FLAGGING SAFETY

Okay. So you’ve been inconvenienced over the past 24 hours  by those selfish, uncaring, self-centred taxi drivers. Making you late home from work to plunk down in front of the telly with a couple of beers. Or Late for a flight because they were mucking up at Tullamarine Airport.

I wonder if you are a teacher who didn’t mind blocking the streets for a protest to support your cause? Didn’t mind inconveniencing other people who suddenly found their kids’ schools were closed and they’d better make other arrangements.

Or were you a cursing off-duty police officer grizzling at the taxi drivers staging a sit down protest near Flinders Street station  when several thousands of you had done the same marching on State Parliament recently?

Or one of the thousands of union members who marched and waved flags in the periodic anti- Work Choice street marches in recent years.

Or maybe you’re one of those doctors, members of the AMA, justifiably complaining about how unsafe their work places are when confronted by violent drug addicts in emergency wards.

Did anybody, including pontificating broadcasters, stop to think that that is what these taxi drivers are protesting about: An unsafe work place.

They are confronted by druggies and drunks every day, and every night. Their lives are daily put in danger.  And they have, yet again, vicious proof.  A 23-year-old taxi driver stabbed and left for dead by a passenger.

He’s one of the 400 taxi drivers injured in Victoria every year. The reward for working long hours for not much money.

Taxis do need safety screens. Not the huge, cumbersome, even dangerous, fibre-glass bubbles that are despised by drivers and passengers alike in Sydney.  They need a glass screen between the front and back seats with a slide or a drawer for fare transactions.

It is now almost a year since taxi driver Rajneesh Joga was  killed. The demand for protective screens was raised again then.

So what’s happened ? Public Transport Minister Lynne Kosky says trials of taxi screens are going ahead. You wonder why on their expensive overseas jaunts some Government Minister didn’t at least take photos of the screens in Manhattan cabs. Or even get a screen shipped home.

Wednesday, April 30, 2008

© Copyright Derryn Hinch 2008