Road Safety Trust Robbers Candor Trust

The Road Safety Trust has been deliberately trying to squeeze the Community sector out of road safety for several years for two main reasons say the thrice denied (funds) Candor Trust.

Firstly it apparently feels that the Trust knows best and the Trust (as a Government pursestring holder)can do best. Letters of rejection to the Candor Trust have said as much - that drug driving campaigns are the responsibility of Police and NZTA even though they do not wish to do them. Now there's a real recipe for failure.

The RST is notorious for making it impossible for groups to meet funding criteria no matter how they contort themselves. The criteria requires innovation yet consistency also with Government priorities - this is an oxymoron.

An oxymoron especialy when the Trust is spending our money on its own national campaign to reduce driver distraction, which ought be funded out of the State's road safety budget - but cannot be as it is not a priority due to exclusion from Treasuries' and Polices fatal Resource Allocation Model formula. A quota and supportive publicity formula that only incorporates speed, alcohol, intersections and seatbelts. The subjects that RST is mainly keen to make, or nowadays withhold, grants for.

Road Safety Trust chair Yvonne Sharp is duplicitous in saying it gives out grants only for innovative projects - that is precisely what it does not do which has sen applications plummet from earlier averages of 50-100 down to 14 last year.

"What we fund is innovation and, very unfortunately, none of the applications we got actually complied with that funding criteria", she said. No wonder say Candor, as long experience has told groups the "innovative" word is false advertising.

Transport Minister Steven Joyce told Morning Report he will talk to the trust about why it is not paying out money to community groups and whether it is doing another agency's job. But he'll need to do better than that. He'll need to remove the formula's pernicious influence - and it's advocats and involved scientists who sit on the RST advisory board. That is the only way to save road safety from the untrusty RST robbers.

ENDS

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