Comments on: Wanted: a politician with the courage to be conservative.

By: maelorin

maelorin — Fri, 13 Jan 2006 13:16:10 +0000

it’s not progressive to push a ‘law & order’ or ‘tough on crime’ agenda. more of the same thing we’ve already got is not new. nor is it really news.
here in sa, government announcements along similar lines have been countered with the unsurprising: “we need to spend more money on roads”.
a more ‘progressive’ approach might be to address such complex issues with a more nuanced matrix of responses. hardly sound-bite friendly though.
politicians are consumate experts (or at least their advisers usually are) of “what the public want to hear” – if not what we need, or what would be ‘good’ for us [whatever that might mean ]

By: ross chippendale

ross chippendale — Thu, 12 Jan 2006 06:23:22 +0000

Beattie and Bligh’s knee jerk reactions are exactly what is wrong with politics in Australia. That is, they pull supposed solutions out of thin air, hold a media conference and then forget the problem. Unless the media persists with the issue in which case the knee jerk thoughts result in yet more legislation which achieves absolutely nothing. Curfews? Please! Maybe for politicians, that might help.
Clearly there are improvements that can be made to help reduce the road toll.
Anyone seen the road just south of Coff’s Harbour? There are more crosses and floral tributes there than anywhere else I’ve seen. It’s horrifying to see that and continue to hear State and Federal MP’s and Ministers continue blaming each other. Result? Nothing gets done but the Ministers can point elsewhere.
Fix the bloody roads instead of sitting on surpluses. Force vehicle manufacturers to design and produce safer vehicles. Do something other than bicker, gloat and avoid responsibility

By: Graham Young

Graham Young — Tue, 10 Jan 2006 22:05:33 +0000

Victor,
Thanks for the ideas. Before getting too excited about New Zealand you should have a look at their statistics. For every 10,000 registered vehicles they have 1.7 fatalities per year, while we have 1.4 – a significant difference. They don’t appear to keep fatalities per kilometre driven statistics, but given the relative sizes of their country and ours I would think that the toll measured on that basis is even more in our favour. So they might have curfews for young drivers, but you’d need a pretty sophisticated argument to prove that this was effective.

By: Victor Hart

Victor Hart — Tue, 10 Jan 2006 21:44:08 +0000

This is an area of public safety that definitely needs more than the usual merry -go-round of discussion papers, parliamentary debate and then yet more nauseating debate. Meanwhile, young lives are lost.
There are obviously areas of human activity where legislation will not have any impact in decreasing road fatalities. Human nature can’t be regulated – but some regulation though laws on the culture of driving (especially for youth) can have some impact.
But there are definitely remedies that can decrease holiday road fatalities. In NZ I believe young drivers are under strict curfews.
I see so many young and inexperienced drivers with cars that I think are way too powerful for them to drive.
We wouldn’t give them to have powerful firearms to play with, but we do allow them vehicles that are just as dangerous.
Perhaps I’ll lob in an opinionated submission to the Qld state government who are calling for feedback on its discussion paper “Queensland Youth – on the road and in control”. Feedback is required by 10 March 2006. Click on : http://www.transport.qld.gov.au/youngdrivers
But at the end of the day (what a wonderful political cliché) this issue needs a hard nosed and bipartisan political approach.

By: Robert Merkel

Robert Merkel — Tue, 10 Jan 2006 10:19:39 +0000

But this isn’t about policy, it’s about politics. And as a political tactic it’s pretty much a no-lose situation.This kind of thing is just Beattie feeding the chooks, as predictable as an opposition leader promising to get tough on crime if elected to office.

By: Guy

Guy — Mon, 09 Jan 2006 07:59:20 +0000

I think it’s the job of politicians in some small sense to be progressive, to tirelessly probe for solutions to problems, or at least ways in which the impact of the problems can be reduced. I’m not sure being conservative on road safety is courageous as you suggest, or just an act of political capitulation.