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Australia

Driver training program helps migrants gain license and independence in Launceston

A boy smiling to camera in the foreground, a car with a P plate and a younger boy in the background.

When 18-year-old Afghan migrant Mehdi Safari from Launceston passed his driving test, he was “hopping around” with excitement.

It made it easier for him to travel to his part-time job at a local hardware store, and to school every day.

“Yo puedo [also] go out more with friends, and even when I’m going out to play sport, it’s very helpful to have a license,” he said.

It was also an important milestone for the Launceston Migrant Resource Center’s learner driver program, Drive4Life, as Mr Safari was its 500th participant to pass the P-test.

Coordinator Janice Molineux said it was incredibly significant for those migrants and refugees and their families.

“I was very happy… [and] now it’s 511 [people who have passed]. I just think it’s such a great thing,” she said.

A boy in a hoodie behind the wheel of a parked car.
Mr Safari got a “lecture” from his father about the serious responsibility of driving well.(ABC Northern Tasmania: Sarah Abbott)

license to independence

Arriving in Launceston with his family from the Iranian city of Ahvaz in 2013, Mr Safari said he was passionate about cars and wanted to become a mechanic or engineer since childhood.

“Growing up, I tried to buy toy cars and I’d disassemble them to try to work out how they worked,” he said.

But in Tasmania, once old enough to obtain a driver’s licence, Mr Safari found it a challenge to accrue the required number of hours of practice as a learner driver.

“It was difficult for me to find a car to practise,” he said.

A car provided by the Drive4Life program allowed him to gain the supervised driving practice and skills he needed to get his P-plates.

Odds stacked high

In many ways, Mr Safari and the 510 other migrants who have now passed through Drive4Life have beaten the odds in obtaining a licence, according to Ms Molineux.

“One challenge… is knowing someone with a full driver’s license to help them gain the required hours to sit for their P-test,” Ms Molineux said.

Another is knowing enough English to pass.

A woman with tied back hair smiling to camera, with greenery and a building behind her.
Janice Molineux enjoys seeing Drive4Life graduates driving around town.(ABC Northern Tasmania: Sarah Abbott)

Ms Molineux said some learners who were capable drivers were not able to gain their Ps due to interpreters not being allowed in the car with them during tests.

That restriction was introduced during the COVID-19 pandemic, and Ms Molineux said her organization was working on a proposal to address it.

“We are hopeful that people who are still learning English can acquire their licences. It should not be ‘English first, then a license’,” she said.

“Safety must always come first… [but] you don’t need perfect English to be able to drive.”

Ms Molineux said being able to drive was life-changing for many migrants and refugees living in Tasmania.

“A license lets them gain independence, get to English classes and travel to work where public transport options are not viable,” she said.

Bring your own tutor

Launceston’s Migrant Resource Center started its Drive4Life program in 2009.

The program operates with around ten volunteer driving tutors providing lessons in two dual-controlled cars. The 500 drivers it has helped to gain a license have come from countries ranging from Afghanistan to Sudan.

But the program’s success means it now has a long list of learner drivers waiting to join it, and not enough driving tutors to keep up.

Ms Molineux said it was due to the “battle” of finding driving tutors, particularly bi-lingual ones, that she began a ‘Bring Your Own Mentor’ initiative last year.

“It doesn’t matter where you are on the [learner waiting] list, if you bring someone who’s happy to be inducted as a Drive4Life mentor, then they help you and someone else from the top of the list,” Ms Molineux said.

A man wearing a cap crouched in front of a car that has an L plate on it
Abbas Safari is a fluent Farsi speaker and tutors Farsi-speaking Launceston locals.(ABC Northern Tasmania: Sarah Abbott)

The volunteer tutors go through a driver induction, which involves “some theory, but mostly practice” in a dual-control car with the program’s head mentor.

It was through this initiative that Mr Safari successfully passed his Ps, after being tutored in a Drive4Life car by his father, Abbas.

“With him… teaching me it was alright, because we had that father-son bond and connection, so I was comfortable with him,” Mr Safari said.

“It made the learning experience a bit easier.”

Finally finding their legs

Abbas Safari has gone on to tutor his other son, 16-year-old Milad, and Farsi-speaking Launceston mother-of-nine, Shah Jafari.

He said he enjoyed teaching “very much”, and was motivated to volunteer by his desire to help people in Tasmania’s Afghan community get their license “so they can go on with their lives”.

“Not having a license is like having extra weight on your shoulders,” he said.

A woman in a green headscarf sitting behind the wheel in a car, while a man in the passenger seat smiles to camera too
Shah Jafari looks forward to having her license so she can help with school drop-off.(ABC Northern Tasmania: Sarah Abbott)

Abbas Safari is keen to keep tutoring into the future, and has inspired his older son to one day “definitely” do the same.

“I would like for everyone in the right age bracket to have their license,” Mehdi Safari said.

“Because I experienced that feeling when you get your license and… it’s like you finally find your legs, so you can travel everywhere.”

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Categories
Australia

ACT police hiring criminal psychologist to better understand hoon drivers

ACT police hiring criminal psychologist to better understand hoon drivers

ACT police have hired a criminal psychologist to help them tackle the problem of hoon driving in Canberra.

ACT Chief Police Officer Neil Gaughan said hooning had grown as an issue in the ACT over the past few years, and that police were considering a range of tactics to try to deal with it.

The ACT Legislative Assembly has meanwhile launched an inquiry into the issue of dangerous driving, and is currently accepting submissions from the public.

