Amanda Rishworth (Kingston, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

On 28 October the member for Mayo and I cohosted a program for student winners of the South Coast Local Service Area essay competition here at Parliament House. This essay competition, set up by the South Coast Local Service Area, is open to year 10 students within the South Coast and Hills Fleurieu Local Service Areas. The essay topic was about how police and other organisations could provide better road safety messages. Sixteen students from 11 schools across the area put forward some very innovative and interesting ideas in their essays. The range of different ideas included providing defensive driving courses for all drivers; access to interest-free loans and HECS type debts to ensure the most inexperienced drivers purchased vehicles that were fitted with modern safety features; ensuring that penalties for drink- and drug-driving included community service at injury rehabilitation centres to really get the message across about how dangerous road injuries can be; involvement of GPS technology to govern the speeds of vehicles at speed limit changes; and limiting speedometers to 110 kilometres per hour so as not to encourage excessive speeds.

These were some of the ideas generated from young people about how to improve road safety in our local area. Road safety is an important issue. I would really like to congratulate the local service area and in particular Sergeant Gordon Little; Constable Amanda Dawson; Sergeant Mark Thomas; Paula Tonkin, the Christies Beach High School teacher; and Aimee Bodsworth, a Blue Light volunteer. They really put a lot of effort into organising this.

We were very lucky to also have the members for North Sydney and Kingsford Smith visit the young people, and I know that they got a real buzz out of it. This initiative really does need to be congratulated. It is about crime prevention and getting the ideas of local young people—to get them thinking about road safety but also to develop their leadership in the community. This was a very good initiative and I look forward, as I am sure the member for Mayo does, to continuing to support this important initiative. Some of the students did indicate—I do not have the time to quote therm—that it was a very valuable experience for them, including not just coming to Parliament House but also their walk up to Mount Kosciusko. I commend the program and congratulate everyone involved. (Time expired)