see a trivial difference between a driver who takes opioids and causes a fatal crash, and a company owner who — as is alleged here — makes significant, unapproved material changes to a bus and sends it out onto the road. One might argue that the latter conduct, if proven, involves the greater malice. An owner of a company, shielded by being a director, seems to be subject to a different level of justice than an employee. And knowing that a class action is impossible against them, one can only wonder if the TIO MAC Law encouraged this allegedly criminal behaviour.

If the allegations are proven, then for months, day after day, that bus went out carrying passengers while carrying within it the defect that would kill one of us. Any reasonable person in possession of that knowledge would have had countless opportunities to set it right. The bus went out anyway, more than 90 times over three-plus months, by our count, and it is only by luck that no other car or obstacle was on the road as we flipped and rolled at terrifying speed. I am sure that had there been, everyone on that bus would have died.

You can see from the picture below how far the bus has gone, from where the tyre marks on the road turn and end. The bus was some distance behind me when I took this photo; glass in my eyes, and the taste of burnt metal in my mouth. The bus went airborne and rolled numerous times, severely injuring many of us, breaking my spine in 3 places and killing the passenger directly in front of me. A scene I will not describe to you, despite how seared into my mind it is, but experienced officers and lawyers have described it in their own words as "incredibly confronting and upsetting".

The Hunter Valley driver, saddled with addiction, committed a grievous criminal act behind the wheel, one day, one act, devastating consequences, and he was rightly punished. I ask how that compares, in moral weight, to what is alleged here: the compromising of a vehicle's mechanical design, and the sending of that vehicle out, day after day, until the danger came to fruition.

And here is the perversity: had no one died, it is highly unlikely the bus would ever have been reconstructed and examined, and the alleged defect might never have been found. We know of it only because a man is dead. Meanwhile, a director in the Northern Territory knows two things with certainty: that the WorkSafe regime carries no prison sentence, and that the MAC Act guarantees he will never face his victims in a civil court: those costs are borne instead by the taxpayers of the Northern Territory, and his victims are plunged into a scheme of Orwellian proportion.

Tragically, it was Richard who died — on his 40th wedding anniversary, aged 69, with his golden years ahead of him. And I, like so many others, came away with the unhealing breakage of bones, limbs that will never be the same, minds crippled — physical and psychological destruction that has proven pernicious to our lives.

At the time this letter was first published, Patrick Bedford sat as Chair of a high-profile tourism board, alongside the Mayor of Alice Springs and government stakeholders. Whilst the NT reduces the age of criminal responsibility to 10, those with money and privilege and station seem to bear so little of it.

We write openly, once again, to press that the highest possible charges be pursued and the highest penalties and sanctions sought against those responsible, whoever the courts find them to be.

The only consequence, as it stands, if it comes to pass, is only what WorkSafe can bring: at most, a fine—a pauper's settlement for the taking of a life and the ruin of many others.

Where is our justice?

Joshua Clements

Update — 15 July 2026

More than four years have passed since the crash. I am writing this update because the original letter was lost to a technical fault, and because the years since have answered some of its questions in the cruellest ways.

My injuries are permanent. Seventeen operations on, my spine is fused with metal at L5/S1; you can see it in the X-ray published below, and the pain has never left. It is chronic, it is daily, and I am told it is forever. I live now with several disabilities, without the use of the outside of the two fingers on each hand, with migraines and double vision, with internal injuries from the spinal breaks causing infection, with PTSD, and with a body that must be managed rather than lived in.

I will never snowboard in fresh powder on a glacier again. I will never run out onto a field to kick a ball with my friends. I will never run in the sunrise on a beach.

I am immunocompromised; ordinary illnesses that others shrug off put me in bed for weeks and make even keeping my own home livable impossible without help. Only two weeks ago, I was hospitalised with a viral tonsillitis, which pushed my temperature to 39.2 102. This month, after the scheme that is supposed to care for me failed to respond to my request for support, I had to advertise for and hire a support worker myself, and pay for it myself. I have sold many personal possessions to cover medical expenses, and I have had to sell things of great sentimental value to make up for the lack of care that the TIO doesn't provide.

The crash not only broke bones. It broke my marriage. The person I loved carried me for several years when I could not carry myself, and the weight of it — the pain, the fights with insurers, the destruction of my body, always in pain, nauseous, on 14 medications, who I became under all of it, I don't know — but it proved too much for any two people, she carrying many injuries as well to bear. We separated. So, I am alone, and our cats are with her. Cats, I loved like children and even have them tattooed on my back next to a surfing Pikachu; a flying Charizard just above them. I don't get to see my cats anymore. Trauma is like that. It takes the big things loudly and then the small things quietly, and the quiet moments ambush you at the sink or at the door where they used to wait; rather than hear them purr, I am left crying alone. Recently, I went 3 weeks without seeing another person. The insidious side of long-term injuries is how they shrink your world.

I want to record, plainly, what this crash has cost: a man his life, on his 40th wedding anniversary. Me, my health, my career, my marriage, my home as I knew it, and any morning I might have woken without pain, and the fun of flying down a piste. The love of the person I married. The warmth of the cats that were my entire world. Others on that bus carry their own versions of this ledger of pain. Life can be so cruel; it takes, and sometimes that is all it does.

There is, at last, some movement. The criminal trial of the accused is listed for October 2026, more than four years after the crash. I have also commenced my own proceedings in the Federal Court, under consumer protection law, a novel route, taken because the NT's MAC Act closed every ordinary one. It took me two years to find a fantastic lawyer willing to try my case. I was referred to him by another victim of the TIO MAC ACT. And we understand that even the TIO itself has now brought proceedings against the operator, because a scheme that lets businesses face no civil consequences for the harm they cause is a scheme that even its own insurer, eventually, cannot afford. It undermines their whole business, which is built on the suffering and pain of people who never signed up for a policy with Allianz.

I will not be in the courtroom in October. I am not well enough to attend; I cannot sit in a normal chair for any proper length of time, so the injuries this crash left me with will keep me from the trial about the crash itself. I will keep writing when my health allows, and I will keep asking the Northern Territory the question this letter began with, until it has an answer:

Where is our justice?

Joshua Clements, 15 July 2026

Please, if you have a moment, sign our petition by clicking here.