Who’s looking after the children?
It was one of Derryn Hinch’s favourite one liners, "Who’s looking after the children". It’s also one I might be adopting over the coming months and years, as I start to see a pattern of failure to care for our kids across society.
The latest evidence comes from Forest Lake, where a five year old girl was hit by a car. Its a pretty tragic thing to happen to anyone, let alone such a young child. Plenty of people are upset about it, but as you can see from this courier mail article, they are all upset with the driver of the car.
This week the local paper has a call to lower the speed limit 10k’s an hour on the road, citing the incident as the latest in a string of pedestrian accidents that demonstrate the speed limit needs lowering.
Really?
I would have thought it shows that either we have drivers failing to obey road rules such as stopping at red lights, giving way, and what not, or it shows that we have raised a generation of stupid people who can’t cross a street.
In the case of the 5 year old, she was (as would be expected), with her mother, but her mother was not, as far as I can tell, hit by the car. I hope the girl pulls through, and I hope her mother realises that you can’t let five years cross the road by themselves!
From what I gather, the pedestrian light was green, so the mother and child were following the rules to cross the road; That means that the drive failed to obey a traffic signal, and should be charged with that offence, plus something like grievous bodily harm for the damage this failure caused to the girl.
Once we stop worrying about a few k’s over the limit, and start worrying about how badly some people drive, things will improve. At the same time, we should perhaps start fining people for jaywalking again. I had two people wander out onto Ipswich road at Annerley just yesterday as I was approaching. It wouldn’t have taken much to go wrong for me to have hit one of them. Should we drop the speed limit to 40 on Ipswich road to allow for people to wander about it like a shopping mall?
In closing, let me make this wake up call to parents. You need to teach your kids how to cross a road. You need to set an example on how to do it safely, and you need to hold their hands while you do it!
June 17th, 2008 at 10:48 am
Um, yeah. If my child was hit by a car, so would I.