At 15 the pressure kids put on parents to get their learner licence is immense.
It seems odd, with the nation's economy imploding as it seems to be from what the Finance Minister recently told us and from what Rodney Hide asserted on Q+A last Sunday morning, that we are going nowhere and haven't a hope in hell of catching up to Australia under the Finance Minister's "incremental" approach to economic reform, that we should become focused on the driving age and changing the give way rules on our roads. That is what we are now doing.
And fair enough, I suppose, given that if we are to boost our economic performance, we need to keep people alive to make it happen. Too many people, too many young people, are dying or being seriously injured on our roads. As Transport Minister Stephen Joyce says, our young people have a 60 per cent higher chance of being injured on the roads than their peers in Australia.
The give way rule they're looking at is presumably our unique requirement about giving way to an oncoming car turning right if you are turning left. I still have to go through it consciously every time I'm in the situation requiring observance of that rule.
But let's look at the driving age. John Key is right to say straight away that it will rise. He is proposing 16 years. This doesn't go far enough and is simply more of the incrementalism that bothers Hide when it comes to economics.
And, to be fair, Hide can take the position he does because it helps distinguish his much smaller party from National. And National, as everyone understands, wants to win the next election and cannot propose too many drastic economic reforms that frighten the horses.
Without a doubt, the driving age of 15 in New Zealand is ridiculous. It is more than that. It puts our children in harm's way. What on earth does anyone know about anything at 15? Why would we knowingly put children in charge of lethal, speeding machines at the age of 15? The age of 15 is just three years beyond the age of 12, if you wanted to look at it that way. It is nothing.
But 15 it is and kids know it. At 13, they start to rub their hands together in anticipation of being just a couple of years away from getting their licence. At 15 the pressure kids put on parents to get their learner licence is immense. We've all experienced this, I'm sure.
Getting your licence is a rite of passage. It becomes so important to a kid. It is freedom. I suppose we all remember the joy of passing our written tests, then after the traffic policeman gave us our driving test, driving home with a driver's licence.
It is only a couple of years since I've forgotten the name of the officer who took me round the block. He was gruff, even a little grouchy, but nice enough. In the office afterwards, he took one of those little licence books, a new and fresh untouched book, wrote out my details and handed it to me.
And I drove beautifully, I thought. I drove Mum's little Standard 10 as if I was driving what I really wanted to drive, an aeroplane. Not in terms of speed, of course - I was never really a speedster - but I would drive straight and level and turn gently into the corners. I would park precisely. It would be years before I parked a car as if it were abandoned.
But we can all, at 15, get blase. I think when I was 17 or 18, I probably drove after having far too much to drink. But like you, if you are alive to read this, I was lucky. We made it through.
The trouble with young teen drivers is that they do not know, fundamentally, how quickly awful things can happen to a motor vehicle on a road, with consequences that may stay with them and affect the rest of their lives and the lives of others with whom they might collide.
You can warn them, you can bang on ad infinitum about it but it is likely to go in one ear and straight out their backside.
New Zealand has the lowest driving age in the world, except, as far as I can work out, Ethiopia, where it is 14. I do not know what they drive in Ethiopia. I would have thought the most that got driven there would be a camel or a team of oxen.
I suppose Addis Ababa has motor traffic. Probably, though one cannot be certain having not been there, and given the civil turbulence that has blighted that country for two decades and the drain on the economy of the acquisition of armaments, the roads are probably neglected and so pot-holed as to make excessive speed impossible.
Perhaps they need 14-year-olds to be able to drive tanks. You are fairly safe in a tank until a bigger tank driven by a 15-year-old comes at you and they both get taken out by the very old 17-year-old in another one.
Or it could be, in that nation of wretched poverty and 80 million people where the average life expectancy is 42 years, that they need to start having fun early if they are going to fit in as much life as they can in the four decades God gives them.
But above Ethiopia comes New Zealand at 15. And the more I think about a driving age of 15, the more absurd it seems to me.
In the United States it is 16 but the conditions under which you may drive at that age vary from state to state. But across Europe, in China, in India and in Japan, the minimum driving age is 18. So more than half of the population of the world is prevented from driving before they are 18.
In the UK the legal age is 17 but a debate is under way about lifting it to 18. And such is the glacial speed of the bureaucratic machine there that you might apply for your licence when you turn 17 but you will be on the pension before they test you.
In most parts of Australia you cannot drive until you are 17, although in Victoria it is 18. In South Australia it is 16. And whether a licensed South Australian can drive round Melbourne, I've no idea. And it's their problem.
We should raise the age limit to 18 in New Zealand. It is only sensible. It gives our children a few more years of protection from themselves and their mates.
But even Key's proposal to raise the age to 16 has Federated Farmers recycling their decades-old argument, which claims that a driving age of 16 might work in the cities but it won't work in Kerikeri. Well, it will, of course, because it will be the law.
And it is on those apparently safe country roads of little traffic that a 15 or 16-year-old driver will suddenly find that in a flash, before she can take any evasive action, a drunk 16-year-old has come round the corner, hit her head on and both children are flying through windscreens.
