Look, all of us know surgeons do a great job. But what you probably don’t know is they are rabid publicity hounds. Their PR machine pumps out more releases a week than Sportsbet.
One of the latest calls on the NT government to put an end to unrestricted speed zones on the Stuart Highway, and implies if you are an NT voter you should vote the current mob out if they don’t agree with Dr Phil Carson and his colleagues. Now, while the NT has a road toll on a par with Indonesia, Pakistan or Bhutan, since sections of the Stuart Highway have been unrestricted the prang rate has improved and there have been no fatalities.
Here’s the thing. For the last two years the road toll in Australia has been going up. As Sydney’s Daily Telegraph reported this month, “speed and red-light camera revenue is up (in NSW) — and so are road deaths.
“While the camera revenue used to fund NSW road safety campaigns has risen by 10 per cent to $183 million and the state death toll is up a shocking 25 per cent … the NSW government is spending about $2.3m less on road safety awareness than it did two years earlier.”
All the low-hanging fruit on the road toll is gone. Over the past 20 years, in real terms, road deaths have halved. Now they’re heading back up. Now is the time for a “mature conversation” on what to do across Australia rather than trite threats.
And if you are the owner of a car made by someone in the VW Group, you would have been heartened by the headline in this week’s New York Times: “In the US, VW owners get cash. In Europe, they get plastic tubes.”
Of course, we could add Australia in there. In America, the VW settlement is worth $26,000 a car. In Europe and Australia, owners get nothing because VW says their cars haven’t lost value and says dealers “will be able to bring the cars in line with pollution standards without any decline in performance or fuel economy”.
Now for some time there has been rumblings about CAMS (the Confederation of Australian Motor Sport). Its chairman is pallet recycler Andrew Papadopoulos. This week Phillip Island track officials told track day participants that a new rule meant instructors had to develop a set of hand signals “to indicate necessary messages” to their drivers and bring the cars in every three laps for a chat with the drivers.
So we went to CAMS and repeatedly asked for comment since it would seem the regulations are aimed at new drivers versus drivers with 10 or more years experience who choose to be coached from time to time; that the regulations do not take into account that many cars have in-car radios that allow a two-way conversation between the driver and the coach and that the regulation could make the driving more dangerous since at many tracks it takes three to four laps for the tyres to warm up.
CAMS chose not to comment, so another member rang them and asked about the new regulations. A CAMS person said no, it’s not a CAMS rule, it was the organisers. So we asked the island’s business development manager, Pete Mitchell, who runs the best track in Australia for Lindsay Fox and who told us, no, it was CAMS. We know who we believe. Anyway, email us about your experiences with CAMS.
Doug Wallace and Michele Cook have put together the car book of the year: Ford Australia: The Cars and the People Who Built Them should be on the top of your father’s and mother’s day list. It’s about a million pages with fantastic photos and stories and it’s too cheap at $60.
Former Leyland PR boss John Crawford reminds me that the sponsor of the 1980s Triumph TR7 series was Barclays — the bank, not Barclays the ciggie company.
John says the cars were so crook “that we had to strongarm” the Triumph Owners Club to accept buyers of TR7s. The club did eventually acquiesce, but only accepted TR7 owners as associate members! The quality of the cars coming out of Speke was atrocious. “The plant was manned by a workforce of unemployed longshoremen who built cars like they loaded ships, badly, and with complete disinterest.”
This is a shortened version, read the complete article at: http://www.theaustralian.com.au/life/motoring/surgeons-wide-of-the-mark-on-nt-unrestricted-speed-zones/news-story/ae3ada53de94769c55ea65b797ba86f9
