Baby seat?

[JustCruisn]

Just remember that if you don't use a seat with that meets the standard, you are breaking the law.
You could get a ticket from a coppa if they so wanted to check.
You invalidate any CTP claim you otherwise may have.

So if you import an isofix seat and get hit by a bus, you have to pay for all medical expenses etc out of your own pocket.
If your kid dies in an accident you may be charged with manslaughter.

Choice have a review on baby seats
Child car restraints review and compare with Choice.com.au

[Maverick]

Just remember that if you don't use a seat with that meets the standard, you are breaking the law.
You could get a ticket from a coppa if they so wanted to check.
You invalidate any CTP claim you otherwise may have.

You're using a seat that exceeds the Australian Standards and this has been acknowledged by the government however they can't be stuffed rewriting the rule.

Sure you may get a ticket but you would be unlucky.

It has to be proved that your child seat doesn't meet the ADR's, they exceed the ADR's by a mile. The majority of Australian seats are fitted incorrectly as well leaving you just as open on the CTP front.

So if you import an isofix seat and get hit by a bus, you have to pay for all medical expenses etc out of your own pocket.

No you won't. No-one will deny media treatment to a baby nor will they make you pay the medical expenses, take a look at all the accidents involving babies and the lack of restraints and all medical expenses have been paid for.

If your kid dies in an accident you may be charged with manslaughter.

Very unlikely given the current state of seats in this country with the majority being fitted incorrectly. The ISOFIX seat is better performing in all areas than the Australian seats so they won't have a hope in hell of winning and all it will do is highlight that the government is incompetent and costing lives by not rewriting the ADR's.

[JustCruisn]

Sure you may get a ticket but you would be unlucky.

Very unlikely given the current state of seats in this country with the majority being fitted incorrectly. The ISOFIX seat is better performing in all areas than the Australian seats so they won't have a hope in hell of winning and all it will do is highlight that the government is incompetent and costing lives by not rewriting the ADR's.

Yep it would be unlucky to get a ticket, but that won't stop it happening.
It will be up to you to prove the seat meets the standard - that will cost you a small fortune. You'll need to buy a new seat too as it will be destroyed by the testing.
I'd like to see you prove, to a cop on the side of the road, that the seat meets the standard. You'll need an accredited mobile testing lab, failing that, you would be stuck beside the road with a baby you can't drive home with. QLD impose a $300 fine and three demerit points.

No you won't. No-one will deny media treatment to a baby nor will they make you pay the medical expenses, take a look at all the accidents involving babies and the lack of restraints and all medical expenses have been paid for.

I was in an accident, not my fault, and Medicare is chasing me for over $600 for my medical expenses.
You won't be denied treatment, but you will have to pay all the bills, unless you spend all that money having the seat tested.

Given all the new laws around child restraints, it's very much on the mind of law enforcement. So the chances of getting a ticket for it are a lot higher than they have been in the past. If you get pulled for a speeding ticket and they see the seat they may want to have a look.
And being a new law it will be defended very stongly, to the full extent. Given there is no precedent your lawyer will have to work extra hard.

There may be seats that are better than that offered in Australia, but they have not been tested so they do not meet the standard.

You'd be unlucky to have a crash but when it happens you're going to have a lot of legal expenses to justify your initial decision, and you probably won't be awarded expenses if you do succeed.

But if you really want to press your luck then go for it. Personally I'd stick with the standards and avoid all the possible hassles.

I don't necessarily agree with the laws, but they are there, and we must all follow them, or press our politicians to have them changed.

[Maverick]

Yep it would be unlucky to get a ticket, but that won't stop it happening.
It will be up to you to prove the seat meets the standard - that will cost you a small fortune. You'll need to buy a new seat too as it will be destroyed by the testing.
I'd like to see you prove, to a cop on the side of the road, that the seat meets the standard. You'll need an accredited mobile testing lab, failing that, you would be stuck beside the road with a baby you can't drive home with. QLD impose a $300 fine and three demerit points.

They're not going to leave you on the side of the road and if they don't stop drunks and disqualified drivers from driving away in their cars I fail to see how they will stop someone for the crime of keeping their child safe.

Given all the new laws around child restraints, it's very much on the mind of law enforcement. So the chances of getting a ticket for it are a lot higher than they have been in the past. If you get pulled for a speeding ticket and they see the seat they may want to have a look.
And being a new law it will be defended very stongly, to the full extent. Given there is no precedent your lawyer will have to work extra hard.

The police are unable to police any laws as it is, other than sitting in a speed camera van or picking drivers off with LIDAR they don't really do that much in the way of enforcement.

There may be seats that are better than that offered in Australia, but they have not been tested so they do not meet the standard.

They've been tested overseas in countries that have much more stringent requirements than Australia does.

