Dear readers, what you are witnessing, before your very eyes, is the evolution of a writer.

A few weeks ago I decided that I would try my hand at writing a political article, based around the backdrop of Insulationgate. The trouble I found with writing about politics is that there is never a clear straightforward issue to write about.

Just when you feel you’ve tackled something properly, you find another issue that overlaps the original, and before you know it, you get caught up in a never ending swirl of connected issues, without ever really coming to grips with any of them. It puts me in mind of trying to box an octopus, if Octopi were capable of donning gloves on all eight tentacles.

Anyway, this is an issue that has being troubling me for a while now, and, while political in nature, it’s definitely closer to my topic of choice than Peter Garrett is.

A while back our esteemed Premier, John Brumby (head idiot), announced that for the 2009-10 financial year he hoped to increase speed cameras revenue to $430 million.

Breaking this down, it means that every minute a motorist will be caught speeding and that the state coffers will ring to the tune of $1.2 million every single day. That’s a lot of money. Where it all goes I have no idea, but I know for sure it’s not being spent on road infrastructure or extra police.

This one announcement alone proves that Speed Cameras are more about revenue than safety. They are taxation agents, pure and simple, and I really have had enough of the self righteous moralising that is used to rationalise this venal grab for cash.

The state road toll was under 300 last year, for the first time in history, and despite all the back slapping in Spring Street and TAC offices, the dropping road toll is far more due to standardised passive and active safety equipment in vehicles than anything the Government has done.

I wrote an article sometime ago about the state government’s greed rationale for perpetuating the lie that speed kills and in that article I also wrote that I am not against speed cameras per se, but I am against the way they are used. They could be a real agent for the reduction in collision rates and the road toll, but the government prefers to use them as a revenue source.

Not convinced? Ok, let’s take a look at how Victoria’s use of speed cameras compares to the United Kingdom.

As I said above, the Victorian Government wishes to fleece $430 million from its citizens, approximately 5.5 million of them. The United Kingdom recently took £115 million from its citizens, (roughly around $250 million AUD). Don’t think that sounds so bad? Well it is. Victoria has a population of 5.5 million; the United Kingdom’s population is 56 million, more than ten times the size of ours.

Our road toll was 290 last year; the United Kingdom’s was around 1000. The percentage of our population killed on our roads: 0.0052%; the United Kingdom managed just 0.0018%. This is despite the fact that the UK has more people and more cars.

Our government takes nearly twice the revenue from ten times less people, and we still have more road deaths per capita. Something really doesn’t add up.

How does the UK manage this? Well, it could be the way that their speed cameras are used. They place cameras at identified black spots. There are many criteria that local councils have to apply to any location so that it can be identified as a viable speed camera spot: among them, there must be a history of collisions and it must be shown that other policing methods have been tried and failed to impact on the site. The speed cameras are placed in plain view, then painted bright yellow and signs announce their presence to approaching drivers.

It’s a far cry from the way our State Government deploys the cameras here: hidden away behind overpasses, unmarked cars skulking behind bushes and so on. In most cases the driver doesn’t even know they’ve been caught until they get the letter two or three weeks later.

I ask you this: If someone is travelling at a ridiculous speed, gets flashed by a speed camera, collides with another vehicle two kilometres down the road and wipes out an entire family, exactly what has the speed camera done to improve road safety?

In the same scenario in the UK, the driver spots a bright yellow speed camera, slows down, avoids a ticket and also avoids the family travelling on the opposite side of the road. Surely this is a better outcome? But no, so far the Government seems to prefer the extra revenue to a genuine and effective reduction in speeding in unsafe areas.

It is time that the Government got serious about road safety. This is not achieved by hiding a revenue machine behind a tree, catching Nanna Ethel as she heads outs to the shops. It will only be achieved by providing a visible police presence, visible, intelligent use of speed cameras, better infrastructure and better overall driver training. Of course these things cost money and I doubt I will see it in my lifetime.

But, it is an election year and I urge every single one of you to contact your local member and demand that they make road safety a priority. This is one of the few times that politicians may actually be willing to listen and act on what they voters think – make the most of it and stop being the state governments mobile piggy banks.

+ 1

+ 1