It is the latest road safety campaign and there is not a mangled body in sight. Australian safety campaigners have decided to hit boy racers where they are vulnerable.

The television campaign, designed to encourage drivers to respect speed limits, features young women wiggling their little fingers at passing speeders.

The gesture represents a small penis in youth culture, but in the advertisements even an elderly woman uses the signal. So do other young men who are not in the driver’s seat. The New South Wales Roads and Traffic Authority, the government agency responsible for the campaign, has stopped short of saying that length was the issue.

John Whelan, the authority’s spokesman, said: “To me the gesture says, ‘Speeding – no one thinks big of you’. It will cause people who are speeding to think twice about the image they are creating.”

The young women who feature in the advertisements appear to be much more specific about what part of the speeders they think is not big. And the young male speeders who notice the gesture appear suddenly crestfallen.

Mr Whelan said that the traditional “shock and horror” advertisements with graphic images of car crashes and injuries were no longer effective among young people who frequently viewed stronger images on computer games or in horror films.

The authority’s research, he said, suggested that young males had been desensitised to the shocking images of fatal road crashes that had been used in previous campaigns in Australia. Mr Whelan said: “This gesture to which we’re referring is part of everyday language and part of our culture. So to align that message to our antispeeding message, I think, is going to have an impact.”

The campaign will include advertising on television and in cinemas, and on posters at bus stops. There is also a 15-second internet advertisement that will offer speeders an “xtra-xtra small” condom. The A$2 million (£850,000) campaign has been prompted by widespread public concern in Sydney over a series of multiple road fatalities involving young, inexperienced male drivers who were still on their restricted, provisional driving licences.

The young drivers, known in Australia as “P-platers”, will have additional restrictions placed on their driving licences from next month, including a ban on using even a hands-free mobile phone in their cars and a ban on them carrying young passengers at night.

Of all fatal crashes in New South Wales between 2002 and last year, more than 30 per cent involved motorists aged between 17 and 25. P-plate motorists make up just 7 per cent of drivers in the state but they account for more than 40 per cent of infringements for speeding at more than 45km/h (30mph) over the limit.

Harold Scruby, the head of the Pedestrian Council of Australia, a road safety lobby group, said that targeting the image of young male speeders was clever and commendable.

Australia’s brand of provocative advertising does not, however, have a recent history of great success. The country’s international tourism campaign, which used the catch-phrase “Where the bloody hell are you?”, has been considered a disappointment.

Graphic images

— In 1995 an Aids television campaign in Brazil featuring a talking penis drew angry criticism from the Catholic Church, and from men who shared the penis’s name – Braulio

— Flightpath Media created a mock Cerne Abbas giant under the Gatwick flight path. The giant’s penis was clearly depicted, and two girls added to promote Lynx. After complaints he was dressed in underpants

— Virgin Mobile’s new viral internet ad campaign features a man tucking his penis between his legs, a parody of a pose in Silence of the Lambs

Source: Times archives

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