Lately our local government has been relentlessly banging on about global warming and how we should all be good global citizens and catch a bus to work instead of driving our heated or, in summer, air conditioned cars. Of course, these politicians are given a free Prius to drive each day to their ivory tower so the smugness at the legislative assembly building is thicker than a Canberra fog in midwinter. And equally, they aren’t the ones who have to walk for 15 minutes to a bus stop only to find that it either doesn’t turn up or is so full that the bus driver doesn’t even bother stopping.
This means an extra 30 minutes wait and in winter that can seem like an eternity and usually leads to goodly dose of the flu so you end up staying at home in bed with the electric blanket on high and the gas heating blasting the atmosphere to a temperature usually only found in places near Alice Springs in summer thus negating any savings that you may have made by talking the bus.
Add to this the fact that Canberra was designed for cars and you get the picture why buses don’t figure highly on peoples radars.
Sadly, the government does not like the fact that its people are voting with their feet and staunchly refuse to take public transport. So, in almost bloody minded retaliation a forest of parking metres suddenly sprung up around all business and commercials centres. The overlords sat back and rubbed their social engineering hands together waiting for the populace to see the light.
Of course, it didn’t work. People just paid for parking.
Incensed, the bleeding hearted liberals softies decided that, for the good of the planet, they would start replacing existing car parks with buildings, pondering that logically, if there is no-where to park then no-one will drive a car. Not surprisingly the motorists did not like this one bit and found ways around this lack of parking. After all, this is a species who once decided that they were sick and tired of living in trees and getting eaten by leopards so decided to wander around on the ground and live in large caves instead. The people were not going to be defeated by something as trivial as no parking.
Seriously annoyed now, and with its green credentials ruined by inconsiderate automobile drivers, the government went on a full out attack calling motorist irresponsible planet wreckers and polar bear murderers conveniently forgetting that the bus system was in fact archaic and unusable for about 90% of the working population.
And to make matters even worse, if that is possible, it now appears that there are more government speed camera vans and mounted speed cameras than there are private cars. So, not only will we now have to pay for our parking in a non existent parking lot whilst paying for the pleasure to drive instead of using a bus system and timetable that didn’t work in the Roman days but we also have to watch out for speed cameras.
One could say that we are closer to having a police state than ever. In fact, it makes all that whinging and tut-tutting at regimes such as Burma seams someone hypocritical. Soon it will be an offence to vacuum your car in case some sort of endangered blowfly happened to make its way in.
So what can we do, apart from storming the legislative assembly building with AK47s and changing your name by deed poll to Robert Mugabwe. Well, nothing really. We voted them in, so we have to live with it, the problem being is that I have to live with it as well, not that this makes any iota of difference as the other mob are surely as useless, and possibly more power hungry, as well.
So get used to it Mr Orwell. We have cards to get us into work, we have cards to get money from machines in walls, we even have cards to take to hospital when a wild pig has gnawed your foot off while you sleep in a cave attempting to get away from society. The way its going soon we won’t even be able to smoke in our outside, let alone our own homes. And those that do will probably end up in a cell with someone who has a strange fascination for automatic weapons and banks. This is a scary thought. Especially if you didn’t have a card.
Add to that the fact that we are not allowed to upset anyone, ever, at all, no matter how dumb, selfish, stupid, cruel, idiotic, nasty, they may be. Apparently this is not being inclusive and is called racism, even if Islam is a religion and not a race, which is all quite silly because most Muslims I have met are nicer than Mr and Mrs I-own-a-Ford-Falcon-and-have-two-and-a-half-bogan-kids who live next door, blow up your letterbox with fireworks and poke your dog with a stick.
But whatever the case, whatever we do in our cars will be filmed by someone, somewhere, and they will have your name, and registration on a file. Do something wrong and you’ll receive a nice, impersonal letter telling you that you owe them some money.
Interestingly, when speed camera vans were introduced in Canberra they were required to put up a sign about 200 metres either side of the van that warned motorists that they were there. Of course, the said motorist who at the time was doing 20kph over the speed limit simply slowed down until he was past the van and then gunned it. The vans political masters soon worked out that this was not raising any revenue as no-one was getting caught so they decided to do away with the portable signs and put in permanent signs warning that the speed camera vans may be there. Again, drivers put up with the inconvenience of slowing down for a few hundred metres, and then, you guessed it, tramped it.
