Road Safe Hawkes Bay Killing Kids - Candor Trust

NZTA and the Regional Council should not be funding Road Safe Hawkes Bay, or their likes, to provide 1980's styled youth Alcohol Expos to deter drink driving - it's no longer King. In the Police ESR study of a 5 year crop of dead drivers just 12 (8%) out of the total 140 dead teen drivers had used just alcohol, but 46 (33%) of them had used cannabis.

"The proportion of drivers in the age group of 15 to 19, using alcohol and driving, is low relative to the older age groups, up to 40 years old. This contrasts with the high proportion using cannabis and driving" noted Police scientists authoring the report.

For the Eastern District the trend may be even more pronounced, because over all age groups dying on Hawkes Bay roads there continues to be a strong preference for cannabis over alcohol. Of 56 dead Bay drivers only 13 had just used alcohol. Thirty one however had other drugs aboard.

These youth targeted booze shows are unethical wasted opportunities, duplicating other services, whilst misleading Hawkes Bay people about and concealing from them the true nature of their risks. Teens in RoadSafe audiences will die by receiving the wrong message. The negligence is even more serious given NZ signed the UN Convention on the rights of the child.

Article 17 specifies that children have the right to get information that is important to their health and well-being. Governments should encourage mass media – radio, television, newspapers and Internet content sources – to provide information that children can understand and to not promote materials that could harm children.

Instilling terror over drink driving, at a time other risk drugs have long been far more prevalent in roadkilled Kiwi kids is deceptive, and likely to transmit a clear message that teens should continue to substitute dope.

NZTA should evaluate how much the drink/drug driving toll keeps climbing after such silly public relations exercises as the alcohol expo funded. Candor would offer to assist to remediate shows with updated content, except that the bureaucracy has semi ostracised us for insistence on evidence based practice, as seen everywhere, bar in N.Z.

Steven Joyce mewed platitudes about drug driving education on Close Up in March 2009, but any victim families who awaited progress and a message about drink/drug driving (as used everywhere else) have been disappointed. As have families of the several dozen dead drug driving teenagers since, nurtured into Hades by idiotic road safety messages, that are the equivalent of telling children to look left but not right when crossing the road.

Steven Joyce needs to ensure NZTA desists from funding alcohol expos that are wasting resources, hunt down those responsible for ongoing unfit killer communications, and shrink the Public service by shedding all those who are conspiring to conceal drug driving risk - Candor can name names.

An expanded vision for health promotion, built on evidence not assumptions, though a novel idea is long overdue. Shame on any literate drone who is complicit with the State policy of hushing drug driving risks, so that Victoria can use our torment as a control sample to justify how well their campaigns work. Apologies are owed to teen graves, and the future dead among RoadSafe Hawkes Bays audience.

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