MOTHER PLEADS FOR DRUG DRIVING TESTS

Anthea Gedge has meticulously reconstructed the hours before her
daughter, Lydia, 18, was hit by a car and killed as she stepped off a
tram in the city on New Year's Day.

It was as if she needed to know that Lydia was not "tiddly or tipsy
enough to fall in front of a car" or was not hooning around, as
teenaged revellers sometimes do.

Ms Gedge has the phone messages to prove it; five of them recorded on
her mobile phone throughout the night.

Lydia, who had just finished year 12 at Lauriston Girls School, wanted
to let her mother know she was all right.

But about 8.15am on New Year's Day, as Lydia and her friends made
their way towards the Sidney Myer Music Bowl for a dance party, a car
came out of nowhere and collected Lydia. Her mother said she came to
rest about 100 metres away, in front of a monument to "Weary" Dunlop.
There's a small cross there now, in memory of a young girl with much
to live for.

"She was wrenched away from me. But I have to separate all the
emotion. She was a super kid. I can't let her go for nothing."

Ms Gedge wants to see to it that police have the power to crack down
on what she calls "drugged drivers", and dangerous ones.

A man has appeared in court in relation to Lydia's death, charged with
one count of culpable driving. The court was told he was driving at
91kmh in a 60kmh zone, and was allegedly high on a cocktail of heroin,
amphetamines and ecstasy. He was granted bail and ordered to appear
again.

"We are conscious of drink driving and speeding but not of drug
driving. Our safety net would have lost him if he'd been pulled over
and asked to blow in the bag. Surely in the year 2000 there's some
technology that can be used to accurately test for (prescription and
illicit) drugs," Ms Gedge said yesterday.

She compares Australian roads with the ones she drove on in Britain
before she moved to Australia in 1974, and finds them
"horrendous".

It should be made more difficult, Ms Gedge said, for young people to
pass driving licence tests, and it should be mandatory that everyone
have a course of driving lessons given by a qualified instructor,
which should be subsidised by the Transport Accident Commission.

Ms Gedge said Lydia was a guardian as well as a big sister to
nine-year-old Anica. Both girls were talented ballerinas.

Lydia had hoped to get into a banking and finance course at Monash
University this year, Ms Gedge said.

"I suppose it will get easier," she said. "None of this would have
changed what happened ... but I'm right with the police, God bless
them, when they talk about the horrific number of P-platers getting
killed. I don't want her to go for nothing."