You'd be unlucky to have a crash but when it happens you're going to have a lot of legal expenses to justify your initial decision, and you probably won't be awarded expenses if you do succeed.

But if you really want to press your luck then go for it. Personally I'd stick with the standards and avoid all the possible hassles.

I'd rather have a baby that is alive and go through the courts if required. The other option is to use to an Australian Standard seat and pay for a funeral.

Pretty simple choice IMO. You may also find that Volvo are willing to get involved, in fact I'm sure they will because they're really pushing ISOFIX for Australia and this would be an ideal way to show to the masses that the current standards are rubbish and not worth the paper they are printed on.

I don't necessarily agree with the laws, but they are there, and we must all follow them, or press our politicians to have them changed.[/QUOTE]

ISOFIX is at least ten years away in Australia, probably fifteen years.

Standards Australia are incompetent beyond belief, they had a chance to add in ISOFIX but choose not to consider it once again but will consider it at the next review in around 7 years time. They are so inept they keep issuing statements claiming that the Australian Standards lead the world in child seat safety.

http://www.standards.org.au/download...ints_FINAL.pdf

The ADR's are CRAP. Plain and simple.

goto part 2

[Maverick]

http://www.caradvice.com.au/58898/ch...ct-your-child/

New child-restraint laws are being enacted across Australia right now, placing a hefty burden of additional responsibility on parents. Babies up to six months must ride in rear-facing baby capsules, while children from six months to four years must be secured in an approved child restraint, and from four years to seven kids must ride in an approved booster seat.

The new rules are a step forward for child safety in Australia. Some lives will be saved. But how far forward have the new rules taken us? Experts overseas claim Aussie kids remain second-class citizens on road safety – despite the new laws.

Lotta Jakobsson Ph.D., M.Sc., is Volvo Car’s top biomechanist in charge of the company’s accident and injury prevention analysis. We meet in her laboratory in the company’s headquarters in Gothenburg, Sweden. Jakobsson is a world-renowned automotive child safety expert. She claims the new Australian regulations continue to place Aussie kids at unnecessary risk for three reasons: First, the laws mean we will turn our children around so that they’re facing forwards far too early in life. Second, the Australian legislation means children from the age of eight years will sit in adult seats when they should still ride in booster seats until at least age 10 or 11, and third, Australian regulators continue to refuse to allow parents access to the world’s best practise child seat fixation system, called Isofix.

“An adult’s neck is around five times stronger than a three-year-old’s,” says Jakobsson. “An even younger child’s neck is much weaker even than a three-year-old’s. The earlier you turn a young child around, the higher the risk that massive loads on the neck during a crash will cause unsurvivable injuries. I really don’t think it’s a good idea for children under three or four to face forwards in cars.”

Jakobsson says the deceleration during a serious frontal impact (”the most common kind of serious crash”) causes the child’s head to weigh many times its usual weight. “You simply get to a point where the structure of the neck can’t withstand the loads imposed,” she says. “The under-developed muscles, ligaments and bones get overloaded quite quickly. In many severe frontal crashes the adults might walk away relatively unhurt, but forward-facing children might not survive.”

To illustrate this point, she hands me a 12kg helmet designed to illustrate how unstable a child’s head is in relation to an adult’s. Wearing it you feel instantly as if your neck is no longer stable. The helmet has two large handles at the side. “You might want to hold onto those,” says Jakobsson. “For your own safety.”
In a forward-facing child seat, the child’s torso is held in place, but the head is free to move. The weakest link is the neck. When children face the rear, however, the imposed crash loads – the increased weight of the head – is supported by the structure of the seat, not the neck. “You know, there’s no secret why NASA places the astronauts rearward-facing in spacecraft,” says Jakobsson. “It’s better to support high loads on the head with the structure of the seat than through the neck.”
The proof of this pudding is in the numbers. In Sweden, with a population of nine million, just five children have died in frontal crashes in almost 50 years. In Australia, we lose 80 children annually – though not all of those die in frontal crashes. Clearly the numbers prove the Swedes are doing something right.

We move to a storage facility inside Volvo’s normally off-limits Safety Centre. It’s a repository for wrecked Volvos recovered from real-world crashes. Thomas Broberg, Volvo’s senior technical advisor on safety, takes me to a wrecked XC60, which he tells me was involved in a high-speed crash (with another, older Volvo … after all, this is Sweden). It’s a serious hit, in which the two cars met head-on, each at an estimated 65km/h. The bonnet is folded in half; concertina-ed up at more than head height. The front wheels have moved back into the guards. The headlights, bumper and grille are simply gone. The radiator and air-conditioning condenser are a press-fit into each other and also the engine and transmission, which have themselves slipped their moorings and moved back to accommodate and absorb the crash loads … a combination of very smart engineering and energy management that means the passenger compartment is remarkably intact.

