I drive and I vote

Government, especially, state government, regards us as cash cows to be milked dry with fees, insurance, registration and road infringement system cynically designed not to prevent transgressions, but to profit by them (all the while hypercritically admonishing us to drive "safely").

City dwellers, forced to drive for the weeping inadequacy of public transport, spend years of their lives stationary in choking traffic. Their country cousins brave ruined roads, often without as much as a centre line.

In NSW (forgive the state-centricity) a multi-billion dollar bureaucracy called the RTA goes so far as to stridently oppose any form of training for young drivers, instead thrusting the onus on unqualified friends or relatives to instil in callow kids.

It also bans learners and P-platers from the safest cars known to humanity on the Orwellian premise that anything with forced induction is "high performance" and therefore unsafe. So it is the RTA withholds from the very drivers it says are most vulnerable cars that are – actively and passively – the safest cars yet devised because they are "unsafe"!

No, Johnny, you can’t drive a 90kW Golf because that turbo charger makes it a fully sick road rocket, but you can go forth in a VB Commodore... (Hilariously, this inept and decadent cabal are also in charge of road building in the nation’s most populous state...)

So it is that we're treated to sights such as I saw earlier this month on the M4, described on its website as a "key piece of transport infrastructure in Western Sydney".

There she was: a green P-plater in a 20-year-old Corolla, sticking hard to the right-hand lane – despite the rapid succession of signs telling her to "keep left unless overtaking" – doing no more than 90km/h in a 110 zone, while a rapid succession of vehicles travelling up to the speed limit were forced inside. The last I saw, she was still there.

Nice work Dad, or Mum, or cousin Narelle, or whatever clueless acquaintance has tutored her in the ways of the open road.

Meanwhile, elsewhere, uniformed and armed tax collectors, as the Highway Patrol have become, were squatting behind a radar keeping the stream of revenue running and the RTA was rolling out the first of a series of mobile speed cameras.

If the endless federal election proves anything, it's that the old certainties have disappeared.

Politicians from the PM down enjoy their richly-salaried and entitled sinecures at our behest and it’s dawning upon even the most complacent, corpulent party animals – without actually naming the Member for Grayndler –they might have to do a bit work in their electorates.

Don't be shy. Don't leave it to a pollster to ask you. Remind your local member that their career depends on your goodwill, that you own a car and you vote.