Page 3420 - Week 09 - Wednesday, 22 August 2018
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classes, around the corner to visit a mate or any of those things. Your capacity to do that is restricted.
As young people grow up and acquire their licences, and they are living at home, they do become an essential part of the family transport plan. As a mother of five children, I have relied upon my older children from time to time to take my younger children places when the need arose. It is empowering for them. It gives them a sense of responsibility. It also takes the pressure off the family.
We need to take a look at this from a holistic point of view. That is not to discount the issues of road safety. I believe that the issues of road safety are primarily addressed in the training of young drivers. I would welcome an open discussion about the sorts of competencies that should be ticked off before a young driver can get a licence or before a young driver graduates up the process of getting a full licence.
In some jurisdictions—this may not be applicable here in the ACT, but for instance in Germany—you cannot get a full licence until you have passed tests which show that you are capable of driving in ice and snow. That is not an issue for us here, but we do have serious issues in relation to country roads. City kids often do not know how to drive on country roads.
One of the things that we do know is that while the ACT’s road toll is relatively small, there are a large number of people from the ACT who die on New South Wales or other interstate roads, often on country roads. I think that is simply because they are not used to driving on those and they do not drive to the conditions. This is one of the things that we should be doing: addressing the issue of competency.
In relation to Mr Steel’s amendment, I think it is a bit cute really. Mr Steel has really nailed his colours to the mast. He has said, quite frankly, that for the Labor Party, these issues in relation to curfews and bans on peer passengers at any time would be an infringement of rights and they will not hear of it. Mr Steel is saying that the minister needs to come to his own ideas, but I think I detected a metaphorical half nelson there, saying that if Mr Rattenbury comes back with this in place he will be one unpopular member of the cabinet.
It is quite clear where the Labor Party stand on this. They should be prepared to say openly that Miss Burch is correct, that we should rule out these things. These are ruling out two elements, essentially, of a much larger panoply of things. Yes, there should be a conversation about how we improve the driver training of our young people, but at the same time there are some things that we are not prepared to countenance.
As a parent of someone who had ACT P-plates but who studied interstate, I can say that the number of times my daughter was stopped on the highway going from here to university at Wollongong was quite phenomenal. She was being stopped by police because she was apparently speeding, to be sent on her way because they realised that she had ACT P-plates and was not bound by those rules. And she did become the designated driver for her colleagues. University was pretty cheap for her, because she never drank when she went out. She was always the designated driver because she had
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