Hoon driving ‘happening daily’

Deputy Commissioner Gaughan said police were getting constant reports of dangerous driving.

“It’s daily occurrence,” he said.

“Yesterday I had the radio on in my office and we were in pursuit of vehicles driving on the wrong side of the road.

“It’s happening daily and it’s not happening at three o’clock in the morning like it used to. It’s happening at three o’clock in the afternoon in Braddon.”

He said action needed to be taken to come up with “better solutions” and prevent hoon drivers from becoming involved in criminal activity in the first place.

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ACT Chief Police Officer Neil Gaughan says hoon driving is a major problem in Canberra.

“It seems to be post lockdown, after COVID, we’ve seen an increase in this sort of risky, dangerous behaviour,” he said.

“We’ve actually engaged a criminal psychologist to look at some of the reasons why people are doing it and thinking about how we can entertain kids. You know, I’m keen on trying to keep people out of the criminal justice system.”

Police are also considering placing cameras in problem areas to try to apprehend hoon drivers, Deputy Commissioner Gaughan said, as well as the potential of drones to help in tracking the vehicles.

He also said drivers had learned how to evade police, by crossing onto the other side of the road during a pursuit, where police were not permitted to follow.

“At the moment, if a car goes onto the wrong side of the road, we don’t chase it,” he said.

“Other jurisdictions do things slightly differently.”

He said he was aware that residents shared the concerns of police.

“From a policing perspective, this is the one issue that I know Canberrans are really filthy about,” he said.

I have encouraged Canberrans to make their own submissions to the ACT Legislative Assembly inquiry.

“Hopefully we can see a number of submissions to the committee and they can get together and can work through it and come up with some solutions.”

‘They’ve just blocked passage’

Sign at the entrance to Uriarra Village
Residents of Uriarra say hooning in the area is a huge problem.(ABC News: Talib Haider)

In Uriarra, hoon driving is a persistent problem.

For resident Jess Agnew, it is a weekly occurrence.

“Sometimes three nights a week,” she said.

“It can be dangerous — there’s times where there’s hundreds of people … and you just cannot get through, they’ve just blocked passage.”

She said she had struggled to get a reaction from the police.

“There really hasn’t been one,” she said.

“We were calling regularly, all the residents, and then we just got us stopped because there was absolutely no reaction that we could see.

“And then the police report came out that hoon behavior had dropped at Uriarra, because we stopped recording because we’d sort of given up.

“And then so the minister said to us, ‘no, you’ve got to continue reporting’, so we so we all report now.”

She said she held concerns for learner drivers.

“We don’t want our kids to have to navigate through those kinds of things,” she said.

“When they’re coming home at night, they’ve already got to deal with kangaroos and wombats.”

‘Up to 100 cars coming out’

Hugh looks into the camera, standing outside near his car, in the bush.
Uriarra resident Hugh Hagan, 17, says hoon drivers cause problems for the community every week.(ABC News: Greg Nelson)

Hugh Hagan, a 17-year-old who also lives in Uriarra, agrees.

“Consistently we see on Friday and Saturday nights normally only about 20, but up to 100 cars coming out and just doing burnouts and hooning along roads late at night and blocking traffic,” Hugh said.

“That’s been going on for a number of years now.”

He said he knew of people who had been blocked from driving through while attempting to get into Canberra Hospital, and of fires that had been started by the burnouts.

“[Police] just tell us to call it in and try and get photos and video and they will do whatever they can with the numbers that they’ve got on.

“They might send out a car, it’s not very often that they do, and if they do get sent out they just clear the crowd and then they just end up gathering again later in the evening.”

Hugh said he did not believe that a criminal psychologist would help, and called for harsher punishments for offenders.

Deputy Commissioner Gaughan defended the police response.

“There’s literally thousands of kilometers of roads in Canberra, and particularly if we find these things are occurring in the evening when we’re busy responding to other things such as family violence matters, we simply just don’t have the resources to get to every location on time,” he said.

“So coming up with other ways of dealing with the matter is important and that’s why I welcome the inquiry.”

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Categories
Australia

Adelaide woman spotted by PolAir driving on wrong side of North-South Motorway

A police car with its flashing lights on.

A woman has been fined after traveling on the wrong side of the North-South Motorway for at least 10 kilometers.

The 75-year-old was pulled over about 12.30am on the right-hand side of the motorway at Dry Creek.

Senior Constable Peta Squire said that a member of the public informed police.

“They called police to let them know a white pulsar was traveling on the wrong side of the road,” Senior Constable Squire said.

“PolAir was in the area and were quickly overhead to track the car on Regency Road and Grange Road to stop the vehicle.

“She was a little confused why she was pulled over and officers explained she had driven more than 10km on the wrong side of the road.”

The Athol Park woman was issued a fine for driving on the wrong side of the road.

Her license will be reviewed.

Knife-wielding skateboarder spotted hours later

In a separate incident, a camera near the Regency Road exit spotted a skateboarder on the same motorway.

SA Police said the footage showed the rider was carrying a knife.

Patrols then located the 18-year-old man and arrested him nearby.

A truck on the North South Freeway
The North-South Motorway is a major road connecting Gawler to Old Noarlunga. (Supplied: Wikipedia )

The Brompton man was charged with carrying a knife in a public place and was fined for riding a skateboard on the North-South Motorway.

He will appear in court in September.

The North-South Motorway will soon have major upgrades.

Construction will start on the northern section of the road in 2026, with the southern section beginning in 2023.

The 78-kilometre North-South Corridor will create a direct route from Gawler to Old Noarlunga.

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