Clendon DavidDAVID CLENDON (Green): In this short call I would just like to touch on a few provisions of this bill. I do not know it well; I have not been on the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee but a few things jump out. One of them is the changes made to the enforcement of weight limits on heavy vehicles. It enables police to more easily require overloaded vehicles to be offloaded and it increases the penalties for taking overloaded heavy vehicles on the road. Those are good things in terms of safety and protection of our roads. It is interesting though that in the first reading the Minister introducing the bill Craig Foss talked about the introduction of more productive freight vehicles. Certainly allowing larger heavier vehicles on the road is in a sense more productive. It is better for the vehicle operator and perhaps for the customer but it is a classic example actually of socialising cost and privatising profits. The impact of those extremely heavy large vehicles on our roads means a much higher maintenance bill for the taxpayers traded off against the benefits to the vehicle operators. It is an unfortunate compromise.There is this wonderful technology called trains which this Government seems somewhat oblivious to. They are tailor-made and wonderfully designed for carrying large loads over long distances at relatively low cost—social economic and environmental. Unfortunately this Government has gone down the road of bigger trucks more impact on our taxpayer-funded roads. This bill takes one small step to improving road safety and enforcement but a much better proposition would have been heavy investment in rail transport.This bill also does something interesting in the fact that it enables police to better monitor and enforce regulations about weight limits on bridges. It seems there was a little bit of an ambiguity in legislation and so the possibility of prosecution and enforcing load limits on bridges was much reduced. That is an unfortunate reality of course—collapsing bridges is something we do not want. So it is a good thing that the Government is now tidying up that little corner of the law. Living in Northland bridges are something quite close to our heart of course. There was that one shiny moment of hope when we thought some of our old single-lane broken bridges might actually be replaced—10 of them in fact if I recall. Sadly not a spade has been in the ground. We continue to manage with single-lane tired broken things. The promise was cheap. Unfortunately it turned out to be just that—a promise. One day perhaps.More seriously I would like to reference the provisions in this bill that allow for more available use of alcohol interlocks on cars. I think it is probably a good thing that people who are busted drunk-driving for the first time who are seriously over the limit can be obliged to put alcohol interlocks on their car for a period of time. After that has expired they can then apply for a zero-alcohol licence for a period of perhaps 3 years before they are trusted again to be drivers just in the normal sense of the word with a standard licence. That is a good thing. If a person does that once—offends a drunk-driving law once—their behaviour is likely to be changed by that serious inconvenience of cost of the interlock.Unfortunately the Government seems to think that the interlocks will also work for recidivist drunk-drivers. The fact is that they will get compliance perhaps. A person who has been caught drunk-driving four five six seven times and possibly has even done prison time for that—they will comply perhaps for that period but technology does not change behaviour. What is missing out of this picture? This is a technical fix for a social and often psychological problem. People who repeatedly offend who are repeatedly caught drunk-driving have a deep-seated problem with their behaviour that has to be revealed and dealt with. Technology will not actually solve that problem. Again it is a characteristic of this Government that it thinks that technology can solve personal and social and indeed environmental problems. The alcohol interlocks are a useful strategy in the short term. In the longer term if we are serious about recidivist drunk-driving let us get busy and roll out the drug and alcohol courts which actually deal with the root causes of repeat drunk-driving. Thank you.