Think you're being treated unfairly when the fun police pull you over? Think you're lucky you're here in peace-loving, nuclear sub-building Australia. The USA is the home of the free and the land of the brave, which it needs to be, as a New York Times investigation this week showed that police have killed more than 400 unarmed Americans during traffic stops in the past five years.
"A hidden scaffolding of financial incentives underpins the policing of motorists in the United States, encouraging some communities to essentially repurpose armed officers as revenue agents searching for infractions largely unrelated to public safety." Well, that would never happen here.
Hold on! What about this report from Sydney's Daily Telegraph: "The number of people slapped with fines for low-range speeding offences has exploded by up to 1595 per cent since the NSW government introduced secret mobile speed cameras and removed warning signs. The longer-term average for people fined travelling less than 10km over the speed limit used to be under 2000 fines a month. But by March this year that had exploded to 27,760 people fined for the low-range offence in a single month."
Looking for a great retirement investment? Forget shares, houses, cars, pubs and first edition Michael McMichael books. Let's say a fixed speed camera costs $30k to buy and install and maybe $10k a year to run. The Tele says one camera on Hume Highway returned nearly $400k in fines in six months this year. Twenty readers, one friend and the only family member in my will, you don't have to be Warren Buffett to work out that governments are not as dopey as we think they are.
And in Australia's Disneyland, Canberra, revenue from traffic fines is expected to more than double following the tautologically named Better Regulation Minister, Tara Cheyne, and Transport Minister Chris Steel introducing a new 40km/h zone in the city centre, where violations "exceeded all expectations". This good news may have come because the BRM and the TM didn't tell anyone they were dropping the speed limit.
Now you would expect that a combination of Covid and shifty speeding fines would make the roads safer. Well, given that most of the money from fines doesn't go into making roads safer it's not surprising that in the USA, for instance, driving deaths were up nearly 20 per cent.
Our policy here is when we get things wrong, we apologise and set them right. A few weeks ago we wrote about a 22-year-old outback school teacher who, it appeared, had been sold a 12-year-old Bridgestone tyre. Yesterday, Bridgestone boss Stephen Roche sent me the results of the company's investigation into the issue. The investigation found it was not the tyre sold that failed, and the customer was refunded for expenses despite there not being any wrongdoing by Bridgestone.