Peninsula hit by $4m selective tax

I wonder how many of your readers have noticed that Bob Carr has generously promised to raise $20 million for research into spinal chord injuries by installing speed cameras around 10 NSW schools.

Of those 10 schools in the whole of the state, two are to be in Woy Woy.

Set aside for a moment the questionable ethics of using speed cameras to raise money rather than to reduce speeding and of siting them, not around accident black spots in arterial roads.

They are in residential thoroughfares at a point where the speed limit drops suddenly from 60kph to 40kph for just a few hundred metres, and only at certain times of day on certain days of the year.

Can any of our elected representatives, local, state or federal, explain the process of reasoning by which those 10 schools came to be selected out of all the schools in the state, and why two of them are in Woy Woy?

That the schools are to be Woy Woy Public and Woy Woy South Public, is bad news for those who regularly use Ocean Beach Rd.

Living in a cul de sac to the west of it, I have no alternative but to do so, several times a day.

Since the announcement was made, I have been carefully observing my own performance in school zones and found that even a 77-year-old like me, who saunters round the Peninsula at never more than 50kph, can find himself inadvertantly breaching the letter of the restriction while observing the spirit of it, particularly during those periods when the kids are safely in school and before they start to leave.

At other times, of course, the density of the parental traffic and the manned school crossings make breaches of the restriction impossible - which means that the main weight of this impost will fall, not on the commuters crawling through between 8 and 9am, but on those of us who emerge for social and recreational purposes while others are away at work.

At $2 million per camera, what we are looking at here is a $4 million-dollar selective tax on one small community for the alleged benefit of the entire state.

It's not just the money, it's the points.

Surely this is not only unfair and unethical, but unconstitutional.

However, who can afford to chaIlenge the Government in the courts over it?

If Bob Carr wants to raise money for research into spinal chord injuries he should do it in the usual way.

By getting it voted through Parliament.

This is petty dictatorship.

There should be no taxation without representation.

Peter Scott, Woy Woy