Kids clearly aren’t Australia’s only problem phone-addicts | David Penberthy

This week revealed about 68,000 reasons Australia has problem with people who simply cannot help themselves, writes David Penberthy.

After years of close observation I have come to the conclusion that human beings are completely bloody stupid.

There is now overwhelming statistical evidence to back the assertion.

It comes in the form of infringement notices for the use of mobile phones while driving motor vehicles.

Thanks to the advance of technology it is now possible to photograph drivers while they sit idle, waiting for the lights to change in almost every state in Australia – to see if their hands are straying in the direction of their mobiles.

Remarkably, hundreds of fines are being issued to motorists who drive through the same intersection every day, where the placement of these permanent, overhead detection cameras is public knowledge, but who persist in using their phones anyway.

These people are like a mouse in a laboratory experiment that keeps returning for a pellet despite knowing it will give them an electric shock.

They simply cannot help themselves.

With the exception of WA and the NT, every Australian state and territory now has fixed and/or transportable mobile phone detection cameras.

A driver caught on camera in Adelaide. Picture: SAPOL

Even the civil libertarians in the ACT have them, although it’s my understanding that the Greens-dominated local government wants fines waived if you can show you were using your phone to buy drugs but tripled if you work in real estate.

These detection cameras are now the law of the land almost everywhere.

Their arrival has hardly been a state secret since they were first rolled out in NSW in 2019.

NSW now has 47 of them, Tasmania 16, Victoria eight, the ACT two, Queensland won’t say how many it has or perhaps their Premier can’t count that high, and SA has become the latest state to have five installed at fixed permanent locations in the past few months.

The rollout of the cameras in SA has been a case study in human stupidity.

The exact location of all five cameras in suburban Adelaide was made public by SA Police from the get-go and covered exhaustively by every newspaper, TV and radio station in the state.

The coppers gave the public a three-month period of grace which expired on September 18, during which warning letters were sent advising that after that date they would be facing a $658 fine and lose three demerit points.

During that period more than 68,000 warning letters were sent out, but scores of people received multiple warning letters, one of them reportedly received 33, two received 32 and another 31, advising that they had been caught yet again using their phones.

There was a view that these recidivists were having a bit of a lark knowing that there was no penalty anyway for being caught at the fixed cameras, despite the fact that a random police officer could have pulled up next to them and fine them anyway.

So what happened when the grace period ended? Did everyone shape up and fall into line?

Not even close.

In the first seven days of their formal operation last month 2544 fines were issued worth a total of almost $1.7m. Two motorists were caught six times and one motorist five times in the space of that first week and each is believed to have had their licence cancelled due to the huge accrual of demerits. They’ve also lost more than three grand each in fines.

As I said at the top, how bloody stupid are people.

I have heard a few hand-wringing complaints that these cameras are an intrusion on our personal freedoms.

What rot.

The only people who have any valid complaint about attempts to rein in phone use by drivers are panel beaters and funeral directors, both of whom can attribute a portion of their income to the practice. The panel beaters especially.

Those blokes must have felt like publicans when pokies were made legal, the day that guy from Nokia stood up all those years ago saying they’d perfected a small, affordable device which could let you make a phone call from anywhere.

NSW Premier Chris Minns with South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas at the Social Media Summit at ICC Darling Harbour Sydney. Picture: NewsWire / John Appleyard

Like a highway while you were doing 110km/h, just before you drove up the arse of a road train.

The thing that confounds me about all this is that it speaks of a weird level of addiction.

The people who use mobiles in their cars would definitely not regard themselves as criminals. The profile of the mobile phone-using motorist is different from those habitual self-centred bludgers who get done every day driving unregistered, driving while disqualified, who take drugs and drink while behind the wheel.

It seems to be a genuine addiction by otherwise decent people who in every other field of life wouldn’t dream of breaking the law or behaving in an anti-social way.

It’s funny to think how much effort is now being put into the extent to which technology is dominating and damaging young people’s lives through the proliferation of social media.

NSW Premier Chris Minns and SA Premier Peter Malinauskas announced a suite of measures on Friday including age limits and mandatory subjects in school about the pitfalls of social media use.

A central part of their push is the addictive, all-consuming nature of technology.

On the addiction score, the kids aren’t even close to having a monopoly on this problem.

Pull up at any intersection in the land to see a phone-addicted adult in all their glory. Even at those intersections where everyone knows they have detection cameras.

Anthropologists have wondered for decades how the Mayan civilisation came to an end in pre-Colombian Mexico.

I don’t know how it did either.

But the human race will end when the astronaut pilot of a large space station drives his spacecraft into earth while laughing at a TikTok video.

Originally published as Kids clearly aren’t Australia’s only problem phone-addicts | David Penberthy