Month: January 2010

A teacher asked her 6th grade class how many of them were Rudd fans.

Not really knowing what an Rudd fan is, but wanting to be liked by the teacher, all the kids raised their hands except for little Johnny in the front row.

The teacher asked Johnny why he has decided to be different.

‘Because I’m not a Rudd fan.’

The teacher asked, ‘Why aren’t you a Rudd fan?’

‘Because I’m a Liberal.’

The teacher asked him why he’s a Liberal.

Johnny proudly answered, ‘Well, my Mum’s a Liberal and my Dad’s a Liberal, so I’m a Liberal.’

Annoyed by this answer, the teacher asked, ‘If your mum was a moron and your dad was an idiot, what would that make you?’

With a big smile, Johnny replied, ‘That would make me a Rudd fan.’

Tragic, just tragic. Another accident, and another 5 people killed in an horrific accident in Melbourne – http://urlg.in/1nl

My heart goes out to the families of these kids, and indeed to all those people forced to attend the scene and deal with the aftermath of this accident. It still happens all too regularly, despite all the warnings from police and road safety groups.

No doubt we will shortly hear the impassioned pleas from some in the road safety lobby crying out for lower speed limits, more speed cameras, and perhaps even more controls on the types of cars P-platers are allowed to drive.

The problem is that these knee jerk reactions to road deaths have been going on for years, and it is arguable that the effect of these measures is negligible.

To take this accident specifically, it would seem there were 6 people in a vehicle designed for 5 (which means that at least one wasn’t wearing a seat belt). The driver was apparently travelling at 140km/hr – so clearly had disregarded whatever the speed limit was on that stretch of road. The driver was also clearly inexperienced and got himself into a situation that tragically, he was unable to recover from.

How would an accident like this be avoided? It’s difficult. Young people (particularly young males) are genetically wired to be thrillseekers. Pushing the boundaries and the adrenalin rush that goes along with it is in their blood. A smaller, slower car wouldn’t have saved them (indeed, it could’ve been even worse, if that’s possible, due to the smaller crumple zones and potentially less safety features in a smaller car). If the car wasn’t overloaded, chances are there would still have been fatalities. The only way to avoid an accident like this is for drivers to change their behaviour.

It seems clear to me from the millions of dollars that our state governments reap every year in speeding fine revenue that behaviour is not changing much.

Why do people still speed? The simple fact is, for the vast majority of speeding fines getting issued today, we’re just people making mistakes. We all do it – even the Deputy Police Commissioner of Victoria Police does it, as was controversially revealed this week. We have a bad day, we get distracted, we get annoyed with fellow drivers, and quite frankly, we sometimes watch where we’re going (quite rightly) instead of watching the speedo. And because of the enforcement strategy that most states appear to be using, most people’s speeding offences go unnoticed and uncorrected.

Our governments have become lazy, and instead of funding proper police on our roads, they’ve become addicted to the easy revenue of speed cameras. They’re a licence to print money – like poker machines, except they don’t have to return any money back to the punters. Motorists don’t receive a fine until weeks after the offence, by which time the horse has well and truly bolted.

In raising a dog (and raising kids, though I can’t speak from experience) the general idea is that when your subject does the wrong thing, a quick sharp correction is required immediately. If you try to punish someone for something they’ve done weeks ago you’re likely to upset them and not likely to cause any change in behaviour.

I have some suggestions, dear government, and while I am fairly cynical about the likelihood of anything changing, this is what I would do if I was (hypothetically) charged with fixing this problem:

1. The first thing we have to do is accept that there will never be a zero road toll. People will screw up, no matter what you do. Every death, however, is a tragedy. The media sensationalism that accompanies every holiday period simply drives more knee jerk reactions and less effective strategy. Provide the media with some proper context on our road toll, and rather than simply publishing numbers of deaths, publish numbers of deaths per vehicles on the road. That would be a more truthful way of judging the effectiveness of your road safety strategy. And while I think about it, let’s redefine what is actually a road accident. The toll currently counts such things as a recent accident where a man was unloading a machine from the back of his tilt tray (in the road) and it rolled over and killed him; or the girl who was killed while trying to jump out of a car while it was rolling backwards down her driveway. These are tragedies, sure, but are in no way reflective of our road safety strategy and should not influence policy.

2. A higher, more visible police presence. Our police are grossly underfunded and the government’s perception seems to be that cameras can do the same job. We need more police on our roads – targeting not only speeders but the blue rinse brigade that drive 40km/h under the limit, the morons that think indicators are optional, and the impatient folks who are quite happy to risk their lives (and the lives of their fellow road users) with silly overtaking manouvres around blind corners and generally crazy behaviour. I see this stuff on a daily basis and the fact is, speed cameras don’t fix this. These people get away with these habits for years and years, and are largely ignored by the ‘speed kills’ mentality of our current strategy.

Supplement the higher number of vehicles and police officers with cardboard cutouts and other visible means of slowing people down. Let people know that the chances of them being caught are high! People need visible reminders, not a nasty fine in the mail weeks later.

3. Better driver training. Our teenagers can get a licence by passing a simple test, with little training and little experience, while they’re still developing proper judgement and maturity. Even worse, they’re at an age where they need to push the boundaries of all things in order to progress to adulthood. It’s no wonder teenagers are so over represented in crash statistics.

Give them advanced driver training, on a track, where they can learn how quickly things get scary if they push the boundaries. Put them on a skid pan so they can understand that cars are lethal weapons in the wrong hands. And finally, give them some graphic insights into what happens when things go pear shaped. There’s nothing like a good old glimpse of the consequences to make people think twice before making a stupid decision.

Above all encourage people that if they want to drive fast, to take it to the race track. Most states have a dragway or a circuit (or both) and sadly, motorsport venues seem to be neglected by our governments due to the ‘hoon’ stigma that is permeating our culture. We need to encourage higher participation in motorsport and make people understand that there is nothing wrong with wanting to drive fast and hard, in the right place at the right time.

The only argument the government has against advanced driver training is that it might encourage youths to get cocky and show an inflated sense of their own ability. The fact is, that most youths have an inflated sense of their own driving ability already – wouldn’t you rather they learn their limits on a track, rather than public roads?

4. Mandatory retesting every 5 years. Annually for drivers once they reach the age of 60 or so. There are people in this country driving around who have not had their driving ability tested for 40 or 50 years. We see older drivers doing u-turns on dual carriageways and killing themselves, and the road safety lobby complain that the signage wasn’t sufficient. I’m not kidding, by the way – it has happened here in Tasmania. Get incompetent drivers off our roads.

There is more, so much more… but I gotta go.

Isn’t it funny how we all think we’re right. Especially when it comes to our politics. And I think, if one sits to one particular side of the political spectrum, that one probably tends to associate with people and read online blogs of people and organisations that have a similar point of view. This tends to reinforce one’s values and sense of ‘rightness’. We’re all crusaders, man! Fighting for what’s right and proper!

For me personally I identify as conservative. I believe in an individual’s right to self determination, small government, capitalism, border protection, less welfare, less bleeding hearts, smacking children if necessary, stiff sentencing, equality for all races and no singling out ethnic or religious groups for special treatment. So in the past few days I’ve had a bit of a culture shock in realising that many of the people whose work I most admire appear to have political views vastly different from my own.

Probably the biggest surprise – Ben Elton. I’ve been admiring his work since The Young Ones in the 80s, have read all of his books and always thought of him as being a fairly pragmatic kind of bloke. In hindsight, looking at books like Stark I wonder why I didn’t pick up his leftist tendencies earlier. In any case I just read Meltdown and the message seemed to me that while he was taking the piss out of greedy traders (and fair enough too) that he also believed in a people’s right to make money and be rich so long as it’s all above board. Imagine my surprise when I read on his Wikipedia page (if that can be considered a credible source) that he is/was a Socialist and is a self confessed ‘Welfare State Labour Voter’.

Then there’s Graham Linehan, who is also fantastically hilarious writer. The IT Crowd and Black Books remain 2 of my all time favourite British comedies, so imagine my disappointment to seeing him retweet links to anti-Israeli propaganda stories. Sorry, but while it is tragic that Palestinians are dying, there are two sides to this argument. In my view they are both as bad as each other, and any article that attempts to garner sympathy for one side while ignoring the other’s misdeeds is to be ignored. And generally, as far as I can see most of the apologists for Palestine (indeed, apologists for any form of Islamic terrorism) appear to be from the left. I could perhaps have written it off as an aberration if it wasn’t closely followed by a retweet of this tweet (sorry, can’t seem to link to the actual retweet) about a right wing blogger who was ‘forced to relocate’ after splitting from the right due to violent threats. As if the right are the only ones who have nasty people in their midst.

There are plenty of others too from . People like Robert Llewellyn, John Birmingham, Will Anderson (ok, I’m not that much of a fan), Stephen Fry (him I’m not surprised), Tim Minchin, Alan Davies, heck there are heaps of others I haven’t thought of. All of these people have at some point in the time I’ve been observing their tweets or reading their blogs or whatever… have made some comment that’s made me think ‘Ohhh… he’s one of those bleeding heart lefties’.

In fact, I just googled ‘list of leftist celebrities’ and came up with this page – there are MANY people on this list whose work I enjoy or admire.

So I’m left with a few thoughts on the matter. And here is a disclaimer: I apologise if I have misrepresented the views of anyone on this list. If I have misinterpreted something, please comment or tweet me because this is one case where being proven wrong would be quite nice 🙂

Where are all the prominent conservatives in the celebrity ranks? Are there any? Someone please point me out a few to restore my faith in the movement. Exclude people who don’t make a living out of it, this means no Andrew Bolts, Rush Limbaughs, or leaders of the BNP.

If there are any, they mostly seem to be keeping their views to themselves. To be honest, I think this is probably good advice for ALL celebrities, lest they shatter the illusions of your fans.

Why are there so many leftists out there in the ranks of our public figures? I’ve been musing on it for a day or two and so far this is what I’ve come up with:

Firstly, it is again ‘cool’ to be a bleeding heart. If you’re in a position of authority (like say, Tony Abbott) and you express any kind of slightly right wing view, three hundred different minority groups and left leaning journalists jump out of the woodwork and fire poison pen letters at you from all directions. Additionally, I guess most of the above list are in the arts in some form. That probably makes it a better than even bet that they’ve been exposed to some kind of socialist indoctrination at a university somewhere along the way 🙂

Secondly, those celebrities who have done pretty well for themselves can afford to be lefties. Some of the people on this list (but not all) have enough money and enough distance from us common people that they don’t have to deal with the consequences of opening our borders to all and sundry (I thought Wilson Tuckey was vindicated today by the way). They won’t have to worry too much about the increased cost of living if an ETS is brought in, they can afford it (and it doesn’t seem to bother them that we’re supposed be handing billions of dollars over to the UN to be redistributed to ‘developing countries’, to be spent as they see fit, more than likely on bigger limos and more guns for the socialist dictators in those countries).

Thirdly, I guess many people in the public eye genuinely want to use their position for what they feel is the common good. That ‘common good’ usually happens to be an extreme green cause or help for refugees or fixing world poverty or some other issue which is associated with the left. I do wonder if some conservatives are scared to represent these causes for fear of being misrepresented as being of that political persuasion – some of them are genuinely worthy causes, but it is a bit of a minefield in so far as making sure that money is spent on what it’s supposed to be. So many charity groups these days are so overrun by bureaucracy that sucks up funds like a sponge; indeed I know of people who’ve chosen to head overseas themselves and bring money and gifts to orphanages themselves rather than entrust someone else to do it. Now that’s helping people folks, and the people in question didn’t make a big deal out of it either, I only found out because I asked.

To finish though, I am not such a one eyed extremist that I can’t like a person or their work if we have strongly differing opinions. None of the people above have exhibited the kind of smug self righteousness, nastiness or pettiness that so annoys me about many in leftist circles, as far as I can see. And I’ll continue to enjoy their work and be a fan despite our differing politics.

If anyone wants to enlighten me as to who the prominent conservative celebrities are (particularly British and Australian ones) then please do comment or tweet me. I did find a few lists like this and this but new information is always good, especially Australian oriented. The general consensus does seem to be that when it comes to people in the public eye, us right wingers are outnumbered. Likewise if you just want to agree, disagree or argue with me, civil debate is always welcome so feel free to tweet or comment 🙂