Safety at all costs especially increasing the risk of reduced safety. That is the NZ government mantra on all issues of risk which are so horrific that the national cultural preference of head in the sand. So the risk of transient harm from mild bullying, or speeding on public roads is exaggerated to the point of ludicrous catastrophising, while the danger of potholes, and global economic failure due to a lunatic Russian led nuclear winter is utterly ignored. Cotton wool thinking is leading to cotton wool solutions which are vulnerable to a 5 year old with a box of matches. The math is clearly beyond the skills of officials, and academics in the face of woke rhetoric, and the political expression parents intent on keeping little Johnny safe from non-critical harms, in addition to the potential catastrophic harms which the parents work very hard to ignore because the thought is just too painful to contemplate. The world was a far safer place when little Johnny and Suzy grew up knowing at a visceral level that injury really does hurt: when a fifth of kiwi school children had a green broken bone that healed stronger than ever, but which put them unwillingly on the sidelines of the game of bulrush which was entertaining the rest of the school at every lunch break. Kids back then learned to avoid pain, cope with pain and actively consider risk and evaluate the balance between risky success and failure at a time in life when some of those risks are extremely minor. I can easily see some of today’s children causing a nuclear winter just purely because they have no ingrained concept of personal risk, and having a psychopathic nature they just don’t care enough about others to avoid pushing the big button. Once upon a time a mate of mine was punching glass shop windows. When asked, “why?” His answer was golden. He was doing it progressively harder each time so as to gauge how hard he could do so, 1. Without breaking the glass. And 2. Without injuring himself if he did so. Testing and measuring the risk systematically. Now most of us would think about the risk of prosecution, or the harm to the poor shop keepers. But he didn’t care about those aspects, he was just interested in the physics, and slow on the social implications of his actions. Luckily he got bored before harm was done, and he was encouraged to walk away. Too much of our “safety at all costs” health and safety legislation is based on the premise that the bigger risk is that he would be placed at serious risk of bruised knuckles if the shop window was made of laminated safety glass, rather than 6mm window glass a shard of which would when it broke likely cut his wrist to the bone. A risk he was explicitly aware of and was trying to mitigate purely by intellectually driven technique. I suspect that had he broke the window, there would have been blood, but not as much as if some random cotton wool raised kid today tried the same exercise with laminated safety glass. And chances are my mate would have simply wiped off his t-shirt and bound the wound. While todays kids would waste time and blood making sure the sidewalk was safe for all the lookie loos, before asking where the first aid kit was. Existential risks are real, they are the byproduct of real life, and needn’t be over weighted, but every day serious risks are actively being increased in the face of protecting the populace from the own stupidity from negligible risks. Speeding is not a risk if the driver understands and uses their brakes, the steering and is looking out of the windshield of the vehicle -and has half a brain. Doing the speed limit or less is a far more risky proposition if none of the above is true, and the driver is disengaged mentally from the act of driving. And weirdly airbags cause the most horrific injuries at accident speeds that once were considered mere fender benders. They only seem truely useful as a safety mechanism when the speeds involved are far far higher than any posted speed limit. Only useful and protective at speeds at which one should never experience in an accident if you use eyes, brain, steering and brakes with even the slightest effect.