Reactor Governments

You may have noticed a trend happening at the moment with our governments at various levels.

Things happen - government does something about it

I guess you could say this has been happening for ever with regards to governments. It's not necessarily a bad thing either, and governments aren't psychics, able to predict the future by looking inside a crystal ball.

However, the truth is, they don't need to.

Two recent examples in our fair state of Victoria give us an insight into how governments all over the country now prefer to govern. Both centre around human tragedies.

In January, a father took his four year old daughter and threw her off the West Gate Bridge. She died as a result of her injuries. He now waits to be tried for murder.

The Victorian Premier, John Brumby, acted swiftly after this incredible act to make the West Gate Bridge safer, and since about February, a rather unattractive high-wire fence has been attached to the outside of the bridge to prevent anything that is on the bridge ending up in the Yarra River or surrounding land below.

As a policy response, superficially it cannot be criticised. There have been no more throwing of children off the West Gate Bridge to their deaths since the bridge was erected. There were also no similar examples before this one, as the West Gate Bridge sat there, high-wire-fence-less for nearly 40 years.

What did happen on the West Gate Bridge, with unerring regularity, was people jumping from the bridge to take their own lives. This is a story which is ongoing, is generally not reported, and the press, by their own standards, prefer not to report. Media guidelines are quite strict regarding the reporting of suicides, for obvious reasons.

However, the horrific death of one four-year-old girl spurred the government into action.

In February, Victoria suffered a natural disaster the scale of which had not been felt often in this state, when the Black Saturday bushfires ripped through many areas of the state. The bushfires were responsible for the deaths of 173 people.

Subsequently, the Victorian Government created a Royal Commission into the bushfires, and has pledged to adopt all of the recommendations of the commission's interim report.

This is welcome, but somewhat hollow when you realise that many of the recommendations of the Black Saturday Royal Commission were already recommended to the Victorian Government as a result of inquiries and reviews conducted after other bushfire incidents that have occured over the course of the current Victorian Government.

Again, it took the deaths of nearly 200 people for the government to be spurred into action.

Governments are vast organisations full of well-paid, well-qualified people working towards the improved welfare of the community at large. They should be well aware of issues facing the community, and generally, they are.

Governments need to be proactive, and address problems before they become chronic or acute. On these two occasions, while the eventual actions by government will save lives, an earlier action to an identified and accepted problem would had saved more lives.

As leaders of governments feel the need to comment on the petty minutae of society more and more to get on the evening news, let's hope they don't become so driven by media mentions that real problems that may not engender great sorrow or interest are not ignored until they are "sexy" enough to get a mention before the first ad on the nightly news.