History
The mandatory helmet law had its genesis in the late 1980s when Rebecca Oaten, dubbed the "helmet lady" in the media, started a campaign advocating for compulsory helmets. Her son, Aaron, had been permanently brain damaged in 1986 while riding his 10-speed bicycle to school in Palmerston North. A car driver hit him, flinging Aaron over the handlebars and headfirst to the ground, where his head struck the concrete gutter. After 8 months in a coma, Aaron awoke paralysed and unable to speak. According to Oaten, a doctor at the time told her that Aaron would "almost certainly not have suffered brain damage" had he been wearing a bicycle helmet.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s Oaten travelled the country promoting the use of cycle helmets. For six years she visited an average of four schools a day, "lambasting" children with reasons why they should wear helmets. She also set up a lobby group, the Protect the Brains trust, which spread nationwide and put pressure on the government for a bicycle helmet law.
Oaten's campaigning is commonly perceived as the main impetus for the law compelling all ages of people on bicycles to wear helmets. Aaron Oaten died on 14 August 2010, aged 37.
Read more about this topic: Bicycle Helmets In New Zealand
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“A poet’s object is not to tell what actually happened but what could or would happen either probably or inevitably.... For this reason poetry is something more scientific and serious than history, because poetry tends to give general truths while history gives particular facts.”
—Aristotle (384–323 B.C.)
“The history of reform is always identical; it is the comparison of the idea with the fact. Our modes of living are not agreeable to our imagination. We suspect they are unworthy. We arraign our daily employments.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The history of all countries shows that the working class exclusively by its own effort is able to develop only trade-union consciousness.”
—Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1870–1924)