ROAD safety experts have warned that the Coalition would be ''playing around with people's lives'' and cause a certain rise in fatalities if it was to increase speed limits on rural NSW roads.

Leading academics from Monash University and the University of NSW described NSW as the most backward state in the country when it came to road safety and warned that politics repeatedly outweighed safety.

The leader of the Nationals and the opposition spokesman for roads, Andrew Stoner, revealed yesterday that a Coalition government would do an audit of speed limits in NSW and ask the Auditor-General to investigate speed cameras.

Mr Stoner said there were many inconsistent and confusing speed limits across NSW. He also criticised the Labor government's ''sneaky placement of speed cameras to pick the pockets of motorists'', which did not improve road safety.

Raphael Grzebieta, a road safety professor at the NSW Injury Risk Management Research Centre, said suggesting that speed cameras were ''revenue raisers'' was politically motivated and failed to see their effectiveness in saving lives.