“There were three people in this car,” says Broberg, “including a father driving and an 18-month-old child in a rear-facing child restraint. Everyone in the car escaped without injury, but I would not like to think about the likely outcome for the child if the seat had been the forward-facing kind.”

I ask Broberg if this child would have died in an Australian child seat. “Of course you cannot say for certain what would have happened, but I think the risk of serious neck injury, forward-facing in a crash like this would be quite high.” Unsurvivable injury? “Possibly. Yes.”

In Lotta Jakobsson’s laboratory she explains what happens when an average eight-year-old sits in an adult seat, in an adult seat belt – something permitted under the new Australian child restraint laws: “Well, their legs are quite short and the seat base is quite long in comparison so they slide forward in the seat to get their lower legs over the leading edge. That means the lap part of the seatbelt rides up over the abdomen, which is very dangerous.”

Okay, so what’s the problem exactly? “The seat belt is designed to ride over the bony part of your hips, supported on the pelvis. If it rides high and sits across your abdomen and you crash, you’re at risk of suffering severe soft-tissue injuries. You can bleed to death internally before you get to hospital. This is why children should sit in a booster seat until the age of 10 or 11 – a booster seat is designed to ensure the right geometry for the seatbelt.”

Jakobsson says children do not fit safely in adult seats until they are about 140cm tall – a height which eight-, nine- and even some 10-year-olds are yet to reach.

Then there’s the child seat itself. Australian Standards-approved child seats face forwards and use the ‘top-tether’ attachment method together with the adult seatbelt to secure the seat in the car. If it’s fitted correctly, an Australian ‘top-tether’ seat provides reasonable crash protection – albeit forward-facing.

Fitting a top-tether seat is often fairly complex, however. Unfortunately, many parents grapple with the process and get it at least partly wrong. Numerous surveys have shown as many as two-thirds of parents fit the seats incorrectly – predisposing their children to a bad outcome in a serious crash. In other words, two-thirds of Australian children are currently riding in cars with their safety seriously compromised – first by facing forwards, and second, by riding in a seat that’s improperly secured.

It doesn’t have to be this way. There’s a better child seat fixing system, called Isofix. It’s a system designed by the International Standards Organisation (hence the ‘Iso…’ name), of which Lotta Jakobsson is a member. “Isofix is an international standard child seat attachment system,” she explains. “It’s designed around two standardised seat mounting points built into every new car. It’s used in Europe, Asia, North America and Canada.” Lotta Jakobsson is surprised when I tell her using an Isofix child seat in Australia is illegal.

I’d never fitted an Isofix seat before visiting Sweden. But I’ve now tried it. The verdict? Dead simple – almost idiot-proof. A simple-to-fit base clicks into the Isofix mounting points – there is no possibility of getting it wrong. And the child capsule clicks into the base – also an idiot-proof connection, not to mention about three times quicker than Australia’s outdated top-tether system.

Isofix is a better system because it dramatically reduces the chance of fitting the seat badly. Most new cars in Australia are landed in the country with the Isofix mounting points already in place, yet parents are not even afforded the Isofix option, because using an Isofix child seat is illegal in Australia (because Isofix does not comply with the Australian Standard, which calls for the top-tether attachment system).

The regulators claim that putting Isofix on the shopping list for Australian parents would cause undue “confusion”. A case could be put, however, that two-thirds of Australian parents are already overly confused – or at least unwittingly ignorant – when it comes to fitting a child seat. The bottom line is that allowing Isofix would go a long way to protecting the two-thirds of children driving around right now with their safety compromised via poorly fitted child seats.

While the new child restraint rules will save some young lives, ongoing regulatory arrogance in Australia will continue to add unnecessarily to the death and injury toll among our most vulnerable passengers, at least until the legislation is further upgraded to meet world’s best practice standards.

[Syd118TSI]

The writing appears to be on the wall IRT Isofix. The simple fact that they are easier to fit properly is probably the most important. Seems foolish that Standards Australia won't even consider them - no reason to not have both types approved (given that many cars here won't have the Isofix connections.

Even still though, some classic won't somebody think of the children lines in there Maverick.



Is there someone who could be contacted about this? It all sounds like something that Today Tonight or A Current Affair would show.

[JustCruisn]

Maverick
It's fairly clear that you don't have much respect for the Police and their actions or inactions.

I would like you to realise that cops do stop you from driving away when found drink driving. You get handcuffed and taken down to the local holding cell. Your car is left beside the road. A coppa cannot let you continue to break the law.
I'm still surprised by the number of cars I see in the local park on a Saturday morning, after the booze bus on Friday night.

Nice article I think just the link would have done though.

What I cannot seem to find anywhere is a petition or something.
A good friend of mine heads the NMAA National Motorists Association Australia - Home. They like stirring the Road Safety mob. Maybe they can get it back in the media spotlight.