Page 577 - Week 03 - Tuesday, 19 May 1992
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to year. This body looked at road user fatality groups. Fatalities of cyclists, thanks to head injuries, accounted for 80 per cent of the fatalities. For pedestrians it was 78 per cent, and the statistics go on similarly. So, one could easily make an argument to say that we should be ensuring that pedestrians wear helmets. The arguments that we have heard put initially by the Government in introducing the Bill, and then from others who are supporting the Bill, could be applied quite easily to pedestrians.
Once we have pedestrians wearing helmets, I think we could look at what happens in the home with young children and try to ascertain how many head injuries occur at home. Then we could consider whether or not we should ensure that babies that are being carried around by their parents have helmets on because, after all, occasionally their heads are bumped and so forth. The point I am making, and it becomes clearest of all when you look at vehicle occupants, is that an argument is very easily made for ensuring that helmets are worn under those circumstances. I think there are very good arguments for wearing helmets in motor vehicles. It may well be that shortly we will see people doing that. If we think back a matter of 10 years, it was very rare to see a cyclist wearing a helmet, although, going back quite some years ago to when I was a child, I remember that there were people who wore leather helmets.
The real question is: Where are we going to draw the line? In the chamber this evening, in the final run and obviously after considerable consideration, the Liberals have come down on the side of saying that they will support this legislation and there is no doubt that the attempt by the Federal Government to bribe members of this Assembly with the black spot funding has been taken on. That in itself presents a quite significant style of precedent. The Federal Government will give us money if we are very good and do what they think is a good idea. I think that also needs to be questioned.
For myself, I have come down on the other side and would argue that there are some real costs in terms of cycle riding. One of the costs, of course, is the finding that where bicycle helmet legislation has been introduced there has been a reduction in the usage of bicycles. When you are looking at the overall health of the population, you cannot help but ask what that is going to cost us in terms of fitness and what it is going to cost the community in terms of extra hospitalisation and so forth.
It is too early to determine whether or not that result of the introduction of such legislation will diminish as time goes on. I quite accept that that is often the case; that as a reaction to a particular piece of legislation there is a drop-off, for example in this case, in the use of bicycles, but that use will in turn grow. That is a concern, and it is a concern particularly when there is such an emphasis, from an environmental perspective, on trying to get people to use alternative means of transport, cycling being one.
Another factor in this is people's vanity. There is certainly the argument that people will not now ride bicycles simply because they do not like the way it makes their hair go sweaty, turn into rat tails, turn frizzy, or whatever. I am very fortunate in that, with a bit of barbed wire on my head that counts for hair, it does not really matter very much. We put a helmet on and off and it makes no difference. We do not get too concerned about what our hair is like at any given time.
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