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House of Assembly - Fifty-Second Parliament, First Session (52-1)
2010-06-24 Daily Xml
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ROADSAFE YOUTH DRIVER AWARENESS

Mr SIBBONS (Mitchell) (15:22): It is with great pleasure that I rise today, because I want to talk about a program running at one of my local high schools at the moment, that is, Seaview High School. It is about road safety youth driver awareness which is a very topical point in the community at the moment and which is very near and dear to my heart at least with my 16 year old son just getting his P-plates, which is around the right age where we need to be teaching our young people about the appropriateness of road safety and the ways to drive in an appropriate manner.

I want to talk about the RYDA program, which stands for Roadsafe Youth Driver Awareness. It is a road safety education program aimed at reducing death and injury amongst young people on Australian roads. The program targets 16 to 17 year olds who are at the stage of their lives when they start to drive or ride in vehicles driven by their peers. RYDA is a not-for-profit company that has developed this road safety education program, and it is accessed through the Rotary Clubs of Australia.

It has been very important for the group at Seaview High School to go through this program, and I congratulate the Edwardstown branch of Rotary for supporting this program, which has been put in place through its fundraising activities, as well as a small contribution from the school community. In terms of a bit of history of RYDA, in July 2000 the hills district of Sydney suffered a devastating loss when four teenage boys lost their lives in a horrendous crash.

The accident was on a mild bend, the car being driven by a 17 year old who had had a provisional licence for only three weeks. The community rallied around this tragedy, because police estimated that the speed at which the individual was travelling was 110 kilometres in a 60 kilometre zone, so it really highlighted the need for awareness.

I have to say that the contribution that the program has made to the community has certainly made a difference. The program focuses on attitude and awareness with the aim of helping young adults become better people on the road. The program highlights the privilege and responsibilities of owning and driving a motor vehicle and also illustrates their rights and responsibilities as passengers and pedestrians, which is very important.

The current program is run away from the school site, and it is currently being run in a facility up at Flinders University, just outside my electorate. It is coordinated with local road safety expert driving instructors, the police, recovering survivors of road crashes, drug and alcohol educators and financial services personnel.

Students are divided into six groups with approximately 25 students in each and they basically move through the whole program and cover a whole range of issues. Issues that they cover include stopping distances. Students are actually shown a practical about the impact of deferring speeds, reaction times, vehicle traction and how all those sorts of thing come into play when you are driving.

It covers hazard perception with an interactive discussion aimed at familiarising students with the most common crashes involving young people by establishing what hazards are and equipping them with suitable strategies, and it also covers safe celebrating and fatigue—understanding what drugs and alcohol has to do with the body and how that is affected. There is also an area where police are showing horrific accidents and how that impacts on a family, as well as personal stories.

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