By EWAN KENNEDY
10 July 2006

Yet again an Australian government has come out and insinuated that drivers are too dumb to think for themselves. This time the Queensland state government, which has just forbidden one of the state’s most experienced advanced driving instructors from teaching people how to ‘drift’ cars safely and correctly in drift-racing competitions.

‘Drifting’ in case you haven’t come across the term as yet, involves sliding cars sideways on race tracks or similar closed venues. I've tried it during car club events on slippery grass over the years (long before it got the official name of drifting) and it takes a lot of skill and concentration to do it well.

Modern-day drifting is a Japanese invention and has recently come to public prominence in the movie ‘The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift’. The movie displays illegal racing and drifting on the streets and is so far removed from reality that it’s hard to see anyone with half a brain really trying to carry out that form of driving on public roads.

And anyone with less than half a brain will presumably not have been given a driver’s licence by Australian authorities, so won’t be on public roads in the first place.

Safe Drive Training Australia has conducted various forms of advanced driver training at the Mount Cotton training facility near Brisbane for 11 years and has so far taught over 25,000 high-school students better techniques for normal road driving.

For the past six months it has also conducted courses in competition drift-racing.

Now it has been banned from doing so. The Mount Cotton facility, which is owned by the Queensland government, says the drifting courses "… did not match the centre’s position on safe driving practices".

Safe Drive Training Australia director, Joel Neilsen, says, "We’ve trained 100 drivers so far and, as well as being able to drift on a safe controlled track, every one of them is now also a better, more skilled driver on the road.

"It is the only drift school in Australia which provides its own vehicles and, far from encouraging dangerous behaviour, it teaches drivers to be safe and only to test their skills in a controlled track environment. The maximum speed they reach is about 40 km/h."

Yet again an Australian government is saying that people are too dumb to think for themselves and we will presumably run about all over Queensland driving cars sideways and creating dangerous situations.

I've attended many driver training courses over the years, both as a student and a reporter, and safety and responsible driving are always high on the agenda. Coincidentally, I was invited to attend one of the SDT drift-racing courses the week before the ban but, unfortunately, had other commitments.

Movies, television programs, even comic books and mobile-phone screensavers, show dangerous, anti-social and violent behaviour all the time. People know it’s just make believe and don’t try to imitate the action in real life (at least once they have passed the age of about 10).

Rally drivers, usually on closed public roads, drive at far higher speeds than drift drivers and with just as much sideways action. Yet I've never seen a suggestion that rally driver training should be banned. Or driver training for karts, targa-type events, circuit racing, drag racing, gymkhanas and various other forms of motorsport.

Why pick on drifting, just because a couple of politicians have had one of their usual knee-jerk routines and taken an uneducated dislike to it?