mjpb already answered that question: I did not say there should be an absence of punitive punishment at all....I meant that the vast majority of them are unnecessary, unwarranted and 'criminal'

Well Steel, that gives me some insight into one of the three points that I was seeking further info on in my last post.

You are a hard person to debate with. It is proving to be a chore to just find out where you are coming from before I can even start to agree with or debate your position.

hey all,

To me, holding a driving license shows ones intent to abide BY THE ROAD RULES. The basic laws are being ignored by a large percentage of the population in every State in Aust that I have encountered.

Back to the NT...
I agree that life in the major centres within the NT has declined to a "USA" style atmosphere, and requires a lot of policing. But in our case we have the "scaleys" that monitor heavy vehicles throughout the NT. heres the bit I like.......
They have no power to monitor other vehicles!

How lame it that?
We are supposed to have our "highway patrol" back again, I have only ever seen them seemingly taking errands from centres to centre, ignoring dangerous infringements along the way.

I am forced to think that no-one is interested or cares enough to actually act. Most would also have the attitude of a license being a right! Not the earned privelege that it WAS!

NT

Philips

“Current policing must be taken away from areas like rapes, …”

I wouldn’t want to see any police taken away from other very needy areas. I want to see the policing effort increased across the board, not just for road safety.

“Police numbers and equipment must be radically increased. The cost for this would inevitably come from reduced spending on education, …”

I don’t think that the increase would need to be particularly large…for road safety that is. For all police duties across society, yes it would.

There should be no need to divert costs from anywhere else. The enormous wealth that is flowing into this country from the sale of our one-off non-renewable primary resources should be well and truly adequate to provide for world’s best police service, and hence the best quality of life and level of security in the world!

The fact that this almighty wealth generation is not leading to very rapid increases in quality of life for all Australian citizens (and is rapidly taking us away from sustainability and towards an enormous economic and social catastrophe) is the ultimate indictment of our federal government….and state governments.

As for road safety, it would only require a relatively small increase in police numbers if the education, community empowerment and deterrence regimes were greatly boosted as per my suggestions on this thread on 21 & 22 July.

“Currently police resource are indeed “absolutely streeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeetched”. And I fear that NTeyeball is right in that there appears to be a whole lot of turning-a-blind-eye by police and an abject lack of concern about efficient policing, from the police, pollies or mainstream society.

I apologise Ludwig about my 'vagueness'. However mjpb seemed to know what I was talking about. Anyway. the point is, speeding rules and infringements are used on normal, law-abiding citizens far, far too often. Police resources should target and pursue actual dangerous driving (in cases admittedly, this can be speeding), not punitive speeding however. But despite Australia being a massive country, extraordinarily so, in fact, there is no recognition of this in law-making or maximum speed rules. Same with vehicle technology. This MUST CHANGE. I'm sick of seeing fellow motorists being treated like criminals for minor or safe speeding, while the police waste their time and resources bitching about things like this rather than punishing drivers that drive dangerously, or poor drivers that frequently go unpunished because of the lack of correct focus. This situation MUST and WILL change.

Thanks Steel

“…speeding rules and infringements are used on normal, law-abiding citizens far, far too often.”

How would we confidently separate generally law-abiding citizens from the ratbags, in order to only be able to target the ratbags?

We can’t. We need to treat everyone the same and put everyone under the same rules.

But I agree; the amount of police effort that goes into speed and drink/drug-driving detection is way out of proportion with other just-as-dangerous or more-immediately-dangerous behaviours. But this is only because the latter is practically non-existent, with the former being woefully inadequate.

I wish to goodness that the police would act on tailgating, dangerous overtaking and slow road-hog driving on our highways, and young idiot hoons that so obviously drive in a reckless manner on our urban streets…..and act on complaints about these things. But they just don’t…..or perhaps extremely rarely if they encounter an extreme case! I think that this is a disgustingly terrible inadequacy of our police and of our rule of law, and of the effort to improve road safety.

The focus of police is far too narrow. We agree on that. But I’ll maintain that speed limits need to be policed evenly, which means that people who are driving safely but just a little above the legal limit will get booked. So be it. There has to be a cut off that is obvious to everyone and that applies to all.

But I think that speed limits should be generally 10kmh higher in just about all situations as I stated above on this thread, as a concession to drivers in lieu of a stricter, more evenly applied and much more effective policing regime.