Chester Borrows: Who pays for dumb decisions?

Littering is annoying, sometimes unsafe, but other breaches of social norms can cost lives. Photo / file

When I drove up our road last night, I was pleased to get home after being in Wellington half the week. The countryside in the summer, especially in the evening light, is a special place to be.

I can't help thinking, though, that as much as many of us treasure what we have here in New Zealand in terms of the clean and the green, there is a chunk of the population that just doesn't get this.

One hundred metres up the main road is a bed base for an inner-spring mattress of queen-sized proportions. Dumped on the side of the road for "some other sucker" to pick up and dispose of. The sucker will probably be me. A walk with the dog up the road usually gleans half a dozen glass bottles, bits of plastic or dirty nappies, and even rubbish bags full of household garbage.

A walk up our pristine beaches nets bits of plastic flotsam and jetsam but also bottles thrown into a fire built on the beach and left to break in the sand where the next excited little kid will run bare-footed. I suppose they go to a lonely beach to enjoy the peaceful tranquillity of our great outdoors. Then leave it looking like a rubbish heap.

I make it a practise to bring all this stuff home and discard it with our household rubbish, and I think more and more Kiwis are doing the same. But how do these idiots who leave this stuff lying about miss the point so blatantly? Social norms are called that because societies come to a common observation and understanding about what is acceptable in terms of responsibility and safety.

I would no more throw rubbish out of my car window than fly to the moon, and yet people chuck all and sundry of unwanted items on to the side of the road.

A far more horrific example is the fact that so many drivers spurn wearing seatbelts with tragic consequences. We saw, just this week, six family members including children who were driving without wearing seatbelts when, for some reason, the car went off the road and hit a tree. Five of the family were killed.

The adults in the vehicle must have made the decision not only not to belt up but also not to ensure their child passengers – presumably their own children – were also not belted in.

It is not just the law, it is utter madness not to wear a seatbelt. Despite not knowing how other drivers will behave on the road and so be unable to predict what evasive action may need to be taken, inattention, driver fatigue and behaviours such as speeding and failure to drive safely mean all passengers live and die at the whim of the person behind the wheel.

We could have a similar conversation about people who drive intoxicated, or those doing other dangerous stuff, like hunting with spotlights or shooting from vehicles or on roadsides. Littering is annoying, sometimes unsafe, but other breaches can cost lives.

It is hard to know how we can get through to those who will continue to do dumb and selfish things that cause us all grief. When they make decisions around the safety of those who cannot make decisions for themselves, such as the very young or the very old, it is criminal. Every now and then there is a stark reminder that some people live outside the social norms and have no intention of joining the rest of us living responsibly and caring about communities.

Children pay the price of adults' abdication of these social responsibilities and undoing the carnage that can result is impossible.

Chester Borrows served as Whanganui MP for 12 years and as a minister in the National Government. He is chairman of the Justice Reform Advisory Group, a lawyer and a former policeman.

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