EA S

Our esteemed Transport Minister announced on John Faine's program on ABC Radio this morning that in the next week or two the government is going to announce 17 new initiatives to deal with road safety. This is going to be worth waiting for, especially if the same sort of geniuses that came up with the 50k limit have had a hand in it.

Interestingly, Faine put it to the Minister that in a previous interview a professor of criminology had said that there was no research to show any connection between penalties and driver behaviour, so how did anyone know what worked? The Minister insisted that Monash Uni had done lots of research on this, but gave no details and essentially avoided the issue.

I'm going to shut up on the speed/road safety issue after this because we must all be getting sick by now of the endless stream of bullshit I've discovered (just be grateful I haven't posted everything I've found) that passes for justification for our alleged road safety laws and their enforcement. There's no point in providing more evidence that the current road safety system is a mish-mash of illogical inconsistencies designed and run by well-intentioned fools.

But before I go, just reflect on this. The people who recommended and made these laws all come from the same gene pool. They don't get any smarter or more principled when they're dealing with laws on other topics. These are the same people who imported cane toads to deal with a relatively minor local problem and caused a huge one way beyone the original area; who said that troops had nothing to fear from nuclear testing at Maralinga; who say that genetically modified food is safe; and that DNA is infallible in identifying people and that we have nothing to fear from a national database with everybody on it; and generally that they know best and we should trust them. Do you trust them to understand and pass laws on, say, gene technology when they can't even understand their own stats?