President's Report February 2019
MOTORCYCLE RIDERS ASSOCIATION OF W.A. INC.Presidents and other reports February 2019I hope you are all keeping well and enjoying the great rising weather we are enjoying at the moment, please remember to keep yourself hydrated on these sometime hot days.We held our MRA Committee meeting on Monday 11th January to discuss changes to the MRAWA Constitution to bring it up to date with the current legislation requirements and to allow for organisations, clubs and motorcycle related groups to become members of the MRAWA.I would like to thank Rhonda Nauman and Ian Forsyth for volunteering to work on this. We hope to have the changes ready for you to vote on in the near future.The WA Motorcycle Safety Week is on this year from April 14th -20th and will be opened at the York Motorcycle Festival once again this year and I have invited our Minister for Road Safety, the Hon. Michelle Roberts MLA to open the proceedings.We will have our MRAWA safety booth at the Festival once again this year, this is provided free of charge by the organisers of the event Premier Events and we are grateful for their help. They have asked us if we would once again have a couple of people available in the morning to organise the motorcycle parking. I am therefore looking for 2 or 3 volunteers to fill this role.At the recent Vulnerable Road User Advisory Group (VRUAG) meeting the issue of public consultation leading up to the new Road Safety Strategy 2020 – 2018 was raised by the Road Safety Commission who will be running a series of these consultations. I had a conversation a couple of days earlier with the city of Stirling about a specific consultation specifically for motorcycle riders which I raised at the meeting, this seemed to generate interest from the new Acting Commissioner of the Road Safety Commission (George Temple) who was present at this meeting. The commissioner contacted me the same day as VRUAG meeting to arrange a meeting between the two of us to expand on this idea, that meeting was yesterday 15th Jan 2019 and it proved to be a very productive meeting, with the outcome that we would work together to make this happen in early May this year. The topics that we could cover would be rider training and skills enhancement, infrastructure, road user education and road rules.I will keep you posted on the progress.I have applied for a grant from the Road Safety Commission to run a seminar in May regarding the Motocap star rating for protective clothing and hope to bring over Professor Christopher Hurren who runs the testing laboratory at Deakin University to give us a presentation on how the testing works and the benefits of a star rating for protective clothing. This method of a star rating is a world first and it has been developed in Australia, however many countries are looking to adopt our system of testing and rating motorcycle protective clothing. It is being introduced into New Zealand next week.Remember to ride like you life depends on it. (it does)This report is a mix of Presidents, Safety reports in no particular order.Dave WrightPresidentMotorcycle Riders Association of W.A.