‘Road safety’ Ad Gone Wrong: SAPOL Clowns Crash Car Into Shop Fence

The geniuses from SAPOL have done it again. On Friday January 19, they deliberately staged a car crash on Port Road while making a TV advertisement about wearing seat belts. As with all of their ineffective road safety TV ads, a large gathering of taxpayer-funded entities – police officers, firefighters, production crews and publicity whore Joe Szakacs – gathered to watch the spectacle.

Traffic on Port Road was halted while filming took place, and neighbours came out from their homes to see what all the fuss was about.

What they eventually witnessed was another example of why SAPOL and SAGOV are a bunch of inept, inconsiderate clowns.

One of the cars involved in the intentional T-bone style crash took an unintended detour (cars, it turns out, don’t follow scripts), flew across three lanes of traffic, and destroyed a fence at a nearby furniture store.

The following video footage shows the incident playing out.

Sarah, the retail manager at the affected business, ReStore, said the car could have smashed through her storefront if it hadn’t taken out the fence first.

“They didn’t consider that this could have happened, and our neighbours have their cars parked outside,” Sarah said.

“They should have got in touch with homeowners and told them they’d be doing it.”

“There could have been a car parked there, there could have been people there. You don’t know what could have happened. The fence stopped it, but it could have driven into the shop.”

When asked if the surrounding homes and businesses had been made aware about the production and road closures in advance, emergency minister Szakacs said they had been.

Like everything politicians say, this was a lie. When queried by The Advertiser, a family living in a home directly in front of the crash site said they only learned about it when they saw the cones being set up and asked what was going on.

“No one came around to tell us,” one man told The Advertiser.

“We were standing on the road, with our two kids, right where the car ended up flying over to. We were told we had to go inside but that was just so we wouldn’t be in the back of the footage.”

The impacted car narrowly avoided two parked cars on the street, which the production company said were unable to be moved because the owners couldn’t be contacted.

But the idiots went ahead with filming anyway.

This, dear people, is the collective clown show in charge of road safety promotion in South Australia.

The Advertiser was informed the hand brake in the stationary vehicle, which was hit at “40km/h” was taken off before the impact.

The Advertiser was also told the car in motion was driving faster than originally planned, hitting the stationary vehicle with more force, causing it to travel across the road at a higher speed.

Emergency services minister Joe Szakacs said the business whose fence was knocked down by the car would be compensated.

“In a simple answer, yes, they will be compensated,” Szakacs said.

By taxpayers, of course, not the half-wits responsible for this potentially catastrophic screw-up.

“This is a controlled environment, and this local production company has had about 50 people involved in the production of this.”

Fifty production staff and hordes of cops, and they couldn’t even get a car crash right.

“It shows that in a highly controlled environment like this, with safety experts in place, that things can still go awry”, claimed Szakacs.

With inept SAPOL on the job, it’s almost a given that things will “go awry”.

“I don’t care if people are offended by these campaigns,” said the arrogant Szakacs.

That’s right, people. If you are offended by the ridiculous sums of your money SAPOL and SAGOV spend on ineffective road safety ads, and if you are offended that they recklessly stage these ads in busy residential and commercial areas without proper safeguards and without warning affected locals, Joe doesn’t care.

And why would he?

Despite alarming road toll increases, the former trade union secretary still gets paid hundreds of thousands of dollars a year plus perks, courtesy of taxpayers, to stand in front of cameras and mutter meaningless rhetoric.

If he and his fellow government screw-ups were remunerated according to performance, instead of their ability to talk nonsense, they’d be out of a job and on the dole queue in no time flat.