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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 4 Hansard (8 May) . . Page.. 1120 ..

MR KAINE (continuing):

Mr Curnow claims that hospital admissions have remained constant post-cycle helmet legislation, but he has presented no evidence on how many of these admissions were for head injury and how many were caused by cycle helmets or not wearing cycle helmets. So Mr Curnow's argument that hospital admissions remain constant without further evidence is not very persuasive; neither, of course, does he provide any information on how long people have stayed in hospital as a result of those accidents. I think we are all well aware that there are widely divergent and strongly held views in the community about the safety issue of cyclists wearing helmets, and expert opinions may also differ on this issue. However, the majority of professional health and safety organisations are of the common view that cycle helmets do reduce the risk of head injury in the event of an accident. Maybe the committee can disprove that, and I will be interested to see whether they can.

Mr Moore was trying to make the distinction between adults and children. As far as I am able to determine, children and adults are at the same level of risk of head injury when they are involved in an accident on a bicycle. There is no differentiation in terms of the risk. Some data from the ACT and around Australia does suggest that cyclists between the ages of five years and 20 years do have a higher average rate of injury, but that does not say that they have a higher rate of head injury. It is interesting that, of the three cyclist fatalities in the ACT in 1996, two were over 20 years of age and they both involved collisions with motor vehicles on public highways, so there is not too much that you can draw from that. As the evidence tends to suggest that the risk of head injury is the same whether for children or for adults, it would be my view that there is no justification for having a different law applicable to adults on the one hand and children on the other.

There has been in the past a civil liberties argument raised about the use of helmets and seat belts, each in their turn. I can remember the bitter argument that went on over the introduction of seat belts in cars. There were people who argued all sorts of dire consequences and that it was an invasion of civil liberties, yet today people accept without reservation that the wearing of seat belts is a good thing and we all do it. The vast majority of our community see it as a commonsense road safety measure, and I believe that cycle helmets can be seen in the same light.

In a recent appeal to the Supreme Court of the ACT, Mr Peter Van Schaik, who is a member of the Cyclists' Rights Action Group, appealed against an infringement issued to him for not wearing a helmet. He submitted that the reasonable cause of his not wearing a helmet whilst riding a bicycle was constituted by four different elements. One of them was a denial of his human rights, as expressed in article 29 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights 1947. The interesting thing about that is that that particular declaration of human rights has never had any legal force in Australia. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights has not been enacted in Australia either, but Australian courts take judicial notice of the fact that Australia is party to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. (Extension of time granted) The Chief Justice in that case found that nothing in the ICCPR supported Mr Van Schaik's belief that he was justified in riding a bicycle without a helmet. So there is no basis, under either of those international covenants or statements of human rights, for the view that he was entitled to ride a cycle without a helmet when the law required him to do so.

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