Visitor drivers

What a brilliant and meaningful column Alison Mau wrote regarding visitor drivers causing so many accidents and deaths (‘‘Govt ignores visitor drivers’ toll’’, February 19).

Mostly the horrendous accidents and suffering are not reported on. When is enough, enough? Which Member of Parliament is going to have the courage and grit to do something about driver testing before allowing visitors behind the wheel?

As was pointed out in the article, how would any MP feel if a member of their family was left dead or suffering a long-term injury because of New Zealand’s weak policy making. Lynley Cullinane, Christchurch Mau offers no meaningful statistics to support her case. She cites 22 deaths and 700 injuries last year being caused by visitor drivers. To be useful the figures should be compared to the corresponding statistics for local drivers. Only then can we determine if visitor drivers are causing more accidents than local drivers, therefore warranting harsher scrutiny.

I have heard and read that visitor driver accident stats are not worse than those for local drivers. I do not know, but if that is true then this campaign has an uncomfortable whiff of xenophobia about it.

I support the notion of government introducing/ improving systems designed to instruct visitor drivers – really, it seems like a no-brainer. But the call to fully test them seems impractical and likely prohibitively expensive.

Mau and others promoting this campaign appear to think telling accident victim horror stories is enough to persuade Government policy makers.

Those tragic stories are not enough. What might be enough is proof that visitor drivers are demonstrably and statistically causing more accidents. Duncan McEntee, Christchurch