Editorial: Chinese Country Whispers

AT 7:07 am as I drove back from the fatality yesterday on the New England Highway the Roads and Maritime Services began to lay out witches hats to divert traffic onto Gundy Road on the southern side of Scone, ensuring  motorists would circumvent the accident two kilometres south of Scone on the highway.

Considering the accident occurred at 5:25am how does it take our state government resources an hour and a half to lay out some witches hats to divert traffic on a National highway?

The b-doubles were banked up patiently waiting to get through the accident, physically unable to reverse back to the driveway just 50 metres behind some of them and the local police officer was imploring other trucks which pulled up to get on their radios and tell other drivers to take Gundy Road.

The Roads and Maritime Services said that the traffic diversions were in place at latest at 6:27am an hour after the accident.

When I explained I had been “on scene” and witnessed the trucks pilling up and no sign of witches hats until 7:07am when the RMS staff member laid them out on the south bound lanes out of Scone, they went back and checked another “three” times to say they, who were sitting in Sydney, were assured witches hats were in place at exactly 6:27am.

They added local police were “setting  up diversions after 6am”, but bare in mind that local general duties police were trying to clear and preserve a fatality scene and claimed they were under-resourced for the task and so were reliant on the RMS to set up the physical diversions on the Highway.

It might be quicker and more reliable to have the Scone based SES place the witches hats on the road and do basic traffic control rather than wait for a state government department co-ordinated out of Sydney to call out crews from Murrurundi and Singleton to divert traffic at Scone.

How did our state government resources get to the point where we have to wait for more than an hour and a half for the witches hats to arrive on the New England Highway; worse yet that staff are feeding back to head office that they were there a half hour before they really were?

Add to that the fiasco of police on site who were unable to confirm to media that the New England Highway was blocked, even though you are standing there and can physically see the Highway is blocked, they can’t confirm it is blocked until you call the NSW police media unit in Sydney; who will call someone in Muswellbrook, to get diverted to  someone at the scene who you are probably standing beside to confirm if the road is closed and will then call you back.

The state government system is not set up to cater for any commonsense outside the Newcastle-Sydney-Wollongong area and worse yet the information being fed back to the systems in Sydney doesn’t reflect the truth on the ground.

But I am sure the information they all fed back to the mothership in Sydney met the “benchmarks” for national highway road closure time frames and it will still be seen as viable to keep witches hats for diverting traffic on the National Highway in Singleton and Murrurundi and it will remain an unreasonable budget expense to have witches hats languishing unused in Scone for the off chance there may be an accident.

Thank goodness for the efficiency of centralisation and the cost saving benefits it brings to our local community.

Elizabeth Flaherty
Editor of scone.com.au