Geoff Hazel - A lack of road safety

Transcript

On the first tour, my first demonstration when I was working there, I went and sat down and chatted with the Greek Cypriot, who was running their side of it. And we got talking, and he says, oh he'd just been promoted to be the officer in charge of traffic for Nicosia. And I said, "Yeah." He said, "I hear in Australia you have traffic campaigns." I said, "Yes." He said, "Oh, what do you do?"

So I started explaining how you organise and run a traffic campaign media and all that. And then I got to the hard part. I said, "Then you go out and you enforce the law." And he looked at me, "On everybody?" I said, "Yep. If you pick that particular thing, no matter what it was, you go out and you book everybody that breaks that particular law." "But what if they have a relative who is a senior police officer or a member of parliament, or one of the priests?" "You enforce the law." "Oh, well it was a good idea. I'll put it aside. Not going to be done."

They were killing more on the roads than we were in Australia. And the population, at that stage, it was only 360,000. And that's an act of God. So yeah, road safety was your biggest problem, and as far as I was concerned.