Marian,

\”No Crush Protection Device (CPD), No use\”. DSE and Parks Victoria are taking this ban seriously and tell us that they have \’parked \’ their quads until a decent and relevant risk assessment is conducted.

People have rung in seeking information and the reasons for the ban. There have been international requests for information, and a new need to brief ministers in other governments, other countries. The market place is a strange animal with rules all of its own, and ethics and OHS are not the main game. Could this push by the AWU promote side-by-side units? Or at least more thought about safer machines?

The other condition is that proper training is provided, and training into which the AWU has some specific input. That\’s because at present nothing is said at some such training sessions about the proneness of these quads to rollover; nothing is said about coroners\’ findings\’; nothing is said about the nonsense that the usual \’risk assessments\’ really are; nothing is said about questionable industry-commissioned research into CPDs.

Trainees have the right to know the hard truth. They also ought to know just how much criticism has been levelled at the research the industry uses to argue that CPDs are not protective enough. None of this is taught to trainees, and that\’s unfair.

Union bans are not (always) the final answer to improvement of OHS standards, but they are a step indicating that there is an OHS problem that neither manufacturers nor regulators are willing to tackle effectively. Or they, yet again, blame the dead and injured as ‘misusers’.

It’s often the case that action for improvement of OHS standards must take place well before all the science, expert and academic agreement is in. You just can\’t wait until they all sing off the same scoresheet. If we waited for that we\’d still be mining asbestos in Australia and using it in buildings such as schools. We\’d still be using parathion ethyl (a most dangerous pesticide), and no one would know that some rockwools and ceramic fibres were considered in the past as carcinogenic. It was the AWU – specifically – that banned and raised these OHS issues to the level of awareness that led to improvements. It was not the industry nor regulators.

There is no simple answer, no magic bullet, and even wins on the back of union bans can go back over time to how they were and…. you then need to do it all over again.

In the meantime, as you well know, so many people are being killed by riding quads that are prone to rollover, or riders are encouraged to use ‘active riding’ to deal with riding conditions at the limit of stability of the machine, to use their body weight as an aid to design problems. Do you know of any other machine that has killed people from the age of 6 to 94?!

When you put together such prone to rollover machines and human beings who are prone to be…. well, human beings, you’ve got a recipe for disaster.

I know the difficulties of delivering good training onto farms (by the way, I don\’t believe that the current training is much chop – though there are some very good people in this business of training who could adapt in a single day), and I know the resistance to such training. But this is a bit easier to achieve in a workplace. It’s a legal requirement.

I’m afraid that hoping that riders will be more careful and use ‘common sense’ is a death warrant for too many.