I helped sign up allot of new members to the LDP recently it was great. The liberal democratic party should be registered in SA within 6 months at this rate. If you want to help or join the LDP it's free just goto
ldpsa.org.au
The response was very positive including other people like me who joined to get rid of helmet laws. Next election you will be able to voting against bicycle helmet laws by voting for either ON or the LDP.

Now one good side effect of getting rid of the mandatory helmet law is obviously not needing a helmet to ride a bike.
But another advantage and this one is for those who do wear a helmet is that you could then wear any helmet you wanted. The Australian standard helmet is actually not the safest design and has serious flaws including the strap which has been known to cause neck and spinal injury in some circumstances for example if the helmet catches on an edge and is pulled away from the head it can cause lethal injury or worse still make you a quadriplegic !. Once the law is gone people would be free to evaluate and choose the best designs from anywhere in the world for themselves.

Overseas helmets are more advanced and safer - removing the mandatory helmet law would make these designs legally and locally available to cyclists and indeed anyone touring from overseas or visiting overseas could legally use the same helmet instead of having to buy a new one if they ever come to Australian. I would bet though many of the cyclists in the tour down under are wearing a Snell standard helmet and not Australian standard helmets and for very good reason - If i wore a helmet i would want the best and most appropriate for the circumstances not some rigidly defined and designed backwater standard which is years behind the rest of the world.

The fact that the helmet law specifies only the Australian standard is not for safety but for industry protection. With a small isolated market the AS/NZA helmet standard has continually lagged behind the rest of the world, worse is that we are actually forced to wear something which is far from the best available and more costly compared to what is available in other countries. !

So not only does the law make people who ride without helmets into criminals.
It also makes it criminal to wear a safer design of helmet than the Australian standard helmets which we are limited to by bureaucratic legislation.

So not only do we have the most restrictive and bureaucratic laws we have less cyclists and worse injury rates than what they do in most of Europe where people have the freedom to make up their own minds.

I would be especially interested to hear from helmet wearers what they think of the our restrictive mandatory helmet laws in regard to the above.?