The bus stops here - government begged to start belting our kids

Why is allowing one child to travel unrestrained in a vehicle an infringement that attracts a $225 fine but allowing 75 children to travel unrestrained is called a school excursion?
There have been federal laws in place since 1995 requiring all schools buses travelling on open non-urban roads to be fitted with seatbelts but on local roads there are no regulations demanding seat belts.
Surely this can’t be because legislators only believe that school bus accidents happen on open highways. Of course not. It’s a question of cost.
Apparently “retrofitting” seatbelts to old buses is just too expensive. Which raises a question “what price do you put on a child’s life”? or even “what price would you put on the lives of a bus-load of children’s lives”.
It is seven years since the Queensland Law Society urged the School Transport Safety Task Force to make school bus seatbelts mandatory relating the case of a serious school bus accident where “children were tossed in the air and thrown about like rag dolls inside the bus”.
And three years ago Queensland became the first state to make seatbelts compulsory on school buses travelling in mountainous regions but on city streets bus passengers are offered less protection than those in the family sedan.
Which means I can expect my son to be offered a reasonable level of protection when he heads off to school camp later in the year but had to cross my fingers and hope when he went on a banana bus school excursion to the Planetarium this week.
My guess is that it will take a major accident involving a school bus on a city street to force change.
I pray I am not right.