Miles Kemp: Road safety campaign won’t bring back my brother

THE road toll is a load of crap. It’s an excuse for failure devised by those responsible for your safety to legitimise their inability or unwillingness to carry out the task.

Miles Kemp, left and his late brother Duncan.

• Road safety campaign aiming at zero road fatalities

THE road toll is a load of crap. It’s an excuse for failure devised by those responsible for your safety to legitimise their inability or unwillingness to carry out the task.

Forgive my language but my 18-year-old brother was swallowed up by the road toll never to be seen again.

It is a fraud perpetrated on the public by those who have near total control over what happens on our roads but tell you how many destroyed families they will deem acceptable ahead of time.

Apologies if you thought this column would give you a warm and fuzzy feeling about what my family lost when Duncan died in 1982.

Blah, blah, blah; that’s what midday movies are for. That isn’t me. Instead, what enrages me is the “road toll” policy.

What enrages me is that a meeting of the powers-that-be or many meetings — has decided the aim on South Australian roads should be to allow “only” 80 people like my brother to die each year by 2020.

As the Motor Accident Commission clearly identifies today, zero is the only reference to numbers which should be made when it comes to a road toll.

A zero road toll would guarantee failure every year. Maybe we should be brave enough to fail every year.

Fail, explain, defend, do better and repeat. That should be the template for everyone who earns an income from trying to achieve a zero road toll. And they should be bloody proud to earn that income by striving to do so.

Thirty-five years after Duncan’s death, I still can’t hear a phone ringing past 11pm without feeling irritation, dread, then realisation as the tone of the person on the other end tells me to “stand at ease”.

Who cares, right? We “achieved” the target that year.

Thirty-five years later not much is being done differently to that night. The power pole he died on was plonked where it was cheapest and most convenient. The drunk driver he was with ignored the warnings.

The car was manufactured to travel too fast and a kid made a stupid decision to get a lift. Duncan’s first crash was his last.

The entire community, via the aim to kill only a certain number of people, was ‘sorry, not sorry’ and ready to do it all over again the next day.

But with the debate the Motor Accident Commission has started today, maybe this will change. Maybe.