Car Accidents
As we embark on another busy holiday period on our roads, I’m reminded of a tragic story.
It was late at night. A car ran a red light and an innocent family was in trouble.
As a police officer, I was one of the first on the scene. The father had died on impact in the car. The mother – who was given CPR by ambulance officers – also died at the scene.
Continue reading "This year, let’s not accept road tolls as normal" »
This is not meant to sound heartless. The emotions surrounding the latest shocking spate of P-plate deaths are obviously still raw. And as the families and friends of those who have died work through their grief, it is understandable that they will sometimes lash out and look for external forces to blame as they deal with their loss.
But if kids are going to keep killing themselves at this rate - and kill or injure other people as a result of their reckless or incompetent driving - the time has come to stop molly-coddling these young people and their deluded friends.
The time has also come to stop offering the parents of reckless P-plate drivers nothing other than uncritical sympathy, as in many cases they too have played a role in allowing their children to behave in a way which endangered them and other people.
Continue reading "Time to stop mollycoddling prats with P-plates" »
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LC says:
“Kids spend all of year 10 learning the road rules and participating in theoretical situations and role plays, take the 2 hour written test to get a learners. For year 11 and 12, they get half an hour of instruction a week to make sure there is consistent teaching (parents… Read more »
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LC says:
...Unless their mates are aged over 22. Read more »
Next Wednesday the National Road Safety Council will have its inaugural meeting in Parliament House. This initiative from Australia’s Transport Ministers is an attempt to get expert advice from around the nation to make practical suggestions aimed at reducing our road toll.
The meeting will have a sombre tone.
Sadly, the heart-wrenching grief caused by road deaths visited more families last year than the year before. The road toll in 2009 was up by almost 5 per cent to 1,509 deaths, albeit still the second lowest figure in almost 60 years and less than half the average recorded during the peak of the 1970’s (3798).
Continue reading "Reckless drivers can’t blame government for carnage" »
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Charles Kelly says:
Bloody pathetic James. YOU support a scheme which promotes the very real possibility of people being injured or killed by distracted drivers, and YOU are perfectly content with this - that is, of course, until it’s pointed out that the unwilling victim of YOUR ignorance could potentially be YOUR own… Read more »
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James says:
What is invalid about accepting the consequences of your actions? If you do not like speeding fines, do not speed. That is my argument. If that is self-delusional masturbation, then so be it. In any case, I apologise for my insults. The fact that you seem to think it is… Read more »
A strange thing happened when I became a parent. I started to get upset when I saw stories like the one of the five young men who were killed in a motor crash at the weekend.
I’ve also found myself saying ‘in my day’ or worse, ‘when I was young’. I’ve already made decisions about a computer in my child’s room and whether she will have a mobile phone.
Sometimes when the entrepreneurial gene comes out, I wonder if I could get a mobile phone made that simply dials home and does nothing else. I would market it as not having a camera or video function, wouldn’t be able to surf the net and it wouldn’t rack up bills of many hundreds of dollars. (That’s where the entrepreneurial gene fails me.)
Continue reading "Road deaths - statistically, boys, it’s not good" »
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Christine34Wilkerson says:
One admits that life seems to be not very cheap, but people require money for different issues and not every person earns big sums cash. Therefore to get good loans and just commercial loan will be a proper way out. Read more »
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LC says:
V8’s and turbos (except diesels) are banned for P-platers to drive, unless they require it for employment (though I think there should be no exemptions). Normally I would think such a thing is futile because you’re dealing with a group of people who willingly break the law and like they’re… Read more »
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