This is, except for really stupid people but I don’t care about them.
Seeing that this wasn’t raising the level of the bullion in the coffers, sorry, I mean, wasn’t slowing down the traffic to the required government standard, they decided to just park the vans wherever they felt like. That is, behind trees and bushes, in hidden cul-de-sacs, at the bottom of hills that make the White Cliffs of Dover seem a gentle gradient and around blind corners. Of course, all perfectly visible after you actually crashed into them.
The government tells us that they are doing to save lives, which does makes some sense in that if you are dead you can no longer pay taxes and they don’t like that one bit. No, they want you alive so you can pay taxes. And fines from speed camera vans as well.
I’ve heard arguments that speed cameras and speed camera vans really don’t make any money but this just doesn’t wash with me. If just 20 stupid people sped past a speed camera a day the government would have around four grand extra. Taken over a year and that is lot of money. In fact, enough to buy more speed cameras and vans. It’s a never ending self prophesy really.
But do speed cameras really save lives? Or do they reduce speeding? The government will says yes to both as they have a vested interest. In other words, they put the cameras in at great expense so they bloody well better show some outcomes. Imagine if you will, Wendall Sailor. Now Wendall was a seriously good rugby league player who was wooed over to rugby union by million and millions of dollars in cash. The problem was, Wendall was not a very good rugby union player. Sure he could run, and he was big, but he couldn’t tackle and couldn’t kick, yet alone be in a good position for a winger.
But no matter, rugby had paid big dollars for their major signing so no matter what he was like, they were going to play him. Then he tested positive to cocaine and the Australian rugby world sighed a great big sigh of relief.
And so it is for speed cameras. They bought them, so now they are going work. Whatever the cost, whatever the stupidity. The lunatics are running the asylum my dear.
And yet one can think of lots of things that could do the job just as efficiently as a speed camera. How about better roads, less congestion, better sign posting, better driver training, more lighting, more mobile police. The list is endless.
Moreso, if speed is so bad then why is it that with four times the driving population from yesteryear, we don’t even get anywhere near twice the fatalities? I mean, 20 years ago we had still had trucks, 100 mph super cars like Monaros, motorbikes and caravans and the people driving them often had no idea whatsoever about driving. It used to be said that every Sudanese refugee who stepped off a boat of plane was given a taxi licence before his naturalisation papers. Throw these guys in with half comatose valium mums with screaming kids, boozed up fat businessman in luxury sedans, ditzty young blonde girls in hatchbacks and blonde haired, Winfield smoking booners in Commodores and Volvo driving hat wearers from the local bowls club and you had a recipe for the extinction of man.
And yet it didn’t happen. Even when they were all screaming along wet, icy roads in the middle of winter at 100 kph. Frankly, you had more chance of being gnawed to death by a hairy nosed wombat than dying in a car accident. Especially as speed cameras have a habit of making you take your eyes of the road so you can look at the speedo. Remember, its okay to crash into a parked truck but not okay to speed.
Strangely, and although it may not seem the case, I really don’t have a problem with speed cameras simply because I do not speed and therefore they don’t affect me. Frankly I see them as an idiot tax, that being, if you are stupid enough to speed past onr then you deserve to pay.
So why the speed cameras? Who decided that, although we weren’t doing to badly looking after ourselves on the road, we needed extra regulation to make us even safer? Well you need not look any further than liberal hand wringers who simply can’t bear the thought of people making decisions for themselves. No, no, this cannot happen. The people cannot be allowed to make their own decisions, after all, they are not qualified. Mr Orwell must be glad he is dead because now we have the speed camera.
And the last word on speed cameras? Simply that the logic is flawed. If they worked no-one would speed, but people still get fined, which means they haven’t stop speeding at all. And so they have failed in the most basic objective, if that objective really is to stop speeding, as the politicians tell us.
Oh, and extra money in the coffers. Apart from that it all seems pretty pointless really.
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