In Gilbert & Sullivan’s Mikado, Lord High Executioner Ko-Ko has “a little list” of people who would never be missed if they were to disappear. I imagine you have one too; I certainly do.

You might be surprised, though, that the NSW Roads and Traffic Authority (RTA) was not on mine, alongside all the people who are there including Sydney taxi drivers and smokers who ash their cigarettes out of the windows of moving cars.
Why was the RTA not there? It was certainly one organisation that deserved it, but I always thought that it would be pointless to include it. I thought the RTA was bulletproof.
So did the RTA, obviously.
Parliamentarians from both sides of the fence have been battling them for decades, but few ever got anywhere. Even when the organisation was “punished” for things like ridiculous overestimates of the traffic that would use proposed tunnels, it sure looked like all that happened was that a scapegoat or two was driven out (and then given a nice job somewhere else in government). The RTA itself went on.
The management of the RTA has been implacably hostile to motorcyclists and motorcycling. One chief executive was on the record as saying that, should motorcycles be invented now the RTA would never allow them on the roads. Arrogance? In spades.
When I tried, in the early stages of my work for Sydney City Council, to get some sense out of them about bike parking, they responded with wonderful circular arguments which led nowhere except to the maintenance of the status quo – no parking. We beat them in the end, but it was a hard slog (Thank you, Clover Moore). Intransigence? Tell me about it.
So it was very tempting indeed to join the other Munchkins dancing around the corpse and singing “Ding dong, the witch is dead” when the new O’Farrell government did a Ko-Ko on the RTA. It is clearly going to be emasculated and kept under control by being merged with Maritime Services and then put under a new super ministry.
But as always there are caveats.
One of the advantages of having powerful bodies like the RTA is that they can give ministers truly independent advice; that’s valuable. It’s just a shame that they couldn’t let go of their own limited agendas, and hubris overtook them.
Likewise, the RTA did do some good. I consulted for them for a while (talk about sleeping with the enemy!) and found them to be not a single organisation at all, but a series of more or less independent fiefdoms, each with its own agenda. The fiefdom looking after motorcycle safety did a good job, in my opinion – at least until its work came to the attention of someone higher up the food chain who couldn’t resist meddling.
Let’s hope that the good they did goes on; I suspect it will, because this government seems to have its head screwed on properly in its attitude to bikes.
So please excuse me. I’ve got to find some red shoes and practice that chorus: “Ding dong, the wicked witch is dead...”
Peter “The Bear” Thoeming