LETTER TO THE PREMIER- IN FULL

Dear Premier, 

How close you came to living in the same world that many Victorians live.

A world of heart-ache and disbelief.

You got a phone call from your son telling you that he had crashed the car.

A phone call telling you that he was drink driving.

A phone call telling you that his passenger was in hospital. 

We got a knock on the door telling us our son was dead

Our son was a passenger.

His trust betrayed by a driver

He could have just as easily been killed walking along the street, the driving was the same. 

I would give anything to feel like you do now

I would give anything to feel the anger and love all rolled into one that I know you must be feeling when you look at your son. 

How lucky you are. How lucky your sons’ passengers parents are.

I hope you never dismiss this with the ‘boys being boys’ mentality.

Your boy’s driving was culpable.

Your boy did everything to be a culpable driver causing death

 I wonder if you always thought that this only happened to rat bag families.

I wonder if you have ever secretly dismissed young deaths on the road as only happening to teenagers whose parents didn’t care. 

I feel guilty because like a lot of people before me I have said “will it take a politicians child to die before they get it” 

I have said  “if only they could feel this way for five minutes, they would do everything in their power to prevent this from ever happening again”.

But of course I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy.

 You have not even remotely come close to how it feels now either, but you must feel anger and frustration that this has happened. 

You could be visiting your son in jail if his passenger had died.

Even then I would trade places with you in a heartbeat.

To be able to visit my son and see his eyes alive and try and make him laugh and to hear his voice would be the world to me, even if it was in Jail. 

Your son will be off the road immediately thanks to my Josh and his friend Jack who died along side him. 

We had to fight for probationary drivers to be taken off the road after they have crashed drunk behind the wheel.

We had to fight for this to be taken seriously.

We had to watch the driver who killed our son continue to drive because you said it was draconian to remove his licence.

His licence was more important than the fact he had killed two people.

He failed his probationary period to say the least but you didn’t see it that way. 

You never backed us.  

Do you think your son has failed his probationary period?    

There is still a lot to be done before the correct message is being sent.

Will you meet with me now?   

 Maybe because of the lack of attention you gave our sons death the correct message was never sent to drivers like your son?

I hope you don’t think the timing of this letter is harsh because it is not meant that way.  

It is from the heart of one parent to another. 

A mum who hasn’t any power, to a dad who has it all.

 As the Premier, you have had a real taste of what could have happened to your own family, are you prepared to now look at drink driving courses before the licence is granted?

 Are you prepared to look at a responsibility course, driver training, better education, much better education from an early age?

 Are you prepared to do things that will prevent road trauma instead of dealing with it after it happens? 

It is too late then.

Too late for dead teenagers who had the whole world waiting for them

I believe the government is prepared to concede a percentage of lives on the road as a consequence of having cars and roads. 

This doesn’t have to be.

Life is too precious to dismiss.

As a politician are you prepared to concede your son’s life?

 Or only mine   

A shorter version of this letter was published in the Sunday Herald Sun