Kerre Woodham: Drive the message home

When will the Government raise the driver's age? Any government. What's the hold up?

Over the years, ministers of both red and blue hue have been supportive of the idea of raising the age at which young people can get behind the wheel of a car, so why have we not seen it passed into law?

In 2007, United Future leader Peter Dunne had the rare honour of Parliament granting leave for his bill on raising the driving age to 16 to be introduced to the House. Any one MP could have stopped the bill going forward, but they chose not to do so.

Clearly, raising the driving age in a desperate bid to stop the road carnage appealed to politicians across the House. But two years, and many many deaths and amputations and head injuries on, we're still letting kids kill themselves.

Three dead kids in Invercargill this week and one seriously injured. Just another week and another piece of statistical grist for the researchers to add to their mill. How can we all stand by and let it happen?

The argument used to be that country kids had to have their licences young to get to school and help on the farm. But the days of New Zealand as a bucolic paradise are long gone.

Most Kiwi kids live in cities and towns. The days of kids helping out in the family business appear to be long gone, too. Get them to unpack the dishwasher and you're doing well. And they hardly need a driver's licence for that.

Anyway, Dunne says if his bill goes ahead, he'd be willing to consider exemptions for country kids to enable them to drive the kilometres they need to drive to get them where they need to be.

Dunne also points out that 15 used to be the school leaving age and that young people leaving school and taking up jobs needed their licences to drive to work. That's no longer the case.

Survey after survey says that 15 is too young to be behind the wheel of a car ask any researcher from the University of Otago's injury prevention unit or the AA. Young people's brains haven't developed sufficiently by the age of 15 to think ahead, multi-task and react to unexpected situations.

In the past, when we had citizens' armies, we needed young people men, in particular to be reckless and believe that they were six-foot-tall and bullet-proof so that we could send them off to be cannon fodder in futile wars. Now that war has become high-tech, we don't require the same number of bodies, but that recklessness is still in the DNA.

Can't we protect these kids from themselves by giving them a fighting chance of surviving their learner drivers' years?

Why don't they test their machismo in other ways through martial arts or team sport, even chess?

There must be other ways for young men to test their mettle and their boundaries other than putting them into metal coffins and letting them go for it.

* www.kerrewoodham.com