Garth George: Scant cause for New Year cheer

Already it is manifestly apparent that the only things in the world that changed at midnight last Saturday were the numbers on the calendar.

The possible exception is the satisfaction level of cricket fans, who on Tuesday watched the Black Caps win a second one-day international in less than a week - and the return to form of our beloved Nathan Astle.

Let us all pray that this is a turning point for our national side which will lead to their return to the upper rankings of world cricket, including a top seeding in next year's World Cup. (To be a New Zealand cricket fan you have to be eternally optimistic.)

But as for the rest of life in this land of ours and this world of ours there is little room for optimism.

We read that healthcare is still beyond the reach of many in spite of more Government spending, and we know that the Government will keep throwing more money at it without addressing the reason. It is too much to hope that the third-term Clark Government will acknowledge that the cause is a vastly bloated health bureaucracy, which absorbs money like a swab absorbs blood but contributes nothing to the treatment.

Until that question is addressed the health system will continue to flounder and tens of thousands of Kiwis will be left to suffer pain, discomfort and disability day in and day out.

And those who need treatment will be condemned for another year to the machinations of Pharmac, which judges the efficacy of all drugs and medicines purely on cost.

Many more of us will be relegated to cheap and nasty generics, and many others will remain deprived of treatments that could ease their lives because Pharmac's bean-counters judge them too expensive.

We read that the road toll, at 404 last year, was the lowest for 42 years and that Land Transport New Zealand and the police are patting themselves on the back - yet the statistics show that our road fatalities for each 100,000 people are the second highest of eight developed countries.

The lowest are in Canada, Britain and Sweden, but they are poor comparisons because they are all civilised countries which don't hand out drivers' licences to 15-year-olds, have informed road safety programmes and roads capable of handling the sophistication and density of modern-day traffic.

For as long as our road safety "experts" keep concentrating on speed, booze and seatbelts our road toll will continue to fluctuate. These campaigns have pretty much achieved their purpose and any further spending on them will be wasted.

We can take it for granted that the only people left who ignore the strictures on booze, speed and belts are those with alcohol addictions and the chronically stupid, for whom no amount of tut-tutting will make the slightest difference.

So let's hope that those in charge of road safety move on from trying to treat the symptoms and begin to address the fundamental causes of our high death toll.

Top of the list is to increase the licence qualification age to 18 with a total ban on driving placed on anyone under 17.

Driver training, both practical and theoretical, needs to be much more stringent.

The next item on the agenda should be inattention, for it is not speed that kills, it is speed combined with incompetence and inattention.

Until drivers are taught that driving in today's heavy traffic requires 100 per cent concentration every second of every minute, our accident rates, both fatal and non-fatal, have little chance of reducing.

I wonder how many drivers realise that at 100km/h their vehicles are travelling just under 28m every second. (Incidentally, where are the figures for, and comparisons of, all road accidents and not just fatal ones?)

The banning of cellphone use while driving is, of course, indispensable to any campaign against inattention.

On the world scene, any optimism for an improvement in the international affairs of man will have been dashed by a glance at the world section of this newspaper on Tuesday.

Take just the headings on one page.

"Army of children snatched for war", "Gaza's slow descent into self-destructive anarchy", "Death squads return to business on Darfur's killing fields" and "Europe entering New Year beset by problems and bereft of fresh ideas".

They all ignore the continuing debacle in Iraq, terrorist activity in Afghanistan, Indonesia and elsewhere, starvation and disease throughout Africa - the list goes on and on.

But the thing that gives me the New Year willies far more than the above is the growing interference of the United States in the affairs of more and more countries of the world.

This was brilliantly canvassed by Gwynne Dyer on Tuesday (link below) and need not be repeated here.

What does deserve repetition, however, is Dyer's description of American foreign policy under the Bush Administration - by far the best I have ever heard: "To a man who has only a hammer, everything looks like a nail."

Helen Clark, Winston Peters and Phil Goff better buy hard hats.