It’s madness that we let parents smoke in cars with kids

Why is it that the health, safety and wellbeing of our children sits seemingly so low in this country’s priorities? Why is it that we say children are front and centre of the Government’s decisions and then our actions prove otherwise?

Why do we ban cellphones in cars but not smoking in cars carrying kids? We ban and punish otherwise good citizens going 54kmh in a 50kmh speed zone but thick old dad blowing 4000 chemicals and toxins into the faces of his children in an enclosed tomb was seen as ‘‘not a priority’’ by the last chumps in charge.

Wimps, wallies, pathetic – and even Labour needed a little cattle prod to where the sun don’t shine to remind them of their PR mission statement a year ago to make kids the centrepiece. Remember?

When the new law is passed, can all our leaders sit side by side on a stage to show the country it’s time some things matter more than others.

Why do Australia, Canada, parts of the United States and many other countries find smoking in cars with kids so wrong that they passed a law banning it and then punished the numbskulls who continued to puff away, oblivious that their actions were seriously harming their so-called precious cargo in the back?

We’ve all seen the ads: secondhand smoke kills. So we cleaned up our act on planes, bars, restaurants and other public places. The sky would fall in, cried the free marketeers. We’re still waiting.

We then followed with a decade of rules, banning smacking, bullrush, lolly scrambles, and we got close to banning fun itself.

We slip, slopped and slapped, and over-parented, fussed and faffed around our young charges. We stopped them riding to school and playing outside. We oversupervised them.

Then we banned sunbeds in case going orange meant an early death. We talked healthy food and obesity rates at near-death levels, but then opened a donut franchise shop with a drive-through. Yeeee-hah. No walking.

We banned pies in schools then reintroduced them, thank the lord. We talked about taxing sugar. We became such a confused state that we dropped the drinking age to 18, thinking surely this will make the buggers mature more quickly.

Sadly, but unsurprisingly, Jenny Shipley’s admiration for cafe-style drinking never took off with young people who still wanted to, well, be young, dumb and full of fun. We then allowed synthetic cannabis to be sold with milk and bread at the corner dairy. I know. Madness. The resulting ban was worse. Forty dead and counting.

But among all this chaos of change, new rules and bans, we never banned smoking in cars with children.

Even this week, smokers emailed demanding their right to puff away in their cars with the kids choking in the back. It makes me feel more comfortable with our AM Show campaign every time an angry smoker demands the right to kill children.

The issue has been on the country’s radar since 2010, but National thought it was PC gone mad and nanny state, so it carefully took its hands off everything and called itself business friendly. Gutless really. They had the chance to make a difference to 100,000 kids whose voice isn’t developed yet, but they preferred to hoist a new flag up a pole called ‘‘change’’.

For a country that says kids are our future, we have a funny way of showing it at times. We sadly, brutally kill our children at a rate of one every five weeks. Monsters attacking babies in paradise need their own special law with a special sentence that truly punishes.

And at the other end of the spectrum, we can’t train and provide enough teachers so every primary school child starts next year with a teacher at the front of the classroom.

This week I was proud to be part of a short, sharp AM Show campaign to highlight and change a law that shouldn’t be needed, but sadly it is because some people remain unfit parents.

More please, said the Children’s Commissioner, who played his own big part in our campaign.

Thanks to the Government for moving quickly. Children not yet born will be impacted by this. That’s gotta be worth it.