Driving Instructors Under Review
The Age
Wednesday October 23, 1996
THE STATE Government is assembling members of a working committee to review the standards and training of Victoria's driving instructors. The committee will have three months to come up with a blueprint for change to what most sane motoring countries would regard as a hideous joke - a system that lacks any controls over who teaches its citizens how to pass a basic driving test.
The Minister for Roads and Ports, Mr Geoff Craige, is assembling the committee from the police, RACV, TAC, VicRoads, Department of Infrastructure, and the Metropolitan Traffic Education Centre. Others, as he said in a speech to METEC on 14 October, will be "members of the public, including a young person and a parent, individuals from metropolitan and country schools, individuals from driver-training associations and experts in vocational training and psychology".
The committee is to consider the minimum standard of skills and knowledge required by instructors, their fitness and propriety, mechanisms for enforcing the aforesaid, and to consider submissions from "the public and interested parties".
I have a name for the committee - let's call it "The Dog's Breakfast".
Here we have a government that makes millions upon millions of dollars a year penalising and punishing people for failing to perform a complex task for which they are grossly undertrained.
Here we have a government that spends millions of dollars on glamorous television commercials telling parents to take time out to teach their children to drive.
Here we have a golden chance to divert some of the $1 million a week made from speed cameras (1995 figures) plus the bonanza that will flow from the new laser guns to stricter government training and licensing of driving instructors.
But Mr Craige is giving his dog's breakfast three months in which to find at least part of the answer to the way the under-25s are killing themselves at a far higher rate than any other drivers.
OK, we can't go the way of countries such as Japan where all driver-training is done by government instructors - although that would be a helluva good way of creating new public sector jobs.
OK, governments don't have the political guts to ban young people being taught by their relatives even though they are handing on their own faults, prejudices, bad habits, ignorance and skills failures.
Three bloody months in which to try to undo the damage the TAC has done by duck-shoving the responsibility for driver training to parents and relatives in yet another series of television commercials - the showbiz alternative to actually doing something.
If that's the TAC's idea of how drivers should be trained, then this committee will be about as objective as the O. J. Simpson jury.
This is a golden chance to start with a clean sheet of paper and create a far higher level of driver training than the pathetic mime and relentlessly rehearsed route-driving that now delivers licences to young people who generally think the TAC commercials are a joke.
But I guess Mr Ian Forsyth, the marketing manager of the TAC (what are they marketing and to whom?) will make sure the committee delivers the right outcomes. After all, as he has stated, the TAC is now deciding where speed traps and booze buses are to be set up . . . " Funny, that. I always thought it was the police . . .
© 1996 The